Employer Branding ideas are essential for building a strong and attractive employer brand. Since many companies have started investing more in their employer branding strategies, I decided write about some real-life employer branding ideas and strategies. Companies like HubSpot and Facebook have mastered their employer branding and recruitment marketing efforts, and here is how!
The concept of employer branding has become one of the most popular topics in the world of Talent Acquisition. This is because it is getting harder and harder to find, attract and retain qualified talent. Demand for talent is getting bigger, and supply is getting smaller every day. Naturally, the market is suffering from a big talent shortage, which has resulted in the “War for Talent”.
Because all the changes in the HR industry, the way we recruit has changed. However, many companies are still sitting still thinking that there is nothing to be done to attract talent.
Wrong!
There are many employer branding ideas with which you can attract talented people. So, take the wheel into your hands and don’t let competitors steal talent from you.
You were probably already given advices that sound like this, “You must put more effort, time and money into employer branding to improve your recruitment and talent acquisition strategy!” But what does that mean? How to do that?
Even though there are some guides on how to generate and implement employer branding ideas, many of them are abstract and not very understandable. This is especially hard to understand for people with little experience in the world of Human Resources and Marketing.
To make employer branding as a recruiting strategy clearer, I decided to give you some real-life examples from the industry leaders. You can use these employer branding ideas, and add them to your own recruiting strategies.
Social Media is a simple, fast and affordable way to target the right people and spread the word out. Similarly to product and service marketing efforts, social media can be used in Employer Branding and Recruitment Marketing strategies.
When it comes to employer branding on social media, it is good to have a separate career and corporate accounts.
Why?
Because the message your deliver should be completely different. The purpose of the 2 sites should be different as well. This is why HubSpot has both corporate and career page on Facebook. They also didn't call it just HubSpot Careers as many other companies would. They call it HubSpot Life because their goal is to show the world how is it to be a HubSpot employee.
Here are some examples of how Facebook and HubSpot do it.
HubSpot on Instagram
This is Hubspot’s post that grabbed people's attention just a few hours after it was posted. Why is this post so special? Why is it considered a part of their Employer Branding and Recruitment Marketing strategy?
First of all, right below the business name, there is a tag line “My Happy Place” that immediately sends a positive message about the workplace. If you read what the post is about, you will find out that it is all about making their employees feel better.
Having a bad or unsuccessful day at work can be depressing and discouraging. HubSpot doesn’t want their employees to feel that way. Their goal is to support them and give their best to bring their motivation back.
Looking at their hashtags, you can see that they really made sure that this post gets to the right people- sales people and marketers. If you have a social recruiting strategy, pick a hashtag that will be recognizable for your company's people and culture. Finally, they encourage other candidates to engage and give them tips for staying motivated. In just one post, HubSpot used some of the best recruitment marketing strategies.
Look at this post!
Yes, I know that not all of you have games and beer at work! However, many modern workplaces encourage fun times and games at work. Some of them even dedicate one whole day per week just for fun.
Even though you may not offer the same thing, I believe, and hope that, there is something your employees love doing besides sitting at the table and working. If so, capture the moment and share it on social media. Don’t forget to encourage your employees to do the same. They are your best brand ambassadors. Remember that people trust regular employees much more than brands and C-level executives.
These types of employer branding and recruitment marketing ideas have become extremely popular. However, in order to be effective, it is important to follow some of the social media recruiting best practices. Posting on different channels at different times can capture different people. Make sure to understand your candidate persona in order to attract people that best fit your company.
Need help defining your ideal candidate, here is our guide to define a candidate persona.
Websites such as Glassdoor are a great source of information about employers from all over the world. People go there to learn more about companies, their cultures, pay, positions, job descriptions, and most importantly, current employees’ opinions and reviews.
If you are struggling to find the right candidates, get a listing on websites such as Glassdoor and encourage your employees to write about you. At the end of the day, your current employees are your best brand advocates!
It is important to be 100% transparent and honest with candidates. Many companies send emails to candidates after interviews asking them to rate their interview experiences on Glassdoor. This way, you can build a profile that candidates and job seekers will find very useful. It will also help you learn more about your recruiting process from candidates' perspectives.
To understand the importantce of employer branding on Glassdoor, let me share a few stats from surveys done by Glassdoor and Allegis Group:
69% are likely to apply to a job if the employer actively manages its employer brand (e.g., responds to reviews, updates their profile, shares updates on the culture and work environment). -Glassdoor
76% want details on what makes the company an attractive place to work. -Glassdoor
Top five pieces of information job seekers want employers to provide as they research where to work: 1) Salary/compensation, 2) Benefits, 3) Basic company information, 4) What makes it an attractive place to work, 5) Company mission, vision, values. -Glassdoor
69% would not take a job with a company that had a bad reputation, even if they were unemployed! -Allegis Group Services Study
84% would consider leaving their current jobs if offered another role with a company that had an excellent corporate reputation. And most in $75-100K salary range would only require a 1-10% salary increase to consider such a move -Allegis Group Services Study
84% of companies believe a clearly defined strategy is key to achieving employer branding objectives -Employer Brand International Global Research Study
Facebook on Glassdoor
What is great about this job ad is that candidates can find tons of useful information about the company and position. This is one of their current employee’s testimonials. It is completely transparent. This is important because, to find the perfect job candidate, both pros and cons should be disclosed.
This particular employee says: “If you don’t like data, don’t come here!” If you are looking for a perfect match for your company and job opening, let the candidates know what would make them your candidate persona.
Strong senior leaders set the tone for high-performing companies. However, when it comes to deciding whether an organization is a great place to work for, there’s only one audience that really matters: the employees.
United States based company, Workplace Dynamics, anonymously surveys companies’ employees (not including leaders) and rewards the top-rated ones.
Have your employees participate in surveys like this. If you are scared to do this before you have any insights about your company's culture and employees' satisfaction, do an internal audit first. Make a simple set of questions that will help you better understand your current situation in the company.
Many companies in the United States like participating because having a title of a Top Workplace really makes their recruiting efforts easier and more successful.
Employers that get the reward get a little badge that they use on social media, their websites, job listing sites, your career site, email signatures and wherever they have an online presence. There are usually categories for small, medium and large size companies, so there’s place for everyone.
This is how TCG, a custom software and development company, that won the award last year uses the Top Workplace logo on their website:
The main goal is to show the audience and your potential hires how you treat your employees. Tell them things like: what actions do you take to make them feel better and be more productive, how do you help them grow both personally and professionally, tell them about the core values of your business and how do your employees contribute to the success of the business Give them a proof of their love for their workplace and teammates.
Your employer brand dramatically influences your ability to attract, influence, hire and retain top talent. Measuring, monitoring and improving an organization's reputation is becoming an important component of broader talent acquisition strategies for forward-thinking companies.
When looking for good employer branding and recruitment marketing ideas, always start with your own employees. Employee referrals are structured programs that companies and organisations use to find talented people by asking their existing employees to recommend candidates from their existing networks.
Research has proved many times that employee referral programs help improve many recruiting KPIs. Referrals make the best employees in many ways: they take shortest to hire, they are the least expensive to hire and they stay longer with companies compared to candidates that come from other sources such as job boards and career sites.
But why is a referral program considered employer branding and recruitment marketing method?
The answer is simple- they strengthen your employer brand and reputation. When your employee wants to recommend someone for an open position, they talk to those candidates first. Trust me, these are mostly nice words about you as an employer and your Employee Value Proposition.
Since job seekers trust much more employees' words than CEOs' or corporate brand's, this is a great way for building a stronger employer brand and attracting talent even for future job openings. Extending your talent pool with these people can’t hurt you. It can only make hiring and recruiting faster and more productive.
On their ‘Refer a Dev‘ webpage, HubSpot explains how much they love and need awesome software developers. If you refer such a developer to them, and HubSpot ends up hiring them, you’ll be rewarded with a paycheck or some other type of referral bonuses.
Already have a referral program? Check out these referral reward ideas!
Inbound recruiting is one of the newest HR strategies used to attract talented people. The main purpose of an inbound recruiting strategy is to, through relevant and useful content, get to the people that would best fit your company’s jobs and culture.
Inbound strategy is a long-term solution for filling hard-to-fill roles. In the example below, you can see a blog post of an interview with 3 data scientists at Facebook. This blog is posted in Facebook’s career site, and it talks about their personal experiences as data scientists at Facebook.
These people talk about how their work contributes to the overall Facebook’s success. They talk about their personal and career achievements and development.
This is considered as an inbound recruiting strategy because, instead of hunting and sourcing high-quality people, they are encouraging them to come and apply themselves.
Do you have interesting projects your company is working on? If so, these are likely to attract passionate and motivated people who want to grow their careers. You just have to have a strategic way to communicate your story with them.
Below, you can see a blog post about great intern programs at HubSpot. They are big on attracting talent even before they get out of school. Student get great opportunities to learn, after which HubSpot keeps them as their full time employees. Writing content like this is the best way for attracting talent through inbound recruiting.
Your career page isn’t just a place to post your jobs – it is a place to attract high-quality applicants and sell them your job opportunities.
Candidates don’t apply immediately after hearing about a job. Instead, 59% look up the company’s website. Sixty six percent want to know about your company’s culture and values, 54% about perks and benefits, and 50% about mission and vision. -2016 Global Talent Trends
Check out Facebook’s career site.
Do you see how their career site is used to attract ambitious people who want to make a difference? They really make their site a goldmine of meaningful content attractive to many job seekers.
Here are some more ideas for career site optimization.
As video is the best way for delivering messages in marketing, it is now also widely used in recruitment marketing. Social media and internet users are just more likely to watch videos than read. Use video to record employee testimonials, and put them on your career site. Make a video of your workplace, and share it on social media. Include videos on your job ads and on job boards. Since Google likes videos, these will reach much more audience than images and plain text.
Put a video next to your job application form and watch how application form abandon rate drops.
There are no words to explain how important your job descriptions are for attracting high-quality job applicants. The goal of every job description is to mirror your candidate personas’ dream jobs, cultures and workplaces.
Same as you want to attract people with best fit, candidates want to find their perfect jobs. Explaining your company culture, EVP should be part of every job description. Precise requirement, duties, skills and characteristics should be listed.
Before writing a job description, do a research on which keywords people are using when looking for job opportunities. There are great tools to do so. Use these keywords and include them in your job descriptions as Google will award you for that by ranking you higher on job search results.
To save time, we have made some editable job description templates for you.
Another great way for building your talent pool with high-quality job candidates is through talent community and recruiting events. Many employers have found this one of the best ways for finding people with the perfect match for their companies.
These events can be of various types. They can be online, or in person, they can be general or highly targeted. They should all, however, have the same goal- to find people interested in your company, engage them, and pull them out of your pools when a new position opens.
In a recent conversation with a few HR managers from fast growing companies, I found out about a few interesting ways to organize talent community events.
If you, for example, struggle to hire people with certain IT skills, think about creating a workshop where your IT professionals will educate students or anyone else interested in this area. Share your even on social media platforms, your career sites, do some paid advertising to increase your ad impressions and do a highly-targeted campaign.
HubSpot has a great strategy for building their talent community. For example, they have live online webinars about New Hire Training at HubSpot. Anyone can join the live event, and learn about how does the onboarding and training look at HubSpot. They are well known for having great training programs, and this is what attracts people.
Talent communities and events are great ways to meet people interested in your company. This way you can find out about their skills, personalities and knowledge.
I have also spoken to a few companies who struggle to hire nurses and medical assistants. They do a simple, short course or a training, invite candidates from that field, and build their talent pool for their future needs.
Here, it is important to understand that just adding these people to your database is not enough. The key is to keep them engaged and provide useful and relevant content.
Connecting with candidates at the point when you have a new job opening is an old an inefficient recruiting strategy. Today, it is necessary to engage with talent way before that.
This is one of the most productive ways for building your talent pool with high-quality job candidates. Companies that use this approach are much more successful in reducing their time and cost per hire, improving quality of hire and reducing employee turnover rates.
Why?
Talent that ends up in your talent pool through candidate relationship management and inbound recruiting methods, are candidates with the best cultural fit. They are your ideal candidates or candidate personas.
If you have a career blog, don’t just finish there. Allow your readers to opt in to a newsletter. Share useful tips and stories from your company through targeted email campaigns. Even if they are not ready to apply yet, you have the opportunity to connect with them and convert them into applicants later.
Remember, candidates are like customers. It takes as much research and touch-point for candidates to apply as it takes for customers to purchase. You need to make sure that you are delivering an exceptional and unique experience through all these touch-points.
Today’s recruiting and hiring strategies are highly measurable. There’s no more guessing, blind predictions and expectations. Time, cost, quality of hire, acceptance rate, best sources of hire can all be measured if using the right tools and technology.
If you are wandering what other HR professionals are measuring, download this list of most important hiring metrics.
Knowing which source of applicants bring the best hires can significantly improve your hiring if you know how to use the data. Let’s say, for example, that your best job candidates come from employee referrals. Knowing this, you can adjust your strategy, cut job board expenses and invest more in employee referral programs.
We know that time to hire has a big influence on candidate experience and acceptance rate. Would you then make changes if you know that it takes more than 45 days to hire someone? Using the right tools, you can find out which stages of your hiring process have bottlenecks. Use this data to improve and fasten the process.
All these steps seem complicated and very time-consuming. They are, if you are not using the right tools. Recruitment marketing tools such as TalentLyft can help you implement your recruitment marketing and employer branding strategies.
With tools like this, you can easily create a well-optimized career site, optimize your job descriptions, streamline your referral programs, and significantly improve relationships with candidates and improve candidate experience and candidate engagement.
If you are not sure if you need a tool like this, here's our guide for buying a recruiting tool.
