Steps to Developing Your Employer Branding Strategy

Developing your employer branding strategy can be one of the smartest decisions that you can make for your business. This employer brand is all about showing off your reputation for the potential candidates that you will higher. Your professional branding and employer branding can be two separate things, but you can work to improve both of them.

When you are ready to get started with your own employer branding strategy, take some time to look over some of the steps below to help. you get started.

1. Set Up Your Goals

The very first step that you need to focus on is defining your employer branding goals. These will be slightly different from one company to another, so having a good plan in place will make a world of difference. Some of the goals that you can choose from include:

• Increase your offer acceptance rates when you give an offer to someone else.
• Increase the referral rates from current employees
• Get more people to see your job posting from social media and apply
• Get more visitors to your career site
• Build trust with your current candidates
• Increase employer brand awareness
• Increase the engagement you have with your candidates
• Get more applications for a job
• Get candidates who are high-quality

You need to pick one or two of these that will be your main focus and can help you measure and see big improvements.

2. Identify the Right Candidate Persona

The next thing that you need to work on is creating your candidate persona. This will be a crucial step that helps you when writing out the job posting and looking for the candidates who will be able to fill up the position that you need.

If you do not know ahead of time who your perfect candidate is supposed to be, you will find that it is so much harder to send out a targeted message to the candidate. You also will struggle with getting the right people to apply with you in the first place.

Think about who you would like to hire. What type of experience they have, their age range, and where they live. The more details that you can come up with when it comes to the candidate persona, the easier it is for you to make a targeted job posting for this person.

3. Define your EVP or Employee Value Proposition

Looking at your current employees, do you have any idea why they have chosen to work for you? Do. Do you know why your current employees are willing to stay and keep working for you? Do you know what they like the most about you and your company as their current employer?

These are questions that you need to take the time to answer if you would like to make your own employer branding strategies. If you can’t come up with the answers, it is time to do some research to learn more about them. These questions will help you to determine your EVP, or employee value proposition.

The EVP of your company is going to be one of the messages that you can target your candidate persona with from above. There are five things that are going to be included in this EVP and they include:

• The compensation that you provide. This is the salary along with any bonuses that you will give to them.
• Benefits: This is going to include all of the extras that you include in the pay. It can be the healthcare, retirement, and any other perks that you provide.
• Career: Many people look to see if they have a chance to advance when they get into a new job. Whether you offer this or not could be an attraction to some potential candidates to you.
• The work environment: The kinds of conditions the candidate will need to work in will help determine whether they apply or not.
• Culture: Your company culture can be a big enticement or deterrent for many.

4. Define the Channels to Promote Employer Brand

There are a total of 10 channels that you can use in order to reach the candidate before they are hired. These are going to be called part of the candidate’s journey. They are also good places for you to promote your new employer brand. Some of the channels to use to promote the improved employer brand include:

• Social networks
• Career site
• Current employees
• Workshops and lectures you attend or host
• The application process, inbound recruiting
• Job advertisement
• Candidate relationship management

Choose which of these is the most important to you and make it your goal to get your information out there.

5. Measure the Results

It is not enough to just put the plan in motion and then assume that it will all work out the way that you would like. You need to actually measure the results and see what is working and what you will need to improve as time goes on. Frequent measurements will be a big factor during this time.

To do the measurements, you will need to take a look at the goals you chose to set up from the first step. You can then monitor these goals and see whether they are successful in promoting your employer branding strategy, whether you need to make some changes to the work you do, or whether you would like to switch out your goals.

You will find that data-driven recruiting is going to be impossible if you are not utilizing the correct recruiting tools. There are many great HR resources that can help get this done.

6. Getting Your Employer Branding Strategy Ready to Go

Your business needs to have an employer branding strategy up and running as soon as possible. This is one of the best ways to beat out the competition and bring on some of the best talents in the industry when you are ready to hire. Take a look at some of the steps above to help you successfully develop your employer branding strategy.

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