Employer branding for success
Nowadays finding and keeping good employees is a challenge. Many highly educated person leave their countries to find better jobs. Professionals will always find better opportunities if they don’t like their workplace and looking for another. High level fluctuation can cost fortunes to the company. Well-built internal and external communication and employer branding can be a nice solution to these problems.
In the following article we collected some useful information about organisational communication and employer branding that can help your company perform better.
Types of communication at a company
Every company has two types of communication: external and internal.
External communication is for the customers, to the market, to the competitors - to the world outside the company. Internal communication is dedicated to the employees, future employees and stakeholders.
It has 4 main function:
- Emotional function - the members of the organisation can express their positive or negative feelings about the job, workplace or other topics.
- Motivational function - the leaders can motivate their people to reach organisational goals by giving them feedback .
- Informational function - clear and appropriate communication stops insecurity.
- Controlling function - communication channels provide information for the managers and leaders about the company’s working mechanism.
What is employer branding
It’s everything that makes the company stand out from its competitors. Employer branding is a part of a company’s internal communication and internal PR. Having a well-built employer branding strategy is a common responsibility of the HR, marketing and communication department. Of course the support from the top management is also required.
Employer branding can help the company finding and keeping valuable and trusted employees. It’s about to build trust in the company and create a sympathetic image of the workplace.
Effective employer branding can also make the company’s image clearly visible and attractive to the ones who are seeking for a job. It contains employer value proposition (EVP) as well.
EVP: every extra opportunity and allowance that the employees can get besides the salary.
To sum up employer brand is a group of functional, economic and psychological benefits which the company can provide to their people.
Main target Groups of employer branding: employees and future employees (itt lehetne valami látványosabb grafika)
The aims of employer branding
Employer branding has multiple aims and goals. Maybe the most important is to attract the best employees, engage them and make them committed.
It’s also an effective way of motivation. A good employer branding strategy can help the employees share their thoughts and feelings about their team, job or workplace. Therefore the people can feel themself apprectiated and valuable as employees. Employer branding can also provide a stronger connection to the brand and the image of the company.
Making the line smaller between the employee experience and the customer experience is also a goal.
Developing the employer branding strategy
People always share their thoughts and experiences about a workplace with their acquaintences, friends and family. In the time of the social media and globlzation, these experiences can reach a lot of people and infulence the company’s good or bad reputation. Therefore if the organisations want to be successfull they need a well built employer branding strategy to create positive experiences to be shared.
As we said there are two main target groups of employer branding: future employees and employees. These require different types of strategy.
1. Job candidates - future employees
Seeking for a job is a quite difficult and exhausting activity. There are a lot of job advertisements on the internet and most of them are quite similar. Here comes employer branding.
If the job ad istelf is special, interesting, kind and attractive, more job candidates will apply. Also the recruiting process can improve from a boring and unpleasant thing to nice experience.
For example optimising the job advertisment webpage to mobile phones can be a good assistance to the candidates - nowadays most people use their phones for looking for a job as well. To make their jobs more easier it’s efficient to simplify the application process. Don’t use long and complicated forms for application.
The usage of social media platforms for job ads is also an employer branding tool. Everbody use at least one of these platforms so the company can reach candidates easily there.
Eventually the hardest task: make a good impression on those who are finally not selected to the job. Of course they will be disappointed but we can help them by being kind, honest and humane to them. And the most important: give feedack every candidate even if they are not selected!
2. Employees of the company
As we said, well educated and qualified professionals have a lot of opportunity to work at. So if the company have them, permanent positive experiences is required to keep them.
Employer branding communication needs to be motivating, honest, kind and positive so that employees can feel themselfs appreciated. Employees must feel that it’s a good place to work, they are valuable and their opinion counts! Good employer branding can make them feel this way.
Building a stick together community can be an effective way of employer branding. Organising common, after work leisure activities can strengthen the connection to the collagues and the company. Organising such events can be rather exhausting but don’t worry, there are a lot of online tools - such as Meestory - that can make it simpler and easier. Check out our introduction to learn more about Meestory’s working mechanism!
Last but not least: as long as personal opinion and experience is worth much more than company’s self made communicational products, organisations must encourage their people to make content about their positive experiences at the company. A self made article or video abuot everyday life in the company can be more authentic and attractive than marketing and PR messages.
Measuring employer branding success
Of course leaders and management likes to see results. When it comes to employer branding, it’s a bit hard because there are no objective metrics of success. However, we suggest you some ways of measurement - made by Imaginasium - to make it easier for you.
Here they are:
- number of job applications
- application growth rate
- number of interviews
- time spent on interviews and hire
- % of application process where the candidates quit
- offer acceptance rate
- cost per job application.
To conclude we can say that in terms of employer branding honesty, kindness, caring and humanity are the most important requirements.
