Employer branding lives and breathes on the basis that recruiting top talent is much easier for organizations if you can build communities of potential candidates, keep them interested in your company’s vision, and effectively communicate the unique benefits of your corporate culture in a way that is entertaining and informative, even when they aren’t actively looking to change careers.
Ideally, your organization would have a holistic employer branding strategy together that ties in your corporate recruiting efforts, social media, and content marketing initiatives. But we know that every organization is at a different place on the employer branding spectrum — some organizations have just wanted to hit the ground running and adjust their strategy as they go while others are still waiting for inspiration on how to get started.
That’s why we put together this list of 5 unconventional employer branding tips that you can apply at any stage of your employer branding program:
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Don’t leave current employees out in the cold. Perhaps the best way you can impact your employer branding efforts is to keep your current employees happy and engaged. Your employee engagement initiatives can support your recruiting efforts seamlessly if you take the time to educate current employees on how to communicate the things they love most about working for your organization in an effective way. Do you have a hashtag you want to use to harness all of the social media love from your employees on Twitter? Did you write a recap on the blog about a recent company event that employees may want to share with their friends and family? Enable your team to share what they love about coming in to work and they just might. Keep in mind that your employees should be the core of your employer branding efforts and if you’re trying to communicate benefits of working in your organization without their help, your work will likely be in vain. In the meantime, if you’re looking for a meaningful way to impact employee engagement, check out the latest e-book from The Starr Conspiracy Intelligence Unit — The Ultimate Question to Ask Employees: An Introduction to the Employee Net Promoter Score.
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Integrate your employer branding efforts with marketing. Don’t try to launch your talent communities or content for employer branding without the help of marketing. Use the same strategic approach you use to run outward-facing campaigns for prospects. Your marketing team knows how to communicate in your brand voice and use all of your brand’s channels to do it effectively, so with with them, not against them.
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Focus on visual media. You should be using photos, video, graphics, and other visual media to support your employer brand. As the old saying goes, “show, don’t tell.” Telling your prospective candidates about a great company lunch doesn’t do half the justice that a killer team photo will do. Beyond that, visual media can be repurposed by marketing in a variety of ways across all of your brand’s owned media properties.
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Don’t forget about paid media. If you have already established some of your digital employer branding efforts and are proud of some of the content and communities you have built, consider leveraging paid media to get the word out about tough-to-fill job openings or to push a social employer branding campaign over the edge in participation and engagement.
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Make sure your online talent communities are optimized across all devices. If employees or prospective hires can’t participate in your talent communities or apply for jobs on a variety of devices, you’ll be missing out on a large segment of potential candidates.
Want more employer branding tips? Connect with The Starr Conspiracy on Twitter and Facebook.
Image: RecruitingBlogs
