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Today’s Question: How does your company craft and spread its awesome employer brand ?
1. Always Treat Candidates Well
I think it is important for employers to understand that, like it or not, the way they treat job candidates is part of the employer brand.
I advise employers keep their candidates up to date on their statuses in the process. Rejection is hard, but waiting is intolerable!
Some employers get so caught up in looking slick and clean in their recruitment branding that they forget about their company cultures. When using realistic job previews, company information videos, or other collateral, use the real people in your company as part of the branding. The goal is to find more people like the great employees you already have. Capture that philosophy in your recruitment brand.
To encourage top talent to join your company rather than a competitor’s, you need to offer prospective candidates more than a better job. Top talent appreciates educational opportunities that allow them to improve their skill sets, and they want to know that a potential employer will provide the support necessary for them to build extensive career portfolios. Outstanding companies combine these opportunities with fast career tracks, giving employees more agency to take on bigger projects and move into management opportunities.
Imagine looking at a hiring manager’s LinkedIn profile as you are doing research on a company as a potential employee. The first thing you see is a picture of that person standing in front of a bar with a bunch of alcoholic beverages while holding a drink in their hands.
This could be an innocent glass of water in a vodka glass, but there’s a high probability that the brain will perceive that the hiring manager is at happy hour!
Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the question is, how does that reflect on the overall corporate brand of the company?
To create LinkedIn brand continuity for the whole company, start by making sure your executive team updates their profile pictures and summaries. There’s nothing worse than a leader who leads by the old adage, “Do as I say, not as I do.”
Then, send out a corporate memo and ask every employee to update their picture or profile. Yup, it takes a little work, but the strength of your employee base having corporate continuity is priceless.
Finally, post weekly or biweekly content on your LinkedIn company page. Ask employees to use their personal news feeds to share the cool things about your company, not just the boring corporate C-level jargon that nobody can understand.
We get a hold of the most relevant student groups (e.g., digital marketing clubs or python dev clubs) and hold events with free pizza. Nothing gets students together like free pizza. We tell them about the location, the schedule freedom, and the new-age work culture, and most of them are excited to apply for our available work terms or post-grad job opportunities by the end of the event.
If you look at our careers page, you will see how simple and organized everything is. A careers page should be approached as a marketing tool. Cast a wide net for page hits, then give people actionable information to drive them to “convert,” or apply. We empower candidates with tools like an intuitive job search function, and we also brief them on our core values.
The key is to develop a compelling employee value proposition (EVP) that can be used in job postings, job descriptions, and on the employer’s job site or website. A compelling EVP answers the question, “Why would I want to work for this company?”
When we work with our employers to increase the number of candidates who apply, we suggest advertising information about the culture, benefits (traditional and nontraditional), types of clients, the mission of the organization (people are becoming more and more mission-driven in their careers), etc.
The information can’t be stiff and formal. It needs to be approachable. It needs to make people feel like the company is approachable and a nice place to work, not stiff and restrictive.
