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Every company needs a strong reputation to succeed. Whether you’re trying to sell to customers, secure new partnerships or develop your employer branding, a strong reputation is the backbone to success.

Your company likely has several brands and fronts that it needs to maintain. You’ll have your customer-facing brand, which focuses on the professional side of your business and how amazing your products/services are.

You’ll also have another reputation to uphold – your brand as an employer. How you treat your current and future employees is vital for business growth and the sustainability of your organisation.

But why?

Here’s why strong employer branding in recruitment is more important than ever.

Strong Employer Branding Makes Your Business More Trustworthy

The first step in your recruitment process is to attract the best candidates. Your open roles won’t gain traction if you don’t improve your employer branding in recruitment.

But why is employer branding so crucial to gaining interest?

Well, when a candidate comes across your vacancies online, they’ll typically research your company to ensure you’d be a good employer. Research shows that 75% of job seekers will investigate a company’s reputation before applying for a job.

When that candidate searches your company on Google or social media, they’ll see the top hits you and your employees share on those platforms. Maybe it’ll be top-hitting pages like your home page or about us page, or perhaps they’ll come across your latest Instagram posts. 

What you’ve shared is what they’ll see.

This is important because your online presence makes up a large part of your employer branding in recruitment. If your official company page isn’t fun, engaging and professional, you may deter potential candidates from applying for roles with your business.

Employer Branding In Recruitment Makes You More Trustworthy

You Become An Appealing Choice

Now we’ve established the importance of brand reputation in creating trust amongst candidates, we need to know how employer branding can be levelled-up to make your business the ultimate choice for candidates.

One of the most vital factors in the decision-making process for applicants is company culture. Applicants want to see a dynamic and lively employer that will provide them with opportunities to grow.

Culture is not just offering a free snack bar or having a pool table in the office – it’s about creating an environment where individuals can thrive and efforts are valued.

84% of job seekers say the reputation of a company as an employer is important in their decision-making process. If you don’t respect or enhance company culture, you will struggle to attract talent.

Creating a strong company culture is also beneficial in the recruitment process for another reason – your employees start to become your recruiters.

If your employees are active on platforms like LinkedIn, they may share thoughts and feelings about work. If you respect them, create a strong company culture and ensure they’re happy in their role, they’ll be more likely to share how great the company is on social media.

This will alter their connections to how great it is to work for you, enhancing your employer branding and potentially even gaining their applicants from their rave reviews.

Helps You Retain Your Talent

Keeping a hold of the employees that you currently have is just as, if not more important than sourcing new talent.

The staff that you already have are the building blocks of your organisation. Whether you have 5, 50 or 500 employees, the team members who are already there will help develop your business now and in the future.

But it’s never as easy as hiring staff and keeping them forever.

A reported 1 in 5 Brits were expected to change jobs in 2022. Now imagine if 1 in 5 people in your workplace left one after the other.

That would create a big problem.

Not only would you be sourcing new talent to fill your upcoming vacancies, you would have to spend more time and money replacing the staff who just left. Finding replacements for your team members can cost between 6-9 months of their salary, prices you might not be able to afford to pay!

But how can my employer branding fix this issue?

Employer branding can play a huge part in retaining your staff by nurturing employee expectations from the very beginning. By developing an employer brand that shows people what to expect from your company, you can use your brand as a tool to manage expectations at the beginning of the candidate journey.

By doing this, you’ll attract more candidates who are inspired by your company goals, mission and values. If you can deliver on these expectations throughout the hiring process and beyond, you’ll increase your chances of making better hires. This will help improve your retention rates.

3 Top Tips To Improve Employer Branding In Recruitment

  • Increase Your Online Visibility.

A crucial step in attracting candidates is to improve your online company presence. As previously mentioned, most applicants now research businesses before submitting applications.

If your company is hard to discover, inactive on social media or lacks online personality, you’ll become a less attractive opportunity and reduce the number of potential applications you receive.

Try publishing relevant sector blogs, sharing articles on social media or creating interesting industry infographics. Doing this will not only increase audience engagement but will also hopefully increase application conversions.

  • Celebrate Your Employees.

Showing that you care about your staff is vital to all aspects of business growth. Employees crave validation and acknowledgement, so give them the attention they seek to help keep morale high.

If someone receives a promotion, share a photo of them on Instagram. Should an employee gets married/has a child, show them some encouragement. If a team has exceeded their targets, shout them out to show how great they are!

Employee recognition goes a long way to improving your employer branding in recruitment.

  • Show Humanity.

When trying to attract candidates, try to avoid being corporate. Applicants want to work for lively businesses with a defined personality. They don’t want to work for a faceless corporation.

Crunching the numbers and showing a professional front is fantastic when interacting with clients but should be avoided when candidates are in the picture.

Instead, work on defining your company’s tone of voice. How would your business speak if it were a person? How would your business act? What would you want it to look like?

Personality goes a long way in creating strong employer branding in recruitment, so ditch the corporate front and show a bit of humanity in your online profiles.

How To Develop Employer Branding

Employer Branding In Recruitment Will Aid The Process

Employer branding isn’t something that you can create in a day. It takes time, dedication and commitment from everyone involved. 

It’s vital that everybody involved understands your approach to employer branding so the company profile can stay consistent across all channels.

Once you’ve established a strong brand, you must regularly implement it into your day-to-day routine to achieve the best possible results. Once this is achieved, you will hopefully see the recruitment rewards.

Employer branding isn’t something that you can create in a day. It takes time, dedication and commitment from everyone involved. 

It’s vital that everybody involved understands your approach to employer branding so the company can stay consistent across all channels.

Once you’ve established a strong brand, you must implement it into your day-to-day routine to achieve the best possible results. Once this is achieved, you will hopefully see the recruitment rewards.

Employer branding won’t replace your staff and it won’t be the main source of success. It will however aid your recruiters and get the ball rolling.

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