If you’re living in the world of recruitment, employer brand is a phrase you’ll probably be sick of hearing. From events, to podcasts to webinars to blogs like this one, you can’t get far without stumbling across someone trying to solve the mystery that is a great employer brand.
However, away from the complexities and contextual differences between organisations, there are some fundamental strategies that will lay the foundation on which to build a great employer brand message. Based on how we’ve seen our greatest clients do this, we’ve gathered a list of practical tips to supercharge your employer brand quickly.
Get to Know Your Audience – Segmentation
A marketing team wouldn’t set out to build a brand without first taking time to understand their audience clearly. The process for this is segmentation and it is just as important in employer branding. Get to know your workforce. If you take a typical organisation, the sales team’s perception and requirements of the brand they work for will be different to those of IT and Finance. Their feelings, thoughts and needs are all equally important in distilling out the key themes running throughout your organisation. Once you’re clear on this, cultural fit at interview stage is much easier to quantify, which in time will strengthen your employer brand message.Research
The only way to find out more about the reasons people work in your organisations is to talk to them. Regularly conducting short questionnaires, focus groups, and one to one feedback sessions are all good ways to get to know your audience on a different level and gather better quality information that will help to build an authentic picture of your employer brand message.Marketing and HR = Stronger Together
Corporate and employer brand are intrinsically linked, that’s fairly obvious, but there are still very few instances where HR and Marketing really work together to formulate those consistent messages. Social media and digital channels are critical to messaging, but it’s difficult to be solely responsible for the creation of all the engaging content you need to deliver your message consistently and regularly. Work together to shoulder the burden.