Define Your Employment Brand with These Best Practices

Defining your employment brand helps create alignment between how you want others (current and potential employees) to view your brand and how they actually view it. The goal is to make sure your brand image accurately represents your culture.

The following are five best practices to use while defining an employment-brand message and communicating it to the job market to the most qualified talent:

• Defining your employment brand is about demonstrating what is unique about you. Is your company’s career site compelling? Does it leave a positive impression? The same goes for your company’s presence on social media. Use these platforms to your advantage by find ways to engage candidates — e.g., the use of recruitment videos. Sharing videos and photos of company events is another way to portray your brand.
• Put some effort into the application process. Over one-third of candidates who start the application process don’t complete it due to a frustrating interface. Additionally, the experience you provide is another reflection of your brand. Make it as easy as possible for candidates to search and apply for jobs across all channels. That means limiting the number of steps candidates must take to search for jobs and submit their resume. It also means doing regular maintenance checks.
• The employer brand message is all about the job candidate. With that in mind, turn the focus on them when talking about your employee value proposition. Most companies simply discuss their mission and values. Unless you really go deeper and discuss how that mission and those values relate to the employee experience, candidates will merely skim those things.
• Your job offering is your product, and the job candidate is your consumer. It is crucial to take the time to research your ideal candidate base, learn what is important to them in an employer, and use that information to shape your employment-branding message.
• Job candidates search for jobs much the same way they make purchasing decisions. Whether searching company career pages; browsing job boards, niche sites, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube; or attending in-person networking events or social gatherings, job candidates look everywhere. Whenever and wherever your employment brand is represented, you need to ensure it is being represented consistently.

Finally, as important as it is to define your employment brand and know who you are as an employer, it is just as important to know who you are not. The important thing is to be true to who you are (or who you want to be) as an employer. Defining your employment brand means defining the values which everyone in your organization should try to reinforce consistently.