This blog was originally published in July 2022 and has been updated June 2024

Have you struggled to find the right employees for your business? If so, the problem may lie in an often-overlooked area: employment branding.

If you’re wondering, “What is employment branding?” stick around — you’re in the right place!

Employment branding refers to how a company promotes itself as a preferred employer to existing and potential employees. Encompassing company culture, salary, benefits, work-life balance, and more, employment branding is a framework a company uses internally to retain employees and also as a way to communicate with prospective employees about why your organization is a great place to work.

It is, essentially, your reputation with your current and future employees.

Let’s take a closer look at employment branding: how to build your employment brand, examples of great employment branding, and how to use your employment brand 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.

To illustrate the difference, here’s an example from a home healthcare company we worked with:

Their overall branding talks about serving their community 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 can “do good” through their work.

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

Developing Your Employment Brand

Now that you understand the concept of employment branding, the next step is to develop your organization’s employment brand. There are several steps involved in developing 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 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:

How the company lives its values
What do your employees like about working there
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.

Employment Branding Examples

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:

Using Employment Branding To Attract and Hire Top Talent

Next, it’s time to put your new employment brand to work.

To use your employment brand well, you need to use that messaging across all your recruiting materials and activities. This means the reasons why your company is a great place to work — the key messaging you developed in the employment branding process — needs to be woven into:

Your website’s career page. This is where potential new employees will go to not only see what positions you have open and how to apply, but also to learn who you are as a company and why they should consider working there.
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!
Your company's social media accounts. Sharing positive staff testimonials and success stories on your company's social media pages can help build both credibility and visibility among job seekers.
Messaging pushed out to the interview team. Your employment brand messaging should be built into interviews by consistently highlighting the reasons why your company is a great place to work.

In your messaging, highlight the benefits your employees enjoy, from salary and health benefits to a supportive work environment and opportunities for career growth. Share real stories from current employees to give further insight into what it would be like to work for your company.

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 — according to a Glassdoor poll, 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.

To improve your online reviews:

Ask key employees to write reviews on Indeed and/or Glassdoor. 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.

To that point, consider an example from one of our past clients:

Our client managed coin operated machines, and had dozens and dozens of negative Google 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.

The moral of the story: responding to your reviews — good or bad — will help maintain your good reputation among clients and employees alike.

Keeping Your Employment Brand Front and Center To Improve Employee Retention

Your employment branding’s potency doesn’t end once you’ve hired someone. Done well, employment branding addresses both recruiting and retention. It’s a tool you can use to both attract new 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 their experience working for the organization.
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
They reward employees that live by the brand.

The way your employees see your organization will affect employee loyalty and retention. A strong brand image will help you not only recruit great new employees, but also retain the ones you already have.

Develop Effective Employment Branding With Help From Red Seat

If your company needs help developing its employment brand, our team can help. At Red Seat, we’ve assisted many clients in the process of distilling their company values, mission, and culture down to 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.

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