Employer Branding: Why, When and How?

For me, this phrase means two things: firstly, that when you’re in a leadership role, you need to put your team first, and by enabling them to do great work, your organization gets great results. Secondly, as a marketer, in addition to your team, you need to put your customers first. Once you’ve created a service or a product, it’s easy to fall in love with it and focus your marketing around what you’ve created. What you should do instead is focus on how it serves the people you’ve created it for, and the positive change it makes in their lives. It sounds simple, but in reality, putting customers first in the way you market takes great effort.

Employer branding is not just campaigns you run to form people’s views on what your company stands for. It’s the interviewing experience of the candidates applying for a job at your company. It’s how employees are treated when things get tough. It’s how people are treated when they decide to leave the company. And much more. So, if you’re working on a company’s employer brand, you need to advocate for changes in policies and people’s accountability for inevitable missteps in addition to creating campaigns that communicate what the company is like or how it would like to be perceived.

I’ve mostly worked in startups, where planes are built while you’re flying in them. This means that implementation and strategic planning happen hand in hand. So, I can only talk from that experience. In these setups, you need to start creating a feedback loop consisting of systems for collecting employee feedback, acting on constructive feedback, and turning positive feedback into stories that resonate with the talent you want to attract. Companies are living and breathing things, so this work never ends

Every employee’s experience is part of a company’s brand. On the other hand, very few people can truly say that they’re an expert in creating and maintaining a successful employer brand.

As in every other job you need to start from the basis. In Employer Branding that is a deep understanding of your employees and your target group(s). In the beginning, it is very important to collect as much information as possible. You can do this through internal research (surveys, focus groups with different stakeholders...), external research (by an external agency or to participate in some market research), going through mission and business goals, and combining it all in one good source of information. Then, based on that source, you should create an EVP (Employee value proposition) that will diversify you as an employer on the market and reflect everything that describes your culture and benefits. Based on the target groups, that you define as a next step, you will be able to create your communication plan and shape EB activities that you chose to do in the next period. I think in IT, as an example of a very dynamic market, you need to evaluate your strategy in some shorter time (6 months for example), so you ensure that you keep up with some major trends that are happening there.

There are a lot of tools that I use daily. For instance, for external communication, there is a social media management tool (we use Sprout) that helps me to plan and evaluate all posts that I create for our external community. Also, I use Google Analytics and Plausible that help me to figure out what content is driving more traffic to our website, what pages are more visited than others, how our campaigns performed, and how we stand when it comes to application rates. Campaign URL builder is a useful tool that helps you to mark the source of the traffic, this should be used not only for campaigns but also for organic posts. In internal EB, I use a tool (Bitly) that helps me to track our internal newsletter metrics (clicks) and to learn with which content people reacted the most. Survey and Forms are great tools that you can use to check how colleagues are satisfied in general with EB initiatives that you organize or to check what they think about some topic, or just as a tool for applying for your events. For some design work (when you don’t have a designer) you can use Canva as a great tool for amateurs.

I can divide metrics that I follow into two groups. In the first group are those that can be followed on a daily/weekly/monthly basis and among them are ER (Engagement rate of your post), Reach (the number of people your post has reached), number of followers of your social media pages, users and pageviews on website, number of direct applications (how much people directly apply to your openings) and churn rate (the percentage of employees leaving your team at a certain period divided by the total number of employees in the organization during that period). Metrics that are in the second group and that should be followed on some longer distance are NPS score (the number of promoters minus the number of detractors), the satisfaction of your employees with the company and its benefits (it can be measured by a survey on yearly basic), referral stats (how much your current employees are bringing new team members) and your position on “TOP employers” external research.

Joberty offers Employer Branding profiles to companies, job ads, and a blog post as paid services. Most commonly, tech companies use our job board for advertising open positions within their companies but lately, the number of Employer Branding profiles is getting higher, and I’m so excited because of that. I truly believe the best investment you can make as a company is to work on your Employer Branding strategy. With Employer Branding, you don’t see short-term results, or maybe you can’t measure them, but it will pay off in the long-term multiple times. It does wonders if you know how to use all the resources out there.

I can’t tell what works best, but it is usually not something you see on official company websites or social accounts. I think job seekers like to see how people interact within a team, what a career path is in that company, and what the interview process is like. That’s what we are trying to do with Employer Branding company profiles on Joberty. To show the authentic image of a company plus the anonymous reviews will help you a lot to decide if that company is the right place for you. The feedback so far is that we successfully matched the right people with the right companies based on the information you get on our platform.

No wonder content marketing is aggressively shifting towards video format because you can communicate many pieces of information within a video, which can take only a couple of seconds. Our users are online most of the time, and they are used to consuming video messages, tutorials, and online education are very popular nowadays. So it was a natural way of doing things for us by offering our target group what they are used to seeing. You have to follow trends, and more importantly, you have to know your customers and respond to their needs. We made a revolution among job portals in Serbia by using video format to advertise open job positions. Thanks to Videobolt, we could publish videos fast because we sometimes have up to 10 new job ads a day. Moreover, the message communicated within a video was clear and concise – it always showed the main things such as the company, city, position, and seniority. And the video itself wouldn’t be longer than 10 secs. That format has proven perfect for social networks, and it has made many applicants per job ad significantly higher than before.

The main benefit we saw in using Videobolt was no prior knowledge of any tool, technology, or extra skills for someone to make a video using Videobolt. It is easy, simple, and perfect for social networks because it will fit any format you need. There are so many templates that I’m sure one must find something to like. We keep changing the templates, and we are still discovering new possibilities with the new one. Editing a video in Videobolt is super easy. It will take less than an hour to become an expert.