Employment Branding Today for Hiring Tomorrow
By Daryn Salo
Many companies that have no immediate hiring needs often fall into the trap of abandoning their recruitment efforts altogether. The problem with this is that recruitment is a process, and if you don’t maintain your recruitment efforts in some way during slower periods, then you won’t have that great pool of candidates to choose from when you have a need to hire.
To build a database of great talent to choose from, it’s important to always be attracting new candidates and continuously be promoting your company. One of the best ways to do this when there are no specific opportunities is through employment branding. Effective employment branding efforts position you as an attractive employer to your target demographic and allow you to maintain a ‘virtual bench’ of great talent.
Give a TRUE Glimpse of Your Gompany
In a time when more and more visitors are going to company blogs, Facebook pages, and Twitter profiles instead of a company’s corporate website for reasons of greater transparency, it’s increasingly critical to speak to your audience candidly and in a voice free of business jargon.
Visiting some company websites, it’s difficult to tell what business they’re in or what they do based on the language used in the copy. It can also give the impression that they’re looking to hide behind big words or cover something up with complicated verbiage. People’s actions have shown that this is not what they want when they go to find out more about a given company. Your audience wants your outbound communications to speak to them like real people using everyday language – give them what they want and you’ll be much more appealing in their eyes.
Allow Interaction
The most effective employment branding efforts aren’t just one-way communications, but ones that allow for a response and the opportunity for your audience to interact and engage with your brand. People want to see what you have to say, and then provide their own feedback or opinion, or ask questions back to you to gain further information.
If you’re going to follow this best practice and allow for your audience to interact with your brand, then you have to also make a commitment to listening and interacting back with them. There’s nothing worse than inviting participation, only for your audience to find out their voice is falling on deaf ears.
The advantage for you is that the people that take the time to interact and engage with you are the people that are probably most valuable to you. They’re showing interest and requesting more information from you, meaning you’ve clearly struck a chord with them in your communications.
Mix It Up
Web 2.0’s recent emergence has allowed for entirely new methods of communicating to a chosen audience. Where before print or written copy were a company’s main option for communication, today the opportunity exists to use pictures, videos, and voices to show what your company has to offer. More importantly, these formats are how many people today want to receive their communications.
Ensure you’re offering all or at least some of these various forms of media in your employment branding efforts. The advantage to you is you’re able to show off many more aspects of your company in far greater detail with these new tools. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million. The bottom line is that a video showing what your company is like is far more engaging than a few paragraphs describing it.
Know Your Target and Where They Are
Employment branding efforts can become quite comprehensive and require a significant amount of both time and money from your company to execute properly. For this reason, you want to make sure that effort doesn’t go to waste and that you’re directing your communications to where they’re going to be seen by your target audience.
Before you decide where to direct your communications, and what formats to use, determine where your target audience resides and what types of communications they’re most receptive to. If you have a younger target demographic, chances are they’re more web-savvy and prefer their communications to be online. If you’re targeting more senior people, then they may be more receptive to more traditional forms of communication.
Enlist Your Own Employees!
There’s no better people to talk about your company and what it’s like to work there than your own employees. Take advantage of the fact that the people working at your company are also probably your biggest ambassadors and use them in your employment branding efforts. Doing so also leverages the testimonial effect where the communication is coming from an unbiased person with first-hand experience, instead of the company itself.
Get your employees involved in your employment branding efforts by allowing them to voice their opinions and contribute to outbound recruitment communications. Give them the freedom to talk about the company in various media outlets whether it be on a blog, Facebook page, Twitter account, making a YouTube video, or whatever their platform of choice is.
The best way to motivate your employees to get talking about your company is to lead by example. Ensure you’re consistently telling your story to your employees, showing them how enthusiastic you are about what the company does and how you got to where you are today. It’s been said you’re not telling your story enough until your own employees are mocking you for doing it. Essentially you should be over-telling it until it’s ingrained in the company culture.
Have Foresight
Ongoing recruitment efforts are critical to maintain even when immediate hiring needs temporarily cease. Maintaining them will continue attracting job seekers to your company and help you to have a pool of great candidates to pull from when hiring does resume.
Employment branding should always be an important function of your business since it’s a company’s people that are ultimately responsible for its success. It’s also a great way to continue communicating with talent market when there are no immediate opportunities. Always remember that recruitment is a process and takes time – think of what you want in terms of future candidates, and then try and come up with creative communications that you can execute today to start attracting them.
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As Director, Daryn Salo works in partnership with some of the brightest minds in the technology, legal, and finance industries.
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