Employer branding might not be at the forefront of most company priorities, but it is an essential factor in gauging long-term success. When done correctly, the process of creating an effective employer branding strategy helps brands attract, and more importantly, retain top talent.
However, creating an employer branding strategy might be a daunting task for some. Questions arise such as:
- Why should I invest in employer branding?
- Where should I start my employer branding efforts?
- How do I conduct employer brand monitoring?
- How do I maintain my employer branding strategy months or even years after we start it, and ensure that we can maintain a strong employer brand?
To answer these questions and provide a solid blueprint for success, we created this comprehensive guide to ensure all brands start on the right track.
Read more: How do you find the best review management software to fit your employer branding needs? Let us show you: Review Management Software: Questions to Ask and Features to Look For
Why is Employer Branding Important?
Today’s employees conduct plenty of research about a company before they apply, and what they find can make or break their decision on applying with you. Don’t believe us? Here are some employer brand stats to drive the point home:
- When making a decision on where to apply for a job, 84% of job seekers say the reputation of a company as an employer is important.
- 50% of candidates say they wouldn’t work for a company with a bad employer brand reputation, even for a pay increase.
- Companies with positive employer brands get twice as many applications as companies with negative brands. They also spend less money on employees.
Having these and other valuable statistics readily available is important when proposing an employer branding strategy to key decision-makers, especially when a major focus for any brand is to attract and retain customers.
With solid numbers to back up the need for an employer branding plan, you can easily convince stakeholders that creating and maintaining an employee-facing online reputation can pay dividends for healthy company growth.
What Does Employer Reputation Management Mean for Employer Branding?
Optimizing your employer branding isn’t just about attracting new talent; it’s also about having the right employee retention strategy. One of the best ways to get that retention strategy off the ground is with employer reputation management, specifically one that involves getting honest feedback from current employees and using that to improve the current culture. Employee feedback also provides insight into how you can improve the recruiting and onboarding process for new hires.
Another result of effective employer reputation management is free brand promotions from staff. If they see the company actively engaging with employee feedback and finding ways to improve culture, they can easily become brand ambassadors. This type of social proof is the information that job seekers need to determine whether or not to apply with the company.
What Does Strong Employer Branding Look Like?
There are many factors that go into a strong employer brand, and it isn’t enough to just have a listing online where you can post current career openings.
As an employer, you need to be proactive when it comes to addressing feedback and constantly engage with prospects and employees alike.
This means doing more than just creating a company listing on Glassdoor (more on that later). You’ll need to constantly manage the information displayed on the site to accurately set expectations. In addition, you have to engage on other platforms such as social media feeds and LinkedIn, where potential employees might conduct additional research about the company before applying. Setting up employer brand monitoring can also go a long way to making sure that ongoing efforts to boost branding are working.
Meeting people halfway across multiple platforms sends a signal: you’re not like most brands; you care about the company’s perception from a customer and employee perspective. This can spell the difference between a handful of applications and a flood of inquiries about open positions.
Conducting an Employer Branding Audit
A full employer brand audit is also essential when creating your employer brand strategy. This means taking internal stock of current statuses among various channels including:
- Current value proposition
- Social media presence
- Employee reviews
To get an even more accurate picture of the current state of the employer brand you can also send out an employee survey. When doing so, provide more than the usual Yes/No questions. Give people space to adequately provide feedback on areas of company perception and internal culture.
This might give way to much lengthier responses, but these should provide more context and insight than a multiple-choice question. When you have enough responses and data, then your employer branding strategy can begin.
Glassdoor for Employers: A Powerful Employer Branding Tool
A great first step to get the ball rolling on your employer brand is to get an online listing via the Glassdoor for Employers portal. When creating a company Glassdoor profile you need to only provide the following:
- First and last name
- Company name
- Official title
- Total number of open jobs
- Work email address
- Password
From there you can fill in information about your company on its Glassdoor listing. Some helpful information can include:
- Basic information (location, the total number of employees, revenue, competitors, etc.)
- Salary and compensation details
- Explanation of benefits
- A summary of appealing factors that make people want to work at your company
- Stated company missions, vision, and values
Keep in mind that the Glassdoor listing isn’t a “set it and forget it” type of profile. Taking charge of employer branding means that you’ll need to constantly maintain the listing with new information, such as new job listings, updated location data, and even the reviews left by current or former employees (more on this later).
How Asking Employees for Feedback Helps Employer Branding
Similar to customer reviews, employee reviews and feedback are immensely beneficial to any company.
From an external perspective, these reviews provide needed social proof for those looking for a job. The words of current and past employees can easily sway the decision to fill out an application. Even when you’re not looking for new staff, employee reviews can give a current sense of the company culture.
The process of asking for reviews from your employees doesn’t have to be difficult or awkward. Provide a link to the company Glassdoor page, accompanied with a brief message telling them the importance of the review from a new hire and internal standpoint. Providing adequate context and making the feedback process as easy as possible can help the company get more high-quality reviews.
Employer Branding Power Tip: Using Feedback for Company Improvement
Employee feedback can be used to get a current assessment on the internal company culture, but it can also provide direction on new ways to improve and optimize internal perception.
When looking at your online reviews, you need to be on the lookout for specific topics and keywords that can point to potentially rising issues or positive trends.
Of course, manually reading each review and gaining these insights can take time, but you can also use reputation management software with new technologies, such as customer experience analytics, which also works with employee reviews, to easily find notable keywords and trends.
Showing the pattern in specific keywords and phrases is more than enough evidence to go with specific strategies that can improve employer branding. The Voice of the Employee is a valuable commodity when it comes to proposing new and highly effective strategies.
Managing Feedback: An Important Employer Branding Skill
After scouring each review for valuable insights, you shouldn’t just move onto the next piece of feedback. It’s important to interact with each review through a response.
If you’re working with a team, you can delegate this part of the process, but it’s important to have some best practices in mind to ensure a uniform “brand voice” online.
That “voice” can come across as professional or informal, depending on the intended brand look, but it’s important that it be used consistently to give applicants and consumers an idea of how the brand is portrayed across all platforms.
A simple “thank you” can go a long way in a review because it shows that you are actively reading and engaging with feedback. If you’d like to add more detail to the response you can mention specific parts of their review to further show that their feedback is being heard.
Improve Employer Branding by Responding to Negative Glassdoor Reviews
Not every piece of feedback will be positive, so it’s important to learn how to respond to negative reviews. More specifically, you should know how to effectively use Glassdoor and how to respond to negative reviews on the platform.
Once again, a simple “thank you” is effective here, but you’ll need to do more than that to resolve any problems brought up in the review. If possible, provide solutions to the issues brought up. If there are more serious matters in the review, try to take the conversation offline and solve the matter privately.
When responding to negative feedback, make sure to do so in a quick manner. Don’t let negative reviews go unattended for more than a day or so. No company is perfect and responding in a timely and professional manner shows that the brand is always looking for ways to improve.
How an Employer Retention Strategy Helps Employer Branding
Keeping employees is another major part of any employer branding strategy, especially when people are adjusting to new ways of working as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
To craft an employee retention strategy that fits with the changing times, you’ll need to show that your company is flexible in terms of a physical workplace. More brands are willing to allow remote staff than ever before, and you need to make that front and center when talking to current employees.
When the team eventually becomes fully remote, your employer branding strategy will have to change slightly, but the process of looking internally, gathering employee feedback, engaging with prospects across multiple digital platforms should stay the same.
Creating a Powerful Employer Branding Strategy
Adapting to changes in the workplace as previously mentioned is all part of the unique and effective employer branding strategy for your company, but it always starts with looking at the brand’s current employer branding state.
Getting that valuable benchmark provides insight into how much work is needed to meet specific goals.
From there, you’ll need to establish the company on well-known employer sites like Glassdoor and display updated information.
At the same time, you should start gathering feedback from current employees about the current company culture, the onboarding & hiring experience, and areas of improvement.
Depending on the way it was deployed, the feedback could go up as a review or internal data. Either way, they provide additional insights when it comes to improving employer branding.
There isn’t a single company that has perfected employer branding, which makes this strategy a constantly evolving process. However, leveraging feedback from current, past, and future employees as well as staying engaged online can help you acquire and retain employees who will gladly sing the company’s praises for a long time.