Eddy’s HR Mavericks Encyclopedia
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Employer Brand
Your company’s employer brand sets the tone for the organization and helps create a culture that people want to work for.
Continue reading to learn what an employer brand is, why building an employer brand is important, how to develop your employer brand and examples of organizations with strong employer brands.
Continue reading to learn what an employer brand is, why building an employer brand is important, how to develop your employer brand and examples of organizations with strong employer brands.
What Is an Employer Brand?
An employer brand is the perception of your organization within the marketplace. A strong employer branding strategy can help position your company as the employer of choice within your industry and encourage people to want to work for you.
82% of job seekers consider employer brand and reputation before applying to a job
Hiring StatisticsEmployer Brand vs Corporate Brand
Corporate branding refers to how a company presents itself to the world at large, including customers, partners, and the public. Employer branding, on the other hand, focuses on how a company presents itself as an employer to potential and current employees. Both are important for a business, but they are different and should be approached with different strategies.
Why Building an Employer Brand Is So Important
The lines between marketing and recruiting can sometimes be blurry. It is not uncommon for a business to rely on their corporate brand to attract talent. However, in today’s competitive hiring market, it is becoming increasingly important to accurately represent who you are as an employer. When your potential hires are searching for a job, they want to know not only what your company will do for its customers but also for its employees. Building your employer brand will help increase demand for your company and make recruiting easier. A strong employer brand can also help your company by:
- Increasing retention rate. Your employer brand is centered around a positive work environment that people want to be around and don’t want to leave.
- Reducing recruitment costs. A strong employer brand will have applicants approaching you, reducing the amount of money you need to invest in job postings, recruiting events and other expenses.
- Improving employee engagement. Building a strong employer brand creates a culture and work environment that employees thrive in.
- Competing for the best talent. By creating a compelling employer brand, you are able to compete with other companies in your industry for the best talent.
Companies with bad reputations may have to pay 10% more to convince people to work for them; on average, that’s about $4,723 more per hire
Hiring StatisticsHow to Develop Your Employer Brand
Creating an employer brand may seem like a difficult task. Here are a few steps that you can take to intentionally develop your employer brand.
Step 1: Define Your Employer Value Proposition (EVP)
Your employer value proposition (EVP) is a statement that defines how your company is perceived by its current and prospective employees. Your EVP is the component of your employer branding strategy that separates you from the rest of the competition.When defining your employer value proposition, think about your organizational culture and work environment. Identify aspects of your culture that are unique to your organization and construct your EVP around those.Valerie Vadala suggests that businesses should create “an Employer Value Proposition that is authentic to the culture and personality of the organization and appeals to candidates who will be most likely to flourish at your organization.”
Step 2: Provide a Clear Description of What It’s Like to Work at Your Company
Once you’ve defined your employer value proposition, create a clear description of what it’s like to work at your company. Creating acareers page on your website is a great way to portray your organization’s work environment.Highlight what it’s like to work at your company using different types of content including videos, blogs, images and web copy.
Step 3: Create a Positive and Compelling Reputation for Your Organization
To spread your employer brand, you need to craft a visual identity of your organization. To shape your employer brand image, actively keep your website and social media updated with any announcements of organizational success, information about the products and highlights about your employees. It’s crucial that your employer brand image remains consistent across all platforms.Part of your organizational culture should be community based. Your organization can sponsor community events, and staff members can volunteer to ensure that the company is supporting the local community.There are local and national awards for the best workplaces. These awards serve as a stamp of approval for your company and help create a positive employer brand.
Step 4: Develop an Employee Advocacy Program
An employee advocacy program is a formal program that encourages and facilitates positive exposure to your company through current employees.Ask your employees to share content related to your organization on their personal social media platforms. Any time your company hosts an event, wins an award or receives positive press exposure, your employees can help spread the message by sharing your posts.You can also have your staff create employee-generated content. By having employees write blog posts about their experiences or create video testimonials about working for your company, they can help strengthen your employer brand.Employees can also help boost your brand by posting positive reviews on sites like Glassdoor and Indeed.
Step 5: Create a Positive Candidate Experience for All Applicants
Outside of the image you define, your employer brand is dependent on the candidate experience. Take steps to ensure their experience is a positive one. Communicate with applicants at every step of the hiring process to help ensure that they have a positive experience with every team member they encounter.If a candidate doesn’t get the job, send them a polite rejection letter, thanking them for their time. It’s important that you send rejection letters in a timely fashion so you don’t keep applicants waiting for a response.Every candidate will develop an opinion about your employer band and has the potential to spread the word. So whether they get the job or not, try to create a mutually beneficial relationship through positive experiences with them—you never know, maybe they’ll apply again someday and be the right fit for a different role.
Tips for Improving Your Employer Brand
Here are five tips to improve employer branding within your company.
Tip 1: Get Employee Feedback About Your Brand
To improve your employer branding, you first need to understand what it currently is—especially in the eyes of your current employees. This involves understanding what makes your company unique as an employer and what sets you apart from your competitors. You can begin to understand your competitive edge as an employer by conducting employee surveys, focus groups, and 1:1 interviews to gather feedback on what people like and dislike about working for your company. Ask questions such as:
- Why do you like to work for our company?
- What five words would you use to describe working here?
- What do we offer here that is unique and special?
- How would you rate your direct manager? Why?
- Do you know what our company mission is?
- Do you understand how your job contributes to that mission?
- Why do you stay working here?
- Do you have plans to look for a new job in the next 90 days?
Make sure you gather both qualitative and quantitative data. Do not assume that you know the answers to these questions. You must ask your employees for their input to help you truly understand where your employer branding is currently at. Their responses might surprise you. And that is okay! You need to know the good, the bad, and the ugly to build an accurate and strong employer brand.It may be a good idea to hire an outside agency or consultant to help with the discovery process. These professionals will be able to provide you with valuable insights and can help you create a strategy that will improve employer branding within your company. Because third-party survey providers are not directly connected to the company, employees will be more honest in a third-party survey than they would be in a survey or interview with management. If responses are anonymously shared with an impartial and unbiased reviewer, people tend to be more comfortable providing honest and candid feedback. They may feel less pressure to give socially acceptable answers, and instead feel free to express their true opinions, knowing that their responses will not be used against them. Additionally, this research takes time and needs to be done well. You may not know where to start or have the time to dedicate to this task. A third party can alleviate that stress and help collect all the important and valuable data.
Tip 2: Act On the Feedback You Receive
You will have collected both positive and negative feedback from your employees. You might have found that what you thought employees thought about your company was actually not true. All this data is designed to help you.All businesses must start somewhere. Take any positive feedback, and capitalize on it. That is the feedback that will inform you in what areas you are already doing a great job. Look for these common themes and use them to strategically create an employer brand slogan or tagline and identify the value propositions to use in your recruiting marketing and internal communications. Then reinforce them everywhere (next step)! Take any negative feedback and use it to improve. Now you know where you can do better to improve the working environment and experience for your employees. Don’t feel bad discovering areas to work on. All employers have them.Take note that while an employer brand is not the same as a corporate brand, they should marry nicely. Align your employer branding with your company’s mission, values, and culture. When both work well together, it’s a sign your company is on to something great!
Tip 3: Communicate Your Brand Effectively
Once you discover what your employer brand is, you should implement it into your recruiting marketing and your entire employee life cycle—from the first time they hear about your company to the day they leave your company. You can’t fake it. You must accurately and honestly communicate who you are as an employer. If you don’t, your new hires will see right through it shortly after being hired. According to Nas Recruitment, 30% of job seekers leave their job within 90 days because of the employer’s false representation of their brand. Here are ideas of places you can start implementing your employer brand that accurately reflect your company’s true culture and values:
- Company website
- Social media profiles
- Job listings and job descriptions
- Employee testimonials
- Job interviews
- Employee onboarding
- Training
- Management and team meetings
- Performance evaluations
- Internal communications
- Exit interviews
By carefully crafting a strategy where you can reinforce your positive employer brand in all employee touchpoints, you will strengthen your position as a rock star employer!
Tip 4: Be Intentional
Finally, it’s important to be intentional about your employer branding. This means actively and deliberately working to create and maintain a positive image of your company as an employer. It involves creating a clear, consistent message about what it’s like to work for your company and then making sure that message is communicated across all channels and touchpoints. It also means being proactive in managing and addressing any negative perceptions or issues that may arise. You can help boost your employer brand and recruitment marketing by ensuring that everyone in your company is aware of it and understands how to represent it. Additionally, make sure that your employer branding is integrated into your overall business strategy and is not just an afterthought.
Examples of Organizations with Great Employer Brands
Here are a few examples of organizations that have strong employer brands that you can use as inspiration when creating yours.
IBM
IBM leverages videos to create compelling stories about the work being done at their organization. Their careers page covers a wide range of content, from what current employees do in their roles to the reasons that you should want to join IBM.On their careers page, IBM has Glassdoor ratings and specific information about positions in each stage, from entry-level to managerial roles.
Google’s careers page is essentially a content hub. While their organization is a global brand, they create an engaging experience for prospective applicants. Google covers everything from what it’s like to work for the organization to specific information about how they hire.
Netflix
Since Netflix is in the video streaming industry, it makes sense that their employer brand leverages video content. Netflix creates videos to discuss the benefits of working for them, their diversity and inclusion practices and more.
Spotify
Spotify understands their product and the type of employees they want working for them. By promoting their company as a band, they recruit individuals who are passionate about music and seek the community aspect of a band. Spotify’s “Band Manifesto'' on their career page discusses the company's mission, how they achieve the mission, their values and their employees’ roles.If you’re feeling lost about your employer brand, lean on the examples of successful companies who have gone before you. Remember to ask your current employees for their input! We hope these tips will help you feel confident as you work toward defining, developing, and implementing your employer brand.
Topics
Brenda Anderson
Jipe’s founder, Brenda Anderson, is one of the less than five percent of female Utah CEOs. She lives her life unafraid to uncover and execute ideas that change the way we think—while bringing creative ease to the way we live our lives in a world centered on technology. As a strong, ambitious, single mom of two teenage boys, she saw a need for an app that made searching for an entry-level job easy and familiar, especially for the Gen Z population. Before starting Jipe, Brenda spent nearly ten years at MarketStar in several Marketing and Business Development positions. She was primarily responsible for managing the MarketStar corporate brand and created, developed, and implemented their employer brand strategy. After surviving and recovering from brain surgery in 2018, Brenda took steps toward her goal of building Jipe one step at a time. Today she is proudly showcasing Jipe to both job seekers and businesses. The reviews are in: Jipe is needed and relevant, and it is creating a stir in the job search industry. With its innovative interface, Jipe is able to connect employers with strong talent and job seekers with great career opportunities. Brenda has delivered entry-level jobs to the fingertips of entry-level job searchers in an easy, fast, and effective way!
Eddy
Eddy is the all-in-one HR tool built with you in mind. The robust features and ease of use will benefit your company both inside and outside your HR team.
Frequently asked questions
Other Related Terms
Eddy’s HR Mavericks Encyclopedia
Employer Brand
Your company’s employer brand sets the tone for the organization and helps create a culture that people want to work for.
Continue reading to learn what an employer brand is, why building an employer brand is important, how to develop your employer brand and examples of organizations with strong employer brands.
Continue reading to learn what an employer brand is, why building an employer brand is important, how to develop your employer brand and examples of organizations with strong employer brands.
What Is an Employer Brand?
An employer brand is the perception of your organization within the marketplace. A strong employer branding strategy can help position your company as the employer of choice within your industry and encourage people to want to work for you.
82% of job seekers consider employer brand and reputation before applying to a job
Hiring StatisticsEmployer Brand vs Corporate Brand
Corporate branding refers to how a company presents itself to the world at large, including customers, partners, and the public. Employer branding, on the other hand, focuses on how a company presents itself as an employer to potential and current employees. Both are important for a business, but they are different and should be approached with different strategies.
Why Building an Employer Brand Is So Important
The lines between marketing and recruiting can sometimes be blurry. It is not uncommon for a business to rely on their corporate brand to attract talent. However, in today’s competitive hiring market, it is becoming increasingly important to accurately represent who you are as an employer. When your potential hires are searching for a job, they want to know not only what your company will do for its customers but also for its employees. Building your employer brand will help increase demand for your company and make recruiting easier. A strong employer brand can also help your company by:
- Increasing retention rate. Your employer brand is centered around a positive work environment that people want to be around and don’t want to leave.
- Reducing recruitment costs. A strong employer brand will have applicants approaching you, reducing the amount of money you need to invest in job postings, recruiting events and other expenses.
- Improving employee engagement. Building a strong employer brand creates a culture and work environment that employees thrive in.
- Competing for the best talent. By creating a compelling employer brand, you are able to compete with other companies in your industry for the best talent.
Companies with bad reputations may have to pay 10% more to convince people to work for them; on average, that’s about $4,723 more per hire
Hiring StatisticsHow to Develop Your Employer Brand
Creating an employer brand may seem like a difficult task. Here are a few steps that you can take to intentionally develop your employer brand.
Step 1: Define Your Employer Value Proposition (EVP)
Your employer value proposition (EVP) is a statement that defines how your company is perceived by its current and prospective employees. Your EVP is the component of your employer branding strategy that separates you from the rest of the competition.When defining your employer value proposition, think about your organizational culture and work environment. Identify aspects of your culture that are unique to your organization and construct your EVP around those.Valerie Vadala suggests that businesses should create “an Employer Value Proposition that is authentic to the culture and personality of the organization and appeals to candidates who will be most likely to flourish at your organization.”
Step 2: Provide a Clear Description of What It’s Like to Work at Your Company
Once you’ve defined your employer value proposition, create a clear description of what it’s like to work at your company. Creating acareers page on your website is a great way to portray your organization’s work environment.Highlight what it’s like to work at your company using different types of content including videos, blogs, images and web copy.
Step 3: Create a Positive and Compelling Reputation for Your Organization
To spread your employer brand, you need to craft a visual identity of your organization. To shape your employer brand image, actively keep your website and social media updated with any announcements of organizational success, information about the products and highlights about your employees. It’s crucial that your employer brand image remains consistent across all platforms.Part of your organizational culture should be community based. Your organization can sponsor community events, and staff members can volunteer to ensure that the company is supporting the local community.There are local and national awards for the best workplaces. These awards serve as a stamp of approval for your company and help create a positive employer brand.
Step 4: Develop an Employee Advocacy Program
An employee advocacy program is a formal program that encourages and facilitates positive exposure to your company through current employees.Ask your employees to share content related to your organization on their personal social media platforms. Any time your company hosts an event, wins an award or receives positive press exposure, your employees can help spread the message by sharing your posts.You can also have your staff create employee-generated content. By having employees write blog posts about their experiences or create video testimonials about working for your company, they can help strengthen your employer brand.Employees can also help boost your brand by posting positive reviews on sites like Glassdoor and Indeed.
Step 5: Create a Positive Candidate Experience for All Applicants
Outside of the image you define, your employer brand is dependent on the candidate experience. Take steps to ensure their experience is a positive one. Communicate with applicants at every step of the hiring process to help ensure that they have a positive experience with every team member they encounter.If a candidate doesn’t get the job, send them a polite rejection letter, thanking them for their time. It’s important that you send rejection letters in a timely fashion so you don’t keep applicants waiting for a response.Every candidate will develop an opinion about your employer band and has the potential to spread the word. So whether they get the job or not, try to create a mutually beneficial relationship through positive experiences with them—you never know, maybe they’ll apply again someday and be the right fit for a different role.
Tips for Improving Your Employer Brand
Here are five tips to improve employer branding within your company.
Tip 1: Get Employee Feedback About Your Brand
To improve your employer branding, you first need to understand what it currently is—especially in the eyes of your current employees. This involves understanding what makes your company unique as an employer and what sets you apart from your competitors. You can begin to understand your competitive edge as an employer by conducting employee surveys, focus groups, and 1:1 interviews to gather feedback on what people like and dislike about working for your company. Ask questions such as:
- Why do you like to work for our company?
- What five words would you use to describe working here?
- What do we offer here that is unique and special?
- How would you rate your direct manager? Why?
- Do you know what our company mission is?
- Do you understand how your job contributes to that mission?
- Why do you stay working here?
- Do you have plans to look for a new job in the next 90 days?
Make sure you gather both qualitative and quantitative data. Do not assume that you know the answers to these questions. You must ask your employees for their input to help you truly understand where your employer branding is currently at. Their responses might surprise you. And that is okay! You need to know the good, the bad, and the ugly to build an accurate and strong employer brand.It may be a good idea to hire an outside agency or consultant to help with the discovery process. These professionals will be able to provide you with valuable insights and can help you create a strategy that will improve employer branding within your company. Because third-party survey providers are not directly connected to the company, employees will be more honest in a third-party survey than they would be in a survey or interview with management. If responses are anonymously shared with an impartial and unbiased reviewer, people tend to be more comfortable providing honest and candid feedback. They may feel less pressure to give socially acceptable answers, and instead feel free to express their true opinions, knowing that their responses will not be used against them. Additionally, this research takes time and needs to be done well. You may not know where to start or have the time to dedicate to this task. A third party can alleviate that stress and help collect all the important and valuable data.
Tip 2: Act On the Feedback You Receive
You will have collected both positive and negative feedback from your employees. You might have found that what you thought employees thought about your company was actually not true. All this data is designed to help you.All businesses must start somewhere. Take any positive feedback, and capitalize on it. That is the feedback that will inform you in what areas you are already doing a great job. Look for these common themes and use them to strategically create an employer brand slogan or tagline and identify the value propositions to use in your recruiting marketing and internal communications. Then reinforce them everywhere (next step)! Take any negative feedback and use it to improve. Now you know where you can do better to improve the working environment and experience for your employees. Don’t feel bad discovering areas to work on. All employers have them.Take note that while an employer brand is not the same as a corporate brand, they should marry nicely. Align your employer branding with your company’s mission, values, and culture. When both work well together, it’s a sign your company is on to something great!
Tip 3: Communicate Your Brand Effectively
Once you discover what your employer brand is, you should implement it into your recruiting marketing and your entire employee life cycle—from the first time they hear about your company to the day they leave your company. You can’t fake it. You must accurately and honestly communicate who you are as an employer. If you don’t, your new hires will see right through it shortly after being hired. According to Nas Recruitment, 30% of job seekers leave their job within 90 days because of the employer’s false representation of their brand. Here are ideas of places you can start implementing your employer brand that accurately reflect your company’s true culture and values:
- Company website
- Social media profiles
- Job listings and job descriptions
- Employee testimonials
- Job interviews
- Employee onboarding
- Training
- Management and team meetings
- Performance evaluations
- Internal communications
- Exit interviews
By carefully crafting a strategy where you can reinforce your positive employer brand in all employee touchpoints, you will strengthen your position as a rock star employer!
Tip 4: Be Intentional
Finally, it’s important to be intentional about your employer branding. This means actively and deliberately working to create and maintain a positive image of your company as an employer. It involves creating a clear, consistent message about what it’s like to work for your company and then making sure that message is communicated across all channels and touchpoints. It also means being proactive in managing and addressing any negative perceptions or issues that may arise. You can help boost your employer brand and recruitment marketing by ensuring that everyone in your company is aware of it and understands how to represent it. Additionally, make sure that your employer branding is integrated into your overall business strategy and is not just an afterthought.
Examples of Organizations with Great Employer Brands
Here are a few examples of organizations that have strong employer brands that you can use as inspiration when creating yours.
IBM
IBM leverages videos to create compelling stories about the work being done at their organization. Their careers page covers a wide range of content, from what current employees do in their roles to the reasons that you should want to join IBM.On their careers page, IBM has Glassdoor ratings and specific information about positions in each stage, from entry-level to managerial roles.
Google’s careers page is essentially a content hub. While their organization is a global brand, they create an engaging experience for prospective applicants. Google covers everything from what it’s like to work for the organization to specific information about how they hire.
Netflix
Since Netflix is in the video streaming industry, it makes sense that their employer brand leverages video content. Netflix creates videos to discuss the benefits of working for them, their diversity and inclusion practices and more.
Spotify
Spotify understands their product and the type of employees they want working for them. By promoting their company as a band, they recruit individuals who are passionate about music and seek the community aspect of a band. Spotify’s “Band Manifesto'' on their career page discusses the company's mission, how they achieve the mission, their values and their employees’ roles.If you’re feeling lost about your employer brand, lean on the examples of successful companies who have gone before you. Remember to ask your current employees for their input! We hope these tips will help you feel confident as you work toward defining, developing, and implementing your employer brand.
Topics
Brenda Anderson
Jipe’s founder, Brenda Anderson, is one of the less than five percent of female Utah CEOs. She lives her life unafraid to uncover and execute ideas that change the way we think—while bringing creative ease to the way we live our lives in a world centered on technology. As a strong, ambitious, single mom of two teenage boys, she saw a need for an app that made searching for an entry-level job easy and familiar, especially for the Gen Z population. Before starting Jipe, Brenda spent nearly ten years at MarketStar in several Marketing and Business Development positions. She was primarily responsible for managing the MarketStar corporate brand and created, developed, and implemented their employer brand strategy. After surviving and recovering from brain surgery in 2018, Brenda took steps toward her goal of building Jipe one step at a time. Today she is proudly showcasing Jipe to both job seekers and businesses. The reviews are in: Jipe is needed and relevant, and it is creating a stir in the job search industry. With its innovative interface, Jipe is able to connect employers with strong talent and job seekers with great career opportunities. Brenda has delivered entry-level jobs to the fingertips of entry-level job searchers in an easy, fast, and effective way!
Eddy
Eddy is the all-in-one HR tool built with you in mind. The robust features and ease of use will benefit your company both inside and outside your HR team.
Frequently asked questions
Other Related Terms
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