Employer branding is a lot like a birdhouse. Building a good one requires time, planning, and care. Why all the effort? Because you know that a well-constructed birdhouse will not only attract a variety of birds but also encourage them to stay, build a nest, and become long-term residents of your backyard. The same holds true for employer branding. Creating a brand that resonates with potential employees is just like building that exquisite birdhouse. Do it right, and you’ll not only attract a multitude of top talent, but you’ll also encourage them to nest and flourish within your organization.
At KWSM, we have helped hundreds of companies build a strong reputation through employer branding over the past 13+ years. I have worked as a copywriter in-house and at an agency for the better part of a decade and can attest to the difference our agency’s efforts make in helping our clients hire and reduce turnover. In this blog, I’ll show you how employer branding helps attract new talent and retain top talent.
What is Employer Branding?
To understand how an employer branding strategy helps attract new talent and retain top talent, it is first important to understand what employer branding is.
Your employer brand is the message at the heart of your employee value proposition. It’s what your organization communicates as its identity to current and prospective employees. Each employee’s voice should reinforce that you have a strong mission, vision, and core values.
Employer branding is a key component of a talent management strategy that provides a window into your company for candidates to self-assess their fit within it. Employer branding can take many forms, like blog posts, website landing pages, and video interviews.
These components highlight culture, recognize employee achievements, shine a spotlight on company events, and allow employees to detail their experiences at your organization. Taylor David, Director of Accounts at KWSM, has been with the company for nearly a decade and is involved in all of the hiring. She shared her thoughts on how employer branding helps attract new talent and retain top talent, and the importance of highlighting your team.
“Above all else, it’s important that your employees feel recognized and valued at work. Highlighting your team online can be another way to do that. It shows your team that you care, and it shows prospective employees that their achievements will be appreciated here.”
– Taylor David, Director of Accounts, KWSM
How Employer Branding Helps Attract New Talent and Retain Top Talent
Creating an influential employer brand isn’t just about showing off your company’s perks and benefits; it’s about defining and communicating the core values and culture that make your organization unique.
Employer branding helps you craft a compelling narrative around what makes your company a great place to work and pull in candidates who are not just qualified but also culturally compatible. In the long run, this leads to better job satisfaction, higher retention rates, and a more harmonious work environment.
How Employer Branding Helps Attract New Talent
When recruiting new talent, companies sometimes spend considerable time and resources seeking qualified candidates. However, employer branding reverses this common plight and enables candidates to seek out companies instead. But how does it help in this area? Top candidates care about more than just salary and benefits.
Top candidates want a strong and healthy company culture, opportunities to grow and succeed, and the reassurance that they will be valued members of the team. An employer branding strategy addresses this need by carefully crafting a narrative around what it’s like to work at your company. Think of it as the blueprint for your birdhouse. Without a well-designed plan, you’re simply nailing planks together and hoping for the best. With a solid employer branding strategy, however, you’re laying down specifications for each feature of your company culture—be it professional development, work-life balance, or team collaboration.
Showcasing your culture across social media platforms and having your people attest to your culture reinforces that your organization is a great place to work, humanizing your brand in a way that resonates more deeply. Key strategies include:
- Evaluating the needs and motivations of the talent you want to attract
- Showcasing your employer branding on popular social media platforms
- Showcasing your employer branding through blogging
- Building dedicated career landing pages tailored to different candidates
How Employer Branding Helps Retain Top Talent
As for retaining top talent, employer branding is one of the most valuable tools at a company’s disposal. Employee branding helps companies ensure their employees are engaged and passionate, which is essential to growth and collective success.
When employees communicate that they are happy with where they work, it can boost the company’s image. But it also reflects that your team has higher motivation and buy-in because they are proud to work for your company.
Also, remember that your people are your best brand ambassadors. When conducting an employer branding campaign and letting your people advocate for your company, they feel like they are valued and genuinely have a voice. Key strategies include:
- Showcasing a culture of open communication, teamwork, and collaboration
- Providing opportunities for growth and development
- Recognizing employee achievements
Further, attracting and retaining top talent are intrinsically linked. Take, for example, employee referral programs. When companies implement these programs and incentivize their people to participate, it has a few different benefits.
Referrals will not only boost retention by making your current employees feel like you respect their opinions, but they will also ensure that you attract top talent who is also a good culture fit, so they will stay with the company longer, killing two birds with one stone.
A Case Study of Employer Branding Helping with Hiring and Retention
To truly understand how employer branding helps attract new talent and retain top talent, here is a case study that illustrates the value of an employer branding strategy.
A marine services logistics company with several locations across the Gulf of Mexico and over 200 employees came to KWSM to improve its hiring and retention efforts.
Our approach had several layers. 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.
Still, the most effective employer branding occurs when employees advocate for their employer. Our efforts for attracting the right candidates began with crafting careers landing pages.
We built two landing pages with distinct messaging targeting two sets of candidates: those entering the industry and seasoned veterans looking for new opportunities. These landing pages included several elements:
- Tailored copy that highlighted their employee value proposition
- Embedded testimonial videos of employees advocating for the company
- Information about current job openings
We then leveraged blogs and popular social media platforms with their audiences (LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram) to humanize their brand. We used blog posts, videos, and social posts together to:
- Share success stories
- Interact with their audience
- Highlight employee achievements
- Highlight training and career advancement opportunities within the company
We interviewed everyone, from the president to the trainees. By sharing real stories from current employees to showcase what set them apart as employers, employees were ecstatic to advocate for the company when the spotlight eventually shined on them.
For retention, we continued to reinforce their family-oriented culture of communication and collaboration. By highlighting their training and mentorship programs and advancement opportunities, their top employees also felt they were working at a company where they could build long-term careers, which fostered motivation and engagement.
On top of that, we incorporated recognition and incentives for employee achievements by showcasing individual employees in all our content. We also consistently highlighted their wellness programs and work-life balance to show that the company valued them as people.
We also utilized SEO tactics to help them break into the top pages for important, industry-relevant keywords candidates would be searching for. As a result:
- SEO rankings improved from 372 clicks and 5,953 impressions to 612 and 11,820 (a 65% and 99% increase, respectively) in just six months.
- The company received significantly more applications, averaging 86 per month when we started and jumping 56% to 134 per month in six months, with the client also noting an improvement in the quality of applicants.
- Employee engagement improved, as is reflected in an email newsletter we sent out only to current employees, with a 62.54% open rate and 15.3% click average, far eclipsing the industry average of both, which is 16.93% and 1.68%.
By the end of our campaign, our client expressed that we had accomplished our mission. This company said that they could not take on any more employees due to the volume of high-quality candidates we helped them attract and keep their retention rates up.
With our job accomplished, we shifted our focus to selling their services.
Employer Branding Services To Improve Hiring and Retention
Now, it is clear how employer branding helps attract new talent and retain top talent. Great employees want to work with great companies, and by highlighting what makes your company great, you make everyone’s lives easier. Candidates get a birds-eye view of what makes your company great and hear testimonials directly from current employees, and current employees feel like they are valued and have a voice, improving retention.
So, if you want to build more than just a workplace, if you aim to create a thriving ecosystem where employees come, stay, and flourish, focus on your employer branding. Remember, a well-crafted birdhouse becomes a home, and a strong employer brand does much the same—it becomes a community where talent is nurtured, and success takes flight. Fill out the contact form below to schedule a consultation with the KWSM team and start using your brand to attract top talent and hold onto those already driving your success.
