You’re building a brand from the ground up, facing challenges head-on. But there’s one obstacle that keeps occurring: finding the right talent. Applications may be coming in, but they rarely bring the quality you need. It’s frustrating and time-consuming, pulling you away from focusing on growth. Luckily, there’s a way to attract better candidates! Let’s talk about how employer branding helps with hiring.
When you seek out new talent, candidates evaluate your company just as much as you evaluate them. Your reputation sets you apart from other companies in your industry and can help you attract top candidates. These individuals value more than a competitive salary. Good employees want a strong company culture, a healthy work environment, and an employer who appreciates them.
Having spent nearly a decade as a professional copywriter, I can confidently say that our agency’s approach has made a meaningful impact not only on our clients’ hiring success but also on the caliber of talent we attract to our own team.
What is Employer Branding?
Employer branding is a company’s messaging regarding its identity and culture to demonstrate what sets it apart from competitors. It highlights the value proposition of coming to work for your organization.
When implemented correctly, this messaging creates a strong reputation as an employer and conveys the value you offer to your people. Typically, employer branding serves two main functions: attracting new talent and retaining top talent. We go into our employer strategies with those two goals in mind.
Let’s focus on the first function. Also known as recruitment marketing, this strategy helps companies increase job applications, streamline hiring, and improve the quality of candidates they attract.
KWSM’s Director of Content, Greg Colacino, is actively involved in our employer branding strategy process. He shares his perspective on how employer branding helps with hiring.
“The job market is competitive, and hiring is time-consuming. You save yourself a lot of time and energy by putting in the extra effort to attract the right people and won’t have to go through the hiring process again. A well-developed employer brand encourages an inspired workforce that can help your organization achieve long-term success.”
– Greg Colacino, Director of Content, KWSM
How Does Employer Branding Help With Hiring?
When people are exploring new job opportunities or browsing social media channels like LinkedIn, they will come across components of this strategy. If you look closely, you will see them on landing pages, blogs, and social media posts, illustrating in an exciting way what the culture is like.
Here are a few ways an employer branding strategy drives better applicants:
- It showcases an energizing company culture.
- It provides a window into a healthy work environment.
- It gives a voice to employees who can act as brand ambassadors as they share their employee experience.
By spotlighting what makes your company an ideal workplace, you stand out to top candidates and save money by streamlining the hiring process. Our employer branding services can help you appeal to active candidates who are engaged in a job search, but it can also catch the attention of passive candidates who may not be looking for a job but find themselves interested in what you have to offer.
A Case Study: How Employer Branding Helps with Hiring
One notable client that utilized our employer branding services is a marine services company with multiple locations across the Gulf of Mexico and over 200 employees.
As a copywriter, I helped craft a cohesive and consistent brand identity in partnership with Content Creator Miranda Vazquez, who specialized in content creation for social media. An inconsistent brand online could lead candidates to believe that a company is less credible.
“Any company can say they have an amazing culture, but it means more when it comes from someone who works there. We’ve built our social media strategy around this, and letting the employees tell the story has given us engaging and effective content that drives results.”
– Miranda Vazquez, Content Creator, KWSM
We built a comprehensive digital marketing strategy around shining a light on the great connectivity the company has with its employees. We used them to identify the growth that both the employees and the company have experienced.
Here are some of the elements of that strategy:
Landing Pages
This first component of our strategy involved building two separate careers landing pages that targeted different types of candidates.
- Those who are new to the industry
- Those who are already in the industry but looking for new opportunities
On these pages, we employed the company’s brand voice to showcase its award-winning culture, appeal to these two unique audiences, and provide information about the employee experience. How did we achieve all of this? By letting their people speak for them
Employee Interview Videos
An important component of our strategy was sending our in-house video team to interview their people in the field and ask about their experiences with the company. Always keep in mind that your people are your best brand advocates.
By interviewing everyone from the company president to new trainees, we captured the essence of the company’s core values, missions, and pathway to growth by letting their people speak for them.
We embedded the videos onto the career landing pages so candidates would hear about the culture, benefits, and unique opportunities straight from current employees. Putting a face to these experiences is far more relatable to candidates.
Blogging
The next phase of our employer branding strategy was blogging. I wrote weekly search engine-optimized blogs for this company, highlighting what makes their culture and work environment unique.
I continued to interview people at all levels of the company to gain important insights into their culture, their programs, and what sets them apart from other competitors in the marine services industry. My blogs covered moments that showcased their family culture, different initiatives and benefits they offer, ways they have celebrated their employees, essential information about the job for people new to the industry, and more.
Social Media
The final component of our strategy was creating engaging social media content across Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn that complements the blogs I write. We regularly shared content in the Reels format, photos with text, and posts with graphics. We never attempted to promote the business to prospective clients; the focus was always on the people.
When we shared content celebrating employees, they engaged with it. More importantly, their friends and family engaged with it. How often do you see that positive ripple effect from a social post? The families were connected on and off the job, and that made applying more attractive for people who saw those posts. Those employees and their families became the company’s advocates, sharing it on their personal social media profiles. This strategy has helped move top talent down the hiring funnel who applied for open positions.
Results
In the first few months of this program, the client experienced significant jumps in online engagement and in the quality of job applications.
In the first month, clicks on the website content jumped from 372 to 612—a 65% increase—while impressions nearly doubled to 11,820. These efforts have also had a direct impact on hiring! The average monthly job applications rose by 56%, from 86 to 134, and the caliber of the candidates improved substantially.
The Next Step in Your Company’s Growth Journey: Employer Branding
Now that you know how employer branding helps with hiring, are you ready to transform your hiring process? The journey might seem daunting, but you don’t have to walk the path alone. Specialists in branding, like KWSM, can help you articulate and amplify your unique employer value proposition. The investment is minimal compared to the lifetime value of the high-quality talent you’ll attract.
Fill out the contact form below to schedule a consultation with the KWSM team and start leveraging your brand to attract top talent.
