Employer branding is all about knowing how best to relay your company’s values and culture. Specifically knowing how to do so to attract top talent in today's, especially competitive employee market.
Attracting quality employees is no longer as simple as headhunting the latest prospects or putting out an advert and hoping for the best. In order to compete in today's competitive employment market is no easy task.
Not only can great personal branding for your company improve the quality of your hires, and reduce turnover rates but it can also save you from advertising on expensive recruiters.
An employer's brand or reputation can often be the deciding factor for top talent in addition to competitive salaries and benefits. More often than not, it’s your company's personal branding that prospective candidates take into account, so it’s something that's important to get right.
How to Create Personal Branding for Your Company and Attract Top Talent
Attracting top talent can be an incredibly difficult and often lengthy process. Especially when you’re not sure how you can separate the cream of the crop from, well, the crop.
That’s why the tips we’ve provided below are going to help make sure you’ve developed personal branding that allows you to do just that!
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1. Use your story as a selling point
Stories have been a vital part of human existence since we’ve learned to communicate.
This is no less true when it comes to attracting top talent and creating personal branding.
Whether you’re using landing pages with informative videos or stories from current employees about their experiences at your company, people want to know what makes your brand unique.
Using storytelling techniques can make a brand feel more humane. To get a sense of the people behind a faceless corporation.
Recruiting the right people is essential and going through the process of recruiting from the wrong candidate to the right ones can be costly and time-consuming.
That’s why it’s important to have a clear story that defines you as a brand and helps the right people identify with your company.
2. Create the compelling content
Content is king, not just in marketing, but increasingly in recruitment as well!
Prospective candidates spend a lot of time looking for their future roles. Having content that’s compelling, engaging, and creative can help you stand out from the crowd in a major way.
As great as your company and its culture, benefits, and salaries may be, if you don’t have content capable of showing it off in a way that’s visually appealing and engaging, your recruitment drive may be going nowhere slowly.
Use every upside and positive your company has to offer to create this content. Awards, testimonials, employee stories, things you’ve accomplished as a company, and even the view from your office can be used to create compelling content. Using online printing services, for example, is a great, cost-effective way to create unique media for you to distribute after or before an interview.
If your content is good enough, when combined with the power of social media and other marketing techniques, quality candidates will be reaching out to you sooner rather than later.
3. Build a strong company culture
Company culture has become one of the most important things a modern business needs to demonstrate to its prospective employees.
Competitive salaries and benefits are incredibly important to the people who will go on to build your business, but so is your company culture. In fact, up to 83% of millennials report being more engaged when they believe an organization has an inclusive culture.
Building a positive, progressive company culture is at the heart of creating a strong employer brand and there are even studies that show that rooting out toxic applicants during recruiting can save almost $13 000 in eventual turnover costs.
Here are some great tips to help you create a healthy and positive company culture:
- Become a people-first company: There’s more to being a people-first company than a clever catchphrase. It’s an excellent route to take to create a great company culture that's both progressive as well as productive.
- Create value-orientated goals: Studies show that 63% of Millennials believe a business’s primary purpose is not to earn a profit but to improve society. As such, they want to be a part of companies that actively demonstrate how they’re doing this.
- Embody the culture you want to see: Simply put, lead by example. Everyone in your company will expect you to be taking the first step when it comes to creating the culture you say your business wants to have.
Competition for top employees is rife and so it’s important to do everything you can to make sure employees know just what you have to offer them professionally, as well as personally.
4. Advocate through social media
Not only is social media a vital tool for marketing and generating leads, but it’s also essential when it comes to creating personal branding to attract top talent.
With as many as 4.6 billion people across the world making use of one type of social media or another it’s well with including these platforms as part of your company's attempt to attract top talent.
Encouraging employees to advocate on your company's behalf in a way that’s genuine, natural, and humane is a great way to boost your recruitment and brand awareness.
Consider having your marketing teams create packages for your employees to brag about their work. Doing so acts as a great method of rewarding or acknowledging your employee's hard work and promoting positivity as well as broadening your reach.
Potential employees researching your company will come across this, especially if it’s been shared through social media.
Happy employees will happily be able to tell potential candidates what they think of working for you and help you find candidates that already buy into the idea of your company and its values.
5. Rely on technological solutions
Embracing new technological solutions and integrations is a key part of establishing a modern and successful business. If you’re not keeping up, you’re falling behind.
Something no business, or employee can afford to do in today's fast-paced and competitive world.
Making sure your prospective recruits know that your company is a forward-thinking and evolving business can help foster a sense of positivity and momentum. This can make quality employees want to be a part of what they see as a growing, developing, and modern business.
Tying this idea to your personal branding can ensure that your business is not only more productive and efficient but that you’re on the front line of technological developments. Making sure you let talent know that you offer training and education can also be incredibly encouraging to future hires.
6. Develop and optimize your website
Your website is one of the most important aspects of your business and not just for your customers. In terms of attracting top talent, having a great website is essential.
A great website isn’t just a brilliant way to market your business and generate leads, it’s also a great platform for recruiting potential employees. Whether it’s before or after they encounter your business or apply for a job, most prospective employees will check out your website to find out more about your company.
Especially your Careers page.
A responsive, easy-to-navigate, and user-friendly website can go a long way towards building a sense of authority, capability, and trust that matter a great deal to prospective candidates looking at a new place of work.
As you go about creating and optimizing your website, be sure to bear the following things in mind:
- Make sure your site is easy to navigate
- Think of the “career” page as a homepage for potential employees
- Tell candidates you are as a brand and what your values and goals are
- Ensure you come across as reliable and trustworthy
- Provide detailed, engaging job descriptions
- Create clear Call-to-Action buttons
7. Humanize your company
Humanizing your company can go a long way in terms of making your business stand out from the crowd as an attractive and likable brand that top talent wants to work with.
Humanizing your brand can take many forms, from the use and clear display of employee stories to creating a unique tone for your brand throughout your various media and platforms as well as demonstrating the highs and lows of your business and its journey.
Using video and engaging written content or infographics is also a great way to show what it means to be a part of your business and brand.
Humanizing a brand helps ensure you set the right tone for the type of employees you want to attract and reduce long-term employee turnover. By creating a holistic and humane-sounding brand, you ensure the talent that winds up helping you build your business, matches your company culture, values and ambition.
Whether you’re an established business or a developing start-off, you can’t afford to hire poor-fitting employees. It can end up being costly, frustrating, and a major waste of time for both you and the unlucky recruit.
Final Thoughts
Effective personal branding is one of the most effective tools any company should leverage if they want to attract top talent.
The market for today’s top-notch employees has become incredibly competitive and there are more and more companies competing for the same people. Hiring them means being able to offer them what they want, in a way that they can relate to and identify with.
Creating great personal branding is the key to attracting top talent. Marrying the story of your brand with great content while building a healthy company culture and adapting to today's rapid technological changes are the key to attracting talent as well as retaining it.
A brand’s social responsibilities, prospects of career growth, commitment to inclusivity, and diversity all matter to today's employees. They want to know that your company's values align with their own values.
It’s increasingly important that companies are seen to stand for what they say they do, especially to the best of the best of today's workforce.
Author Bio:
Ryan Fick is a Cape Town-based, internationally raised, opinionated writer who is passionate about politics, and social justice and a firm believer in the link between \"Amandla\" and \"Awethu\". With a background in Journalism, Travel, and all-around Content Writing - as well as a burgeoning interest in all things SEO - he is a perpetual knowledge seeker who knows enough to know he doesn’t know it all.