Marketing Director
Here are some of the key stats from Linkedin’s Winning Talent report, showing the importance of employer brand in both the recruitment and retention of talented staff.
53% of candidates entirely rule out accepting a job offer from a company with a reputation of poor job security, poor leadership, and dysfunctional teams.
Negative opinions from past or current employees of the company are one of the top five reasons in which candidates look elsewhere.
No amount of money can tempt half of the UK workers to consider taking a role at a company with a poor employer brand.
How long do you spend investing in your business’ employer brand and employee value proposition? How can a great employer brand help you in your recruitment processes?
What we do mean by both of those terms?
The Employer brand is how you differentiate your business from the competition to attract and retain talent. The employer brand should connect with both your external brand messaging and values, as well as the workplace environment and the approach to people management. The employer brand is essentially how existing and potential employees perceive your company’s leadership, values, and culture.
The Employee value proposition (EVP) is described by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development as “what an organisation stands for, requires and offers as an employer.” This can be everything from salary, holiday entitlement, perks, performance related bonuses, and other benefits including flexible working, company cars, wellbeing incentives and health insurance.
Improve employer brand in 3 steps
Audit your current employer brand proposition.
From working at the company, you may already have a good anectodical understanding of how employees perceive your brand. But it’s time to get more scientific in your approach by conducting an audit with current employees, past employees, and job seekers. There are several ways you could do this:
- Internal focus groups, selecting team members from different departments, different seniority, different skills etc.
- Engagement questionnaires to all within the business
- 1-2-1 interviews with heads of departments / leaders
- Exit survey questionnaires
- Google alerts on your company name
- Social monitoring across Google, Bing and social media sites for brand mentions
- Glassdoor reviews
- Feedback from your internal recruitment team / external recruitment agency from past job seekers
Importantly, you’ll need to identify improvement areas from your audit, and create a plan to combat these issues.
Write your employee brand proposition
Analyse the results of your audit – what are you known for, why are employees proud to work for your business, what made them join you in the first place?
Whilst everyone can agree that salary is an important factor in the EVP, you want to make your brand proposition about other aspects of the business – emotional factors that motivate and inspire employees to join your business, or to stay with you.
Examples of employer brand propositions that we love are:
Airbnb: ‘Create a world where anyone can belong anywhere’, showcasing values including inclusivity, support, and importantly the innovation aspect of the business.
Shopify: ‘Shape the future of commerce, wherever you are’ highlighting that they actively support providing flexibility at work.
Showcase your proposition
When job seekers what to learn more about the business, they are going to want to hear directly from current employees. Some great ways to do this are:
- Have employee case studies on your website. Showcase the knowledge, skills, creativity, and diversity of your workforce through genuine and authentic case studies from employees that love their job
- Strengthen your brand messaging on Glassdoor. Update it with your new employer brand and EVP statement, invest in photography and imagery to get across your message, and do a campaign to invest the volume and recency of reviews
- Use social media to show ‘a day in the life’ of an employee. This could be team members hard at work, celebrating an achievement, getting involved in a community event or enjoying a performance related perk.
- Upgrade your Linkedin account to include access to ‘Life’ pages. Some great examples included here: Canva and Hubspot
