Every company’s brand has two sides, according to its employees. There’s the employer-created side, which is designed by the organization to retain personnel, attract job seekers, and be perceived as a wonderful place to work. Then there’s the internal side, which is made up of staff who have a different perspective on your company than your customers. These two sides are known as employer branding and employee branding.
These two types of branding have quite different appearances and functions. They are, however, both equally crucial to the success of your business. No organization can afford to leave either sort of branding to chance because of its combined importance in defining your company’s total reputation.
Here’s a contrast between employer and employee branding, as well as how you may use both in your brand strategy.
What is Employee Branding?
Employee branding is an emerging concept. Unlike employer branding, which evaluates how outsiders perceive your firm, employee branding efforts concentrate on how your employees perceive your company.
In effect, it recognizes your employees as brand advocates for your company. After all, if they enjoy working with your company, they will spread the word to their contacts. If they don’t like working for you, they’ll tell their contacts.
Employees now have a broader audience than ever to share their experiences with thanks to social media and review platforms like Glassdoor. As a result, employee branding strategy becomes even more critical.
Employee Branding vs Employer Branding
But wait a minute…this sounds a lot like employer branding…isn’t it the same thing? Both yes and no.
When it comes to definitions and aims, employee branding and employer branding do overlap. They do, however, contain some significant differences that are worth observing and comprehending.
What similarities do they share?
If you’re familiar with employer branding, you’ve probably seen some parallels. But first, let’s look at how these two concepts are related.
Both approaches:
- Influence how potential employees perceive your company.
- Assist you in attracting better people in order to improve corporate results and reduce turnover.
- Persuade clients (and future customers) to be more trusting and enthusiastic about working with your firm.
What distinguishes them?
The main question here is, “How do employee branding and employer branding differ?” Here are a few important distinctions.
The direction of the brand, mission, and values is mostly guided by your human resources team and corporate management.
Employer branding typically focuses on work culture, company incentives, and possibilities for promotion.
The emphasis of employee branding is on the communications and experiences employees have with the organization and their work.
Employee experience guides employee branding, highlighting what it’s like to work for the firm, how enthusiastic employees are about the organization, and whether these people are organic brand champions.
Employer branding, as well as corporate culture, are vital to concentrate on since they have a big impact on how well your employee brand performs.
While you can implement great internal workplace initiatives, your employee brand is ultimately defined by your employees.
The Importance of Employee Branding In Today’s Business World
Building a positive employer brand can benefit your company in a variety of ways. Let’s take a closer look at some of the advantages of employee branding:
#1. Enhanced online visibility
The voice of an employee is three times more believable than that of the CEO. As a result, a positive online presence of your employees can help improve online exposure for your company brand in the digital world. This can assist boost organic traffic to your web outlets. This can aid in the distribution of your brand assets as well as the increase of organic traffic to your internet channels.
#2. Employee engagement and performance have improved.
It’s not always about finding qualified candidates. Better employee branding involves providing a fantastic working environment, career growth, personal development, and other benefits to your current personnel, hence increasing productivity.
#3. Improved talent pool
Employee branding assists firms in attracting the top people from a vast pool of interested, potential candidates. According to the LinkedIn Global Recruiting Trends Report, about 80% of talent acquisition managers believe that employer branding has a major impact on attracting top talent.
#4. Reduced employee turnover
Companies may reduce staff turnover by 28% by concentrating on the employer branding experience. How? As previously indicated, you will be able to hire competent applicants, the finest of the best. This reduces the likelihood of having to replace them anytime soon.
You can also develop a strong employer-employee bond to become an employee-friendly firm, which would lower the possibility of them departing for a better opportunity.
#5. Lower cost per hire
A bad brand reputation costs businesses at least 10% extra every hiring. Because a negative brand reputation means a bad work environment, it is critical to have positive employee branding because referrals and positive comments from current employees can offer you a ready-made talent community, ready to be hired.
How Does an Employee Branding Strategy Work?
The correct employee branding approaches or initiatives can boost your company’s performance. We’re going to see how it’s done here.
#1. Determine Your Current Employer Brand
The first step in developing employee branding tactics is to understand your brand. This will offer you an understanding of the existing employer brands, their current difficulties, desired adjustments, and so on. This will assist you in developing your company’s distinctive value proposition.
How crucial is UVP to a business? It defines what distinguishes your company. These succinct but powerful UVP statements will assist both team members and customers in understanding your essential values.
#2. Conduct an audit of the employer’s brand
Inquire about your employer brand’s internal and external research. You can conduct surveys, feedback sessions, one-on-one discussions, and so on with current employees and potential prospects to determine how well they grasp the company’s visions, mission, and values.
Additionally, conduct social media searches and read feedback and reviews from various websites. This is an important aspect of employee branding strategies.
Netflix, one of the world’s top internet streaming corporations, is a perfect example of listening to employees and considering them as valued assets.
#3. Create a distinct employee value proposition for your brand.
Using these insights, you must then create a completely new and distinct value proposition for your organization. EVP essentially represents what a company stands for, what it requires, and what it gives as employment. It is an important aspect of employee branding since it is a marketing message and a promise made to your employees that explains what works and what does not.
#4. Teach your brand to your employees.
Educating employees about your business will turn them into brand ambassadors who can bring value to the overall employee branding tactics you hope to implement. Please conduct internal brand training workshops to raise knowledge and recognition of the brand’s vision and goals so that they can be on the same page as you.
#5. Obtain assistance from current employees.
Existing employees are the primary source of information for job seekers about your brand, culture, and value. 50% of professionals say they will not accept a pay increase from a company with a terrible image. So, how can you persuade your employees to support your company’s employee brand engagement ideas?
You can provide learning and development opportunities, a particular reward for successes or excellent referrals, or organize community events to encourage employees to share their positive experiences with the company.
An example of giving skill development opportunities for employee branding is an executive-led training program offered by AT&T in cooperation with Udacity on themes such as management and leadership to help them advance in their careers.
Salesforce’s employee-centric culture is one of the strongest examples of this. They use their workers to share varied and inclusive blogs on food experiments, performance rewards, family milestones, and staff events.
Accenture’s #InclusionBeginsWithI campaign is another example. They created a video depicting their employees’ diversity-related problems, especially in an era when all forms of prejudice are prevalent.
#6. Improving your hiring strategy
Four out of five candidates believe that the candidate experience they receive during the hiring process demonstrates how a firm values its employees.
As a result, you must guarantee that potential applicants have a smooth onboarding experience. Make them enthusiastic about future responsibilities and prospects from the outset. In the long run, this will also help with interested employee brand engagement ideas.
Digital Ocean, a cloud infrastructure service provider, is the best example of how to improve a candidate’s onboarding experience. In their career section, they’ve included a ‘candidate resources & help’ page. It is essentially a guide on what a candidate should expect during the interview, complete with some frequently asked questions and answers. Isn’t it fascinating?
#7. Spread the word via social media.
Share testimonial films, amusing posts, images, and slideshows on various platforms like as social media to communicate your employees’ stories, preferably by the employees themselves.
According to a study conducted by Weber Shandwick, a worldwide public relations agency, 98% of employees use at least one social media site for personal purposes, with 50% already blogging about their employer. So, make the most of it for employee branding by experimenting with numerous employee brand engagement concepts.
Do you want to learn more about employee branding concepts? Take advice from the best. Google is the best example of this strategy in action. The facilities, benefits, and other incentives provided by Google to their employees inspire talented job seekers to aspire to work for them.
Swiggy is yet another Indian start-up with a strong LinkedIn presence, where they show glimpses of daily life at Swiggy and invite employees to participate.
How to Strengthen Your Employer Brand
Your CEO, leadership, marketing team, and recruiters may all assist establish and grow your employer brand to boost the amount of quality, passionate applicants fighting for employment at your company. Whether you have a huge or small budget, a large or small firm, or a start-up, there are numerous ways you can utilize to think like a marketer, establish deep and meaningful relationships with your employees, and promote your employer brand like a boss.
#1. Don’t be concerned with remuneration.
Your employer value proposition will be stronger if you can discuss how a role will be meaningful (personally gratifying or for a greater good) or a superior work experience, rather than salary, especially if you want to attract younger people. Your EVP should be one-of-a-kind, intriguing, and focused on the deeper motivations for why someone might want to join your team.
#2. Create a corporate blog.
If you’re a recruiter with a marketing mindset, you realize that having a lot of material can be a smart strategy for competing in a crowded market. Job candidates frequently visit a company’s blog to get to know the organization on a more personal level. You can use a personable voice to post company news, cultural updates, and articles produced by your employees or company executives. A blog can also be used to highlight your organization’s distinctive people policies, processes, and programs that demonstrate its dedication to employee happiness.
#3. Make use of high-quality media.
High-quality movies, images, and slideshows can be used to communicate your company’s story, recognize your diverse workforce, and showcase gorgeous workspaces. A welcome video from your CEO or recruiting manager, as well as staff interviews discussing their experiences working for your firm, are excellent ways to make an introduction. At the start of each quarter, plan and budget for these and other marketing costs.
#4. Recruit for diversity
It’s no surprise that who you recruit reflects on your brand. Having different thinkers from various backgrounds demonstrates that you’re not only walking the walk as an equal-opportunity employer but also expanding your brand’s reach (both consumer and employer) into new groups – a solid business move and a critical strategy for developing a successful employer brand.
Employer Branding on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is an excellent platform for reaching out to and engaging with candidates — both active and passive — at all stages of their career journey. Though creating an employer brand from scratch can be difficult, nearly 90% of LinkedIn members indicate they are open to and interested in new job prospects. All that is required is to get in front of potential prospects in compelling ways. Here are a few suggestions:
#1. Online interaction
The more your employees participate in LinkedIn conversations, the greater the possibility for your employer brand to flourish. Anyone with a LinkedIn account can follow LinkedIn Influencers, join Groups, and create long-form blog pieces. And when your staff comment, like, or share news and ideas, your company’s virtual presence grows.
#2. Your free Company Page is your official LinkedIn company presence.
This is where 59% of candidates will go after hearing about a job opening to discover more about your company.
#3. Career Pages are an extension of your Company Page; they highlight your jobs and your employer brand.
By designing your company’s landing pages, you can tell your company’s story and drive excellent applications to your jobs. Customize the job messaging, add rich media such as images and videos, and write innovative job descriptions that showcase your company’s culture.
#4. Recruiter provides you with exclusive access to Linkedin members.
It makes it simple to communicate with applicants and work with your recruiting team. Recruiters who use LinkedIn’s messaging service, InMail, have a 31% greater response rate than those who do not.
#5. Jobs on LinkedIn
LinkedIn send your job advertisements to the most qualified people. When you post a position on LinkedIn, you’re providing potential candidates with a curated view of who you are as a firm, and when candidates get to know you as an employer, they’re more likely to want to join. Be truthful in your posts to help them stand out. Do coworkers eat lunch together every Friday afternoon? Do you have a ‘no meetings lasting more than an hour’ rule at your office? Using your open positions, describe what it’s truly like to work at your organization.
#6. LinkedIn Education
When employees perceive that you care about their careers, they become more invested in your company. You may encourage new workers to stay and progress by providing access to a learning platform that allows staff to make development an effortless habit.
You may present your organization to the people you’d like to join your team by carefully defining and developing your employer brand, employer value proposition, and message.
Final Thoughts
An employee branding strategy is a critical component of your company’s image. When your employees are content and feel respected at work, they will spread the word to their networks. This attracts fresh talent while also keeping your current teams happy.
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