What Is Employment Branding and How Can You Use It To Recruit Top Talent?

If you’re hiring right now and finding it difficult to attract great employees (or any employees, for that matter!), you’re not alone.

In a job market where there are two jobs for every applicant and a record high number of people abandoning their jobs, employers everywhere are in a fight to secure and keep employees. In such a competitive environment, how do you convince top talent to join your team?

One often overlooked answer to this dilemma is employment branding.

If your response to that statement is, “Ok, you’ve got my attention, but what is employment branding exactly?”, you’ve come to the right place. Read on to learn more about employment branding, how to build your brand, and how to use it to recruit and retain top talent.

What Is Employment Branding?

When you hear the word “brand”, you likely think about the way your company is perceived by consumers. But employment branding is a little different.

While a company’s overall branding focuses more on the customer experience, employment branding focuses on the employee experience. 

It answers the question, “Why is your company a great place to work?”

Employment branding is a strategy to promote your company as a desirable place to work; a way to shape how potential employees, current employees, investors, and the general public see you as an employer. It offers an inside perspective—a glimpse of what it’s like to be a part of your organization.

Here’s an example from a home healthcare company we worked with:

• Their overall branding talks about serving their communities and empowering people.

• Their employment branding utilizes the slogan “Good Is What We Do”, and all of their recruiting materials are focused on the concept that their employees love working there because they are able to “do good” through their work.

Both incorporate the company’s values, but each has a different focus.

Determining Your Employment Brand

Now that you understand what employment branding is, the next step is to determine what your company’s employment brand is. 

There are several steps involved in determining your employment brand, but the process can be boiled down to three key elements:

1. Review what your employment brand looks like externally. This includes reviews on employment sites like Indeed and Glassdoor, and to some extent client reviews on Google or other industry-specific platforms. 

2. Internally, review your core company values, mission, and culture. At a leadership level, take a hard look at your stated values to ensure that they really align with the values your company is living out. You should be able to give examples of those values in action. If you can’t, you may need to rethink what your core values are!

3. Ask your employees about their experience with your company. This is the most important component of understanding your employment brand. While your core values and mission play a part, your employment brand is ultimately determined by your employees. What your leadership thinks your brand is may not really be your brand: you need to find out why the majority of your employees say they appreciate working for your organization. 

The goal of these conversations is to boil down the collective thoughts of the organization into a brand and its elements. Look for themes in these conversations: examples of how the company lives its values, what your employees like about working there, and how your employees experience your company on a day-to-day basis.

From there, you’ll have the information you need to create a short statement or slogan (3-5 words that encapsulate your brand) to use and expand on in your advertising and job postings.

Here are a few examples of companies that are doing a great job with their employment branding:

• Big companies (with big budgets) are good resources to give you an idea of what resonates with you for your own employment branding. Best Buy’s career site is exceptional, as is Mayo Clinic’s. What works for these sites is that they use a tagline (Best Buy’s is “Tomorrow Works Here”, Mayo’s is “Life-Changing Careers”), and everything else supports that premise.

• HealthStar, a home health care company we worked with, did an amazing job with their employment brand on their career page. Check it out here.

• We are big fans of using recruitment videos to communicate your employment brand. Here are a couple of our favorites:

  • “Why I love Dropbox”   

  • New Seasons Market Comment Card confessional 

Using Your Employment Branding to Attract Top Talent

To use your employment branding well, you need to use that messaging across all of your recruiting materials and activities. 

This means that the reasons why your company is a great place to work—the key messaging that you developed in the employment branding process—needs to be weaved into:

• The career page on your website.

• Your recruitment advertising. Your job ads should NOT consist only of a job description! They should communicate why your company is a great place to work.

• The subject of a recruitment video. We think this is the BEST way to communicate your employment brand!

• Messaging pushed out to the team doing interviews. It should be built into some of the questions asked of job candidates. 

The Role of Reviews in the Recruitment Process

One aspect of employment branding that many companies overlook is online reviews. And that’s a mistake—statistics state that up to 86% of job seekers view employer and company reviews and ratings when deciding whether or not to apply for a job!

Companies have lost out on great candidates because of negative, missing, or poorly managed online reviews. Plus, when potential candidates apply for a job on sites like Indeed or Glassdoor, the star rating of a company is listed as part of the job posting. Poor ratings will scare away top talent.

Improve your online reviews by doing the following:

• Build your company page at Indeed and/or Glassdoor and strategically ask key employees to write reviews on those sites. Make sure to stagger these reviews so you don’t end up with 6 AMAZING reviews in one day!

• Ask happy customers to write reviews on Google or whichever review site is most important to your company.

• Manage bad reviews! No one likes to receive a negative review, but it happens. Respond graciously to bad reviews, thanking the reviewer for their feedback and asking to connect with them offline to address their experience further. This will show that you care about the kind of experience your employees and customers have with your company.

An example of this last point from one of our past clients:

We once worked with a client who had horrible Google reviews. This client managed coin operated machines, and had dozens and dozens of online reviews from people who were angry because the machines ate their quarters. This company was hiring for a senior accounting role—a position that had nothing to do with the faulty machines—and candidate after candidate declined the role because of those negative online reviews! 

The kicker was that the company did not respond to the negative reviews. It would have been a completely different story had someone on their team taken ownership of the issue and responded online that they were committed to resolving the issue with their customers. 

Their lack of response cost them valuable employees.

Employee Retention: Keeping Your Employment Brand Front and Center 

Your employment branding doesn’t stop once you’ve hired someone. Done well, employment branding addresses both recruiting and retention. It’s a tool you can use to both attract candidates and improve employee engagement. 

Companies that do a great job with this push their employment brand messaging out to their existing employees:

• They include spotlights of employees living the brand in their newsletters or company communications. 

• They produce videos with employees talking about the employment brand. 

• They post stories on Facebook or Indeed of company outings or community service that aligns with the brand.

• They include themes of the employment brand in company meetings and reward employees that live by the brand.

Red Seat Can Help You Build Your Employment Branding

If your company needs help determining its employment brand, we have you covered. At Red Seat, we’ve assisted many clients in the process of distilling their company values, mission, and culture down into concise language that communicates who they are and what it’s like to work for them.

This is just one of the many recruiting and hiring services we offer. 

Learn more about Red Seat’s Retained Search, Fractional Recruiting, and other services by browsing our website, and don’t hesitate to contact us to discuss your hiring needs.