Tips for Branding your Company Site

 Building an employer brand and cultivating your company culture are two tasks hot on the minds of recruiters worldwide. It wasn’t too long ago that none of us even had company websites. Some smaller, older businesses struggled with the new technology to even get a useable site up and running, and now that’s not enough. The first place candidates are going to go to learn more about a company is their website. It’s important to make a great first impression, and really show candidates that this is a place they want to work. Branding your site  is exactly how you hook these candidates.

Have a Clearly Defined Strategy

With any branding endeavor, starting with clear goals and direction is vital. According to an EBI post, 84 percent of companies believe a clearly defined strategy is the key to achieving employer branding objectives. So before you call the programer, or dial down to IT, get your stuff together first.

What Does your Brand Look Like?

Your brand should be somewhere between where you are as a company and where you would like to be. Do you want to be seen as a laid back, beers-after-work kinda place, or do you expect suit and tie 9-5ers? Consider the surface relationships in the company as well as underlying ties like, goals, standards and beliefs. Can you provide a work-life balance, and if so, how? Study other branded sites and check out how they’re conveying their message, and if it is effective. Once you have some pointers, improve upon these aspects and personalize them for your own brand.

Get Your Employees Involved

Real People

Stock photos are great, but real faces of real employees with real ideas are better. Potential candidates are going to take these personal accounts far more seriously than a random blurb written by someone else about the employees’ experiences. What sense does that make after all? Candidates will look to current employees to get a sense of the culture. They will consider how they’re dressed, how they communicate, what is their tone, do they seem happy?

Secondly, anytime you can get your current employees involved in cultivating your brand, it’s a definite win. When you facilitate your employees in sharing their experience with the company, it empowers them as teammates and a culture leaders. You can get them involved in several ways.

Blog

Some companies are allowing their key players to set aside time to blog. In this manner, you can hear about their personal experiences but also get the sense of their stance and experience in the industry. Whether you hire content creators or encourage your employees to share their thoughts, you should definitely have a blog page. Sharing relevant information about your industry is valuable to your brand.

Video

Having employer branding videos featuring small interviews with employees is a cheap and easy way to convey your brand. Budgets do tend to be an issue where employer branding is concerned, 71 percent of employees say that obtaining an adequate budget is their number one challenge in managing an employer brand. With tools like iMovie, short videos of a pretty decent quality are incredibly easy to create and share.

Social Media

Lastly, encouraging social media interaction  amongst employees can be very beneficial. This certainly doesn’t mean the airing of grievances on Twitter is acceptable. This can be an internal entity with the ability to share externally, on the site, with approval.

Social media is quick, easy and free. Whether their sharing in-office Vine videos, tweeting short industry facts or simply being social with a chat on Facebook, all of these interactions go a long way to promoting your brand and creating a fun social atmosphere in the workplace.

Go Mobile

By the time they get home to check out your site on their laptop, dinner needs to get started, kids need to be driven somewhere, or they’ve simply lost interest. When they can check out your site on the go, they’re more likely to explore and learn. You’re also conveying that your company values technology.

Reward and Support your Employees Publicly

Use your site to let your employees know that they are valued. Let them know that you notice a job well done. This is great for company morale, as well as displaying to candidates that you care about your employees and the job they do.