The Ultimate Guide to Employer Branding For Business

“Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.”

Richard Branson 

In the contemporary business world, every business organization is keen on emerging as an appealing employer brand that can attract the best talents in the global job market. In fact, creating a strong employer brand has become an essential part of companies’ brand awareness campaigns. 

To continue, in an uncertain job market with resignations on the rise, companies are looking forward to building sustainable competitive advantages by having top-notch talent on board. After all, an organization is only as competitive as its people. Besides, companies want to invest in young talents today to groom the leaders of tomorrow. 

The question is, what does it actually take to create a strong employer brand? What makes an organization a dream job destination for the most exceptional young talents? How can you make your employer brand a much sought-after name in the job market? This blog has all the answers you need. This is your complete guide to employer branding in 2023.

Before we proceed, let us first shed light on what employer branding actually signifies just to be on the same page.

---

Outline

• What is an employer brand?
• Why Should Businesses Focus on Employer Branding?
• How To Make Your Employer Brand Stronger?
• KPIs to Measure the Success of Your Employer Branding Strategy

What is an employer brand?

If we talk in terms of the technical definition, an employer brand is a term that refers to the company’s reputation in the eyes of the public. Speaking in simpler terms, employer brand is the reputation with which your potential or current employees see you as the employer. 

To further elaborate, employer branding is the long process of implementing various strategies to be one of the most desired companies for its existing and potential employees. To simplify, it is the process of creating a positive reputation in the market in such a way that every fresher or experienced talent wants to work with the respective company.

Employer branding is not only about attracting the best talent but also about retaining your existing employees as well. We all know that human minds are more easily influenced by peers of the same group. 

So, your potential employees will be attracted when you keep your existing employees happy. As we all know, nobody would want to stay in a company that has a negative reputation in the market, and this is the reason, you need a strong employer brand strategy. 

Why Should Businesses Focus on Employer Branding?

Now, coming to the bigger question, what benefits will come along with your efforts in building a successful employer brand? To answer this, we have effectively highlighted the top benefits of creating a positive employer brand in the contemporary world. 

1. It attracts more potential employees

First and foremost, the most important advantage that comes along with building a positive reputation is that it attracts the best talent available in the industry. If you are successful in building a reputation as a great place to work, every talented individual will want to work with you. 

2. It gives you a competitive edge

You as a business owner or recruiter might also agree that everybody in the business world is running behind in finding that one competitive edge that separates you from all your competitors. And what could be a better competitive advantage than the ability to attract top talent? 

If you have your dream team, you have the power to defeat anybody, even in a highly competitive market. The reason is that we all know that employees are the biggest asset a company can possess. 

3. It keeps all the involved stakeholders happy 

The stakeholders of a business include the investors and the consumers of the brand. After the pandemic, many employers waved off their teams to save on labor costs. Many employees even face the difficulty of earning their bread and butter due to this. 

After that, customers of the modern world also become very concerned about how the brands are treating their employees. In fact, as per statistics, one-fourth of consumers said that how a company treats its employees is the major criterion while purchasing after the pandemic. 

Moreover, investors also do not want to invest in or tie up with companies that do not value their employees and have a poor employer brand reputation in the market. 

4. It reduces your recruitment cost 

If you are a recruiter, you might also agree with the fact that hiring every employee requires a lot of effort,  persuasion, and money, of course. But if you successfully emerge as a company with a positive employer brand, this will reduce the requirement for effort and cost-per-hire from your end. The reason is that with the building of a successful employer brand, talent would themselves want to work with you. This will save you the money that will go into hiring costs for employees. 

How To Make Your Employer Brand Stronger?

1. Invest in providing the best candidate experience 

Company values are often seen in terms of the experience that companies or recruiters provide to candidates. Right from the start point where employees drop off their resumes to their final onboarding process, your treatment of your candidates contributes to shaping their opinion about your company. 

Further, their opinion is a major component in building your employer’s brand in the market because, whether you agree with it or not, after interviewing with your company, your candidates talk about their experience with other candidates. 

This is the reason providing the best experience to your candidates is necessary because badmouthing of your company can impact the overall reputation of your company. 

Effectively informing the candidates about how the whole recruitment and interview process can contribute to a positive candidate experience. Otherwise, candidates find it very annoying when they keep waiting for replies from the employer’s or recruiter’s end. Giving them all the necessary information will assist in keeping their experience positively impacted.   

2. Market your EVP through online channels 

EVP stands for an employee value proposition, which refers to a set of additional benefits that a company offers to its employees in order to reward employees for their efforts in the company. Your EVP can be anything that keeps your employees happy and contributes to the employee engagement of your company. Some of the common factors that stand out in creating a good EVP for the company are mentioned below.

• Flexible working hours
• Timely recognition 
• Personalized Rewards
• Career progression
• Health insurance
• Retirement benefits

These are just a few examples of creating a great EVP for your company. There can be many other benefits that add value to the efforts of the employees. In fact, as per the latest employer branding statistics, 41% of businesses use recognition programs to boost their employer brand.  After defining the EVP, the next step will be to promote these EVPs through all the social channels possible. Channels like websites, emails, and other social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter can be used to promote these EVPs. 

Promoting the benefits of employees will assist in forming a positive reputation for the company in the market. This will assist in bringing a positive spotlight on you, which will contribute to attracting new employees to the company. 

Moreover, as we all know that the modern workforce wants more than just monetary benefits, having these additional benefits will assist in retaining your existing employees as well.  So, defining and promoting EVPs will only bring benefits to your business. 

3. Work for a purpose beyond profit

Although profits and earning good money are the major goals of every individual, with time this perspective is transforming. The employees of the modern world are more actively participating in activities that contribute to the attainment of their social responsibility.  This is also the reason they want their employers to work beyond the purpose of earning profits. 

This is where you need to take a stand and operate your company for a better purpose than just earning revenues. The purpose can be linked to any environmental or social responsibility. 

If you successfully emerge as a brand that thinks of the world with a broader perspective, it will assist in getting more attention from your target talent. This will ultimately contribute to building a positive image in the market, which will result in building a positive employer value proposition that lays the basic foundation of the employer brand.

4. Focus on creating a positive company culture

Culture has always been one of the crucial factors for candidates when they decide to join a company. Hence, you need to make sure that you are creating an atmosphere where employees want to be a part of it. 

Moreover, as remote workers are becoming the new normal or people have started hiring beyond demographic boundaries, having a diverse and inclusive environment will do the job. Diverse and inclusive workplaces will ensure that all employees are welcomed and valued in the workplace. 

Moreover, it will reflect that your company is not biased toward a specific part of society. By cultivating a positive workplace culture, you can facilitate a natural environment that promotes enhanced workplace motivation. This enhanced motivation will contribute to their retention and reduce the employee turnover of your organization. 

This way positive employee experience will give you a better reputation in the market. Moreover, it will also give you a wide pool of talent to choose your best talent. In short, you will be hitting two birds with one stone. 

5. Invest in the right technology

Technical support has always been one of the major demands of employees in the contemporary world. They want to work for a company that makes them tech-savvy and also uses technology to relieve the burden of its employees. Hence, you should make sure that you always invest in the right technology that can provide assistance.

Choosing technology wisely is a very important aspect that needs to be considered before investing in technology. The reason is that technology can either make the work simpler or more complex for the employees to operate. 

Hence, you need to make sure that you provide technology that acts as a helping hand for your employees rather than being a head-scratcher for them. 

If you outshine as a brand that uses the latest technology for the benefit of employees, you can effectively be an employee magnet for hiring many potential candidates. This can assist you in gathering your dream team that can effectively assist you in enhancing the growth of your business.

Probing further, after implementing various strategies and tactics to improve the employer branding of your company, the last step would be to measure the success of your strategies. This can effectively be done by measuring success using the different KPIs. 

KPIs stand for key performance indicators, which are measurable metrics that can assist in measuring the success of your implemented initiatives. So, the next section will shed light on various human resources KPIs that you can use to measure the success of your employer branding strategies. 

KPIs to Measure the Success of Your Employer Branding Strategy

1. Time-to-hire

There are various human resource KPIs that you need to be considerate of while tracking the success of your employer branding strategy. To begin with, time to hire is a metric that is used by human resources to measure the time it takes to hire an employee in a company. This metric is measured as the time between the time the candidate contacted the company and the time at which they accepted the employment offer. The less time taken by candidates to become employees reflects the efficiency of human resource management in hiring and the power of your employer’s brand.

 

2. Employee referrals

Employee referrals refer to well-organized programs that are used by many companies to find candidates by asking their existing employees to recommend potential candidates from their social or professional networks. If you are successfully able to hire through your employee referrals, it means you are able to positively communicate your brand internally and externally.

Parting Thoughts

To encapsulate, till now we have discovered that employer branding is a crucial part of the branding process. So, if you want to outshine your business in the highly competitive market, you have to polish your employer branding in such a way that employees reach out to you to work with you instead of you inviting employees to join the company. We hope that the above strategies were convincing enough and gave you a clear idea about how exactly you can work on your employer brand. So, what are you waiting for? Start building your employer brand today to hire some of the top talents that can assist you in enhancing the growth of your business.