s1jobs welcomes International HR Expert, Matt Alder in a series of guest blogs.
Employer Branding has never been more critical. Long-term skill shortages, uncertainty around immigration and the challenges created by digital transformation means that an ever growing number of employers are finding it difficult to attract the talent they need to their businesses. In such a candidate driven market, companies must offer a compelling and persuasive case to convince the best people to join them, and a strong employer brand is critical to achieving this.
There is often a lot of debate about what an employer brand actually is. At the simplest level, it is about building trust to gain attention and persuade by presenting a view of the organisation, its culture, values and employment experience. In a competitive marketplace, it’s crucial for every organisation that the impact and reach of their Employer Brand is leveraged to help showcase differentiation. Recruitment marketing channels are becoming noisier, and this means each business needs to be as creative as possible in identifying all opportunities to maximise their brand.
The challenge is that an employer brand can no longer be just a strap-line created by a marketing focus group. Fuelled by the growth of information available from social media and workplace review sites like Glassdoor, the level of due diligence potential employees are undertaking on the companies wishing to hire them has grown exponentially. An employer brand now needs to be transparent, authentic and stand up to the scrutiny of our ever more connected world. The companies that are rising to meet this challenge are the ones who are open and honest and let their employees speak as advocates for them to provide the social proof of an insider’s point of view.
By far the most successful tactic to showcase an employer brand in a compelling way is to share positive authentic employee stories, which underline culture and showcase the employee experience in a way that resonates with the appropriate target audiences of talent. In order to do this effectively, employers need to identify brand advocates within their organisation who will be sources of content and produce content regularly and consistently. Social media is an obvious place to share these stories but they should also be used as content to connect with audiences via other recruitment marketing channels including job boards.
This storytelling strategy has proved to be successful for numerous companies both large and small across many different talent markets. I’ve interviewed a number of these companies for the Recruiting Future Podcast including Standard Life, Brewdog, Chilis and CA Technologies. If you click the links you will be able to listen to the interviews and find out more about the different ways these employers are sourcing and sharing their employees’ stories and the positive effect it has had on the perception of their employer brands.
The talent market is predicted to get even more competitive in 2018 so there has never been a more important time to review and implement employer brand communication strategies if you want to improve your company’s ability to attract the best talent. Authenticity is key and helping your employees to tell their stories is one of the best ways of achieving it.
s1jobs offers a range of recruitment solutions that can help improve your employer brand. For more information, call 0141 302 7510.
Matt Alder is a Strategic Consultant who focuses on all aspects of recruitment marketing, employer brand and recruitment technology. Over the last seventeen years Matt has helped employers connect to the best talent, improve ROI and drive value via digital recruitment strategies and techniques and has recently written Exceptional Talent – How to Attract, Acquire and Retain the Very Best Employees. You can follow Matt on LinkedIn or via his podcast.
