When you’re out seeking new employees to join your organization, the main issue is often appeal. How will you be able to attract candidates when they find you? What will keep them from applying elsewhere, especially as the labor market loosens up and people start searching for a new line of work? There are a lot of ways to attract prospects. However, the big one that stands out is your company itself. What do your employees and applicants think of you? Perceptions matter a lot, so you have to consider the importance of your employer brand and utilize it to attract the right candidates.
Day in the limelight
As business professional Donald Gonsalves sees it, employer branding is how your company is viewed by key players both inside and outside it,especially in the field of recruitment. The stakeholders in this situation are both your current employees and applicants to your job postings. It’s also more than just how you’re seen. Branding includes what you do in your market and how you compete with other business, and more importantly what it’s like to work within the company. As a result, it becomes something separate from the general corporate brand.
“The employer brand is distinct from the company brand.”
The employer brand, like any other brand, is not a natural product. It’s something that has to be instilled with training, recruitment and during the daily workday. The perception has to develop by not just espousing but demonstrating the ideals of the company on a daily basis. It also means developing a system that makes the employer look good to both the employee and the applicant. That includes providing incentives, support networks, and other means of letting the employee feel appreciated. At the end, the employee should be able to say at the end of his or her time at the company that he or she enjoyed the experience.
Feeling special
There are good reasons why you should develop an employer brand among your staff and potential applicants. As LeeAnn Prescott of Simply Hired noted, the labor market has escaped the hands of employers and been placed back to the candidates themselves in the past year. A combination of more jobs being available plus the rise of employer review sites has brought about the shift.
Among other factors that make branding important is that the culture of the workforce has changed with the rise of the millennial generation. These young employees, driven to be seen as equals, are much more likely to trust someone they can relate to or work with in a company than the CEO or chairman. In addition, you have a better chance of hiring someone who was referred to your company than somebody who just looked up your job posting from an organic search. More importantly, during the application process, people are more likely to discern what working for the company is like through the lens of the interviewers and human resource representative they speak to. Getting the perception of your company right as being a great place where people want to work is crucial if you want your organization to reach or remain at the top of the competition.
