Why is employer branding important, and how could it benefit my business?
Struggling to attract and retain top-tier talent? You’re not alone. Many growing companies face this challenge. At KWSM, we’ve been collaborating with businesses facing these challenges since 2010. We’ve found that investing in employer branding offers an all-encompassing approach to boosting your company’s perception among job-seekers and the broader market as a whole; it helps you retain your best employees, too!
Before we delve into solutions, let’s establish what employer branding actually entails and why it’s critical for your business.
What Is Employer Branding?
Your company’s reputation matters not just to your customers but also to your current and prospective employees. Your employer brand is what your organization offers — beyond salary — for an employee’s loyalty and the value they bring to your company. This includes non-economic benefits like schedule flexibility, company culture, and the work environment you cultivate.
In a nutshell, your employer brand is an outward reflection of your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and has existed in some form since you hired your first employee.
Elements of your employer brand include:
- Company Mission / Vision
- Company Culture
- Benefits
- Business Decisions
- Authentic Communication
Although you have control over these brand elements, you do not have control of your employer brand as a whole. Current and past employees’ opinions, online reviews, and other factors also contribute to how your company is perceived.
To put it another way, your employer brand is one of the defining components of your company’s reputation, and as Benjamin Franklin said, “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.” So, it’s important to identify the goals of your employer branding efforts and to have a strategy for reaching those goals if you want to leverage your brand effectively.
Strategic Goals of Employer Branding
The main differentiator that sets employer branding apart from other marketing and branding campaigns is – surprise! – the “employer” element. You aren’t just trying to reach a wider audience or generate leads; you’re trying to connect with future ‘A-players’ and bring them into your company.
Another common employer branding goal is retaining the talent you already have, which can help you create a stronger company culture and keep costs down by reducing the need to onboard and train new employees.
This strategic focus doesn’t preclude your employer branding efforts from benefiting your company in other ways, of course. By putting the spotlight on your brand’s people and culture, you can also improve your company’s reputation in your industry, which can lead to more referrals and a higher caliber of clientele for your business.
How Employer Branding Helps Attract & Retain Top Talent
Your Employer Brand affects your ability to recruit new employees, how you engage and retain current employees, and the overall perception of your company in the marketplace.
But it’s how you share your EVP with potential employees and the public that makes your company stand out.
Employer Branding: A Magnet for Talent
Creating content with potential employees in mind is the first step. When you are recruiting top-notch talent, those candidates will want to know more about your company than the boilerplate description included in a job posting. They will look at your social media profiles, website, and other channels to learn more about you before proceeding with an application.
These candidates will want to see a healthy and authentic company culture, as well as the potential for growth, in your content. This is good news because creating content that celebrates your current employees meets this need – and improves your ability to retain said employees.
That brings us to another important point – attracting and retaining top talent are two sides of the same coin.
By showcasing employees who are happy to work at your business, you’re attracting potential new hires while also making those employees feel like a valued part of your organization.
Leverage Employee Referrals and Highlight Your Team
Showcasing existing employees also demonstrates a high level of trust. After all, you won’t ask employees to speak publicly about their experience at your company if you’re worried about what they will say.
Similarly, you can accomplish both goals by creating an employee referral program, which incentivizes your top talent to become brand ambassadors and “culture contributors” by bringing in candidates.
Referrals can boost retention by making your current employees feel like you respect their opinions, but they also ensure that you attract top talent who will be a good culture fit, which can help reduce attrition over time.
Reducing Attrition With Employer Branding
Happy employees are likely to stick around, and they also act as brand ambassadors.
Research bears this out as well; according to a study by LinkedIn, employers with a positive brand perception had an average turnover rate that was 28% lower than employers who were perceived negatively.
These results confirm something that you probably already know. Employees who feel a sense of belonging, purpose, and fulfillment at work are more likely to stay engaged and loyal over longer periods. Here’s what KWSM’s VP of Finance & Operations, Stephen Wagner, had to say about the benefits of employer branding.
“Employer branding has been an internal focus at KWSM for a while now, and we’ve seen the benefits firsthand. By incorporating more internal touchpoints and highlighting employee milestones, we have increased average employee tenure significantly. Employees who stay longer also build stronger relationships with clients, which helps the entire agency grow.”
Stephen Wagner, VP of Finance & Operations, KWSM
How to Showcase Your Company Culture Online
In today’s environment, your content is your most powerful communication tool for employer branding. Even if you are not currently hiring, how and what you communicate reflects on you as a company and an employer.
As mentioned above, it’s safe to assume that candidates will look at the content on your website and social media profiles to get a sense of your company culture. More specifically, videos and blog posts are a common and popular resource for this audience. You can also create collateral like an automated email campaign for new applicants or even a podcast to share an inside look at your business.
5 Ways to Share Your Company Culture
- Collect and share photos that show your culture
- Create and share content that explains your values and mission
- Talk about your benefits in blogs and job postings
- Use branded hashtags on social media
- Celebrate and share employee milestones
All of these tactics can be included in your company’s posting schedule for marketing assets and should be consistent with your existing brand guidelines. Sharing these content types regularly shows potential employees and the marketplace at large that you’re engaged.
Finally, remember to moderate comments as needed and optimize content so that it appears “native” for each channel.
Social Proof
If you aren’t familiar with the term, social proof is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when people enter a new or unknown situation. Most of us assume that other people in the same situation possess more knowledge than we do.
In marketing, social proof often takes the form of testimonials, case studies, and other forms of user-generated content (UGC). For employer branding, social proof can include all of the above – self-shot videos of employees talking about work events, for example, or a team member who has been promoted or reached a milestone with the company.
Again, research verifies these ideas, too. A study by Glassdoor found that reviews by employees and former employees are perceived to be among the most reliable sources of information about a company – even more reliable than awards the company received for excellent human resource practices. With that in mind, social proof will be an important pillar of any employee branding strategy.
Case Study: Real-World Employer Branding Success
Recently, a German-based global semiconductor manufacturer came to KWSM for assistance with attracting and retaining U.S. talent to compete against other big tech companies.
The company is well-known internationally but less recognizable in the U.S., which led them to recruit KWSM for a digital marketing strategy designed to advance their employment goals.
After reviewing the client’s audience and evaluating their needs, we combined organic social media posts and blogs with paid ads on LinkedIn, Indeed, and Google. After six months of execution, KWSM was able to raise the average number of monthly visits to the company’s U.S. Careers Page from 350 to 4,000 and their average monthly number of job applications from four to 125. The client also received an additional 2,000 applications per month from Indeed.
“The employer branding strategy showcased their positive work environment, industry-leading company culture, work-life balance, career growth opportunities, and employee wellness programs to cement their reputation as a premier employer. By the end of our campaign, our client said that they could not take on any more employees due to the volume of high-quality candidates we helped them attract and the reduced retention rates.”
Josh Rodriguez, Copywriter, KWSM
10 Ways to Track Your Employer Branding Strategy Efforts
Now that we’ve uncovered both the why and the how of employer branding, there’s one more question to answer: how do you measure success?
Without clear metrics to track and analyze your strategy, employer branding campaigns can become nebulous and may seem ineffective. With these ten metrics, however, you can tie your marketing strategy and campaigns to specific goals and optimize them accordingly.
1) Candidate Quality
The easiest way to calculate the quality of your candidates is to determine the percentage of applicants to interviews scheduled. (For reference, the average is 12%.)
2) Cost Per Hire
To find your cost per hire, add up the total amount of money you spend on ads for open positions, job board postings, recruiters, and related expenses.
Once you build a reputation as a top employer with a robust company culture, more candidates will come to you directly, reducing the cost of having to drive them to apply. The LinkedIn report mentioned above also found that strong employer branding can reduce small-to-mid-sized businesses’ cost-per-hire by as much as 50%.
3) Brand Awareness
While brand awareness is more of an overall metric for your online presence, you can measure it through social media mentions and interactions. On the employer branding front, an increase in brand awareness usually appears as a boost in your application volume.
4) Hiring Sources
Employers can measure hiring sources’ performance by tracking which channels are most or least effective for driving applicants.
By determining which platforms drive the most hires for your business, you can reallocate resources toward things that work and focus on building underperforming channels.
5) Open Applications
How many people submit applications for consideration without a specific job opening? A strong employer brand will increase that number.
6) Offer Acceptance Rate
Even if you’ve established a pristine employer brand, no company has a 100% offer acceptance rate.
If someone does decline an offer from your business, see what you can learn about the reason for the rejection and if there are lessons that you can apply to your branding efforts.
7) Manager Satisfaction
Our final three metrics will come from the results of internal surveys, performance meetings, and evaluations. Ask your managers how happy they are with the candidates you hire and if they have suggestions for improvement. (This is another way to show your leadership team that you value their opinions, which is also beneficial for retention.)
8) Employee Experience
Track employee sentiment through employee surveys, check-in forms, one-on-ones, and exit interviews. Does the employee experience match what you are trying to provide?
9) Employee Referral Rate
This could be the best source of cultural fit. Do your current employees recommend you?
10) Employee Retention Rate
Employee retention rate tracks the number of employees who stayed with your company through a specific time and can also be referred to as employee turnover or “churn.”
Tracking your employee retention rate can provide insights into whether or not working for your business is a good experience for employees and whether or not you are hiring the right ones.
By putting systems in place to track some or all of the metrics above, you’ll be able to create a baseline for measuring the success of your employer branding campaign and create a baseline to improve on.
Experience the Benefits of Employer Branding for Your Business
The competitive nature of today’s job market has made hiring and retaining top talent more important – and challenging – than ever. By investing in employer branding, you can give your business a competitive edge in the marketplace and create value for your existing employees by making them feel appreciated and engaged.
Does your company need an employer branding campaign to attract and retain top talent? Fill out the form below to schedule a conversation with KWSM about employer branding for your business.
