Why is having a strong employer brand so important?

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8 Nov

As businesses look to post-pandemic recovery and beyond, attracting and engaging with new talent, as well as retaining your existing superstars and silent dynamos, is now more important than ever.

H ence, in what is a highly competitive landscape, organisations must put their employer branding strategy at the centre of their hiring objectives. During the next 12 months they must, whilst navigating the path back to sustained growth, focus on positioning themselves as an employer of choice, rather than convenience.

Currently, vacancy rates are still far outnumbering candidate stats - with Totaljobs reporting 50% more jobs than this time last year, but 15% fewer jobseekers (who, by the way, are researching several vacancies from multiple companies all at once). And this issue is not going away - with this year’s PwC’s Global Workforce Survey reporting that 1 in 5 employees are likely to switch to a new employer in the next 12 months. While pay was cited as a main factor, additional influences that people consider when changing their work environment include:

Purpose
Authenticity
Wellbeing
Development
Flexibility

So, the power is now definitely in the hands of employees rather than employers, with increasing emphasis being placed on ‘work with me’ as opposed to ‘work for me.’ With people now re-evaluating what they want from their careers, it’s critical that companies rethink their values, rewrite their mission statement and build a strong employer brand that radiates credibility, authenticity and flexibility.

Trends and Techniques

Purely listing your company’s values often isn’t enough to capture attention. Both current and future employees want to see your values being implemented in action, through initiatives, storytelling, and engaging formats.

We can see that a lot of high-quality employer branding reacts to the previously mentioned factors people want, focusing on flexibility, wellness, employee value and company purpose.

But there’s a problem - your competitors have the exact same aspiration. And with the reputation of a company more visible than ever before, be it through a jobseeker’s Google search or reviews on sites like Glassdoor and Indeed, presenting a powerful, compelling employer proposition is increasingly challenging. Let’s take a look at who’s doing what - brilliantly.

Spotify: Flexibility and Wellness

Spotify puts huge emphasis on ‘walking the talk’ and delivering on their promises with tangible initiatives. As a response to increase demand for flexibility, they have implemented a ‘work from anywhere’ programme. They also prioritise employee wellbeing with their ‘Wellness Week’ - a time where all offices close and employees are free to relax with no emails to distract them. At the heart of their employer branding is their ‘Life at Spotify’ website that details their Band Manifesto, company benefits, values and mission. They know their employees are music lovers, so they’ve made sure their tone is pitch perfect.

Spotify Brand Manifesto

Cisco: Employee Value

IT and networking company Cisco has won multiple awards for their employer branding and have solidified their place as the best company to work for on the 2022 Fortune 100 list. Their engaging, employee-generated stories on their ‘Life at Cisco’ blog bring the voices of their employees to life; communicating the value that they place on talent, hard work and loyalty. They have also created a series of brand videos featuring 120 employees and took to Snapchat and Instagram to spotlight individuals across the company.

Tony’s Chocolonely: People and Purpose

Doing good is something that is at the centre of Tony’s Chocolonely, a company that exclusively makes 100% Fairtrade chocolate. This is a key differentiator for them, so they have chosen to put it front-and-centre in their employer brand strategy, which has contributed to them being a FMCG winner of the Effector World-Class Workplace award. Like Spotify, they have an engaging manifesto; plus they have chosen to present it in a video format that puts their mission at the centre of the narrative. They also spotlight ‘Team Tony’s’ in a fun, creative way on their website.

How to build an employer brand?

We know that capturing the right people’s attention and encouraging them to join and stay is an ongoing challenge. We also recognise that building an employer brand isn’t always easy. All content and no process is the reason why so many brand development projects end up gathering dust and, typically, the energy and enthusiasm generated at the start quickly ebbs away, swamped by the weight of day-to-day operational issues and general fire-fighting.

It requires commitment, creativity, consistency, and focus. And how do you know if you’re even taking the right steps? What if you’re actually making things worse? Because that’s possible, too!

Let’s delve a little deeper and explore the steps required to develop an employer brand that connects with the best talent available.

Firstly, on the premise that before you can look forward, you must look back, you should carry out valuable research into your organisation and analyse your hiring challenges, competitor landscape, internal perceptions, and the all-important external reality.

Then, once you understand where your brand sits, it’s time to put together a plan of action that communicates your company culture, values, benefits, unique initiatives and overall purpose so prospective jobseekers and existing staff get a sense of who you are and what you stand for.

But before you rush to apply the new brand, you need to make sure that you can deliver what it promises, that your value proposition is one your current employees can recognise and believe in, and that new candidates will experience exactly what they expect. This step includes launching the brand internally, consistently applying it to all talent attracting initiatives, and revising all in-house training materials.

Finally, the brand is starting to make its presence felt in day-to-day communications and ‘people practices’ - so it’s important that you are regularly assessing, fine-tuning and adapting it as your business and your industry landscape evolve. Sustaining a successful brand for the long haul requires tracking candidate conversion rates, career site interactions, applicant engagement, and social media activity. It is rare anything this important is nailed first time around, so it’s critical that you regularly analyse the results of your efforts in order to identify where improvements can be made.

As an agency that is experienced in employee engagement, recruitment and employer branding, we’re here to help you understand what all of this means. Contact our team today and we will help you identify, recruit and retain the best talent - people who will work to achieve your objectives, fit perfectly into your culture, have that much-needed drive for success.