How to Strengthen Your Employer Brand to attract candidates

There is a common belief that, in today’s market, there is not enough talent to go around. The people you are seeking to make your visions reality simply aren’t out there. While it is true that there is a shortage of qualified candidates in select fields, the problem overall isn’t a lack of options but rather the ability to effectively connect with candidates—especially those who are passive job seekers.

Two key challenges to overcoming this are:

  • Crafting a strong employer brand
  • Conveying that brand

Both require a human touch, but there are tools that can help.

Strengthen Your Employer Brand

The first task is to craft a strong employer brand that is appealing to the candidates whom you have chosen to target. Building your brand is a hands-on process that requires analytics and creativity. Technology can help you identify areas of weakness, but the power of people is paramount here.

Attracting top talent in a competitive, candidate-driven market is difficult. If your employer brand is not compelling, you’re at a disadvantage before you even start.

You may feel that your brand is already strong and that candidates would jump at the opportunity to work for you. But the only way to know if that is true is to objectively assess the current view of those inside and outside the company. You can either have your internal human resources team undertake this task or, for perhaps better results, work with a branding agency, such as engin10. An outside view can often uncover things you cannot (or do not want) to see.

In our three-part series “5 Steps to a Winning Employer Branding Strategy”, we outline how to work through that process, from the initial audit of your existing brand through to creating the collateral that you’ll use to convey the refined brand to candidates. We also offer five additional steps for strengthening your strategy.

Once you have audited your brand and identified areas that need improvement, you can create a range of deliverables—from text-based content to engaging videos—and target the channels which appeal most to the talent you want to reach.

Convey Your Employer Brand

Once you have your brand and employee value proposition (EVP) set, the next step is to share it with the right people at the right time in the right place. This is where technology can support your strategy by allowing you to target communications for maximum effectiveness. It is important to remember, however, that simply scheduling tweets on Twitter or ads on LinkedIn won’t get you very far if those efforts are not supported by sound data. Clarity into your hiring pipeline and a clear profile of the ideal candidate are essential to making the most of your recruitment marketing.

A well-designed, streamlined talent acquisition platform (TAP) can be of great assistance by providing intuitive metrics that give you only the information you need, when you need it. In other words, the centralized system surfaces the most pertinent data so that you can make better-informed decisions. Once you have a clear profile of the ideal candidate, you can begin to sharpen your messaging to best convey your EVP. For advice on how to create that experience, see “TAP into Elite Talent through Recruitment Marketing.

Craft the Candidate Experience

So, you’ve put your brand out there and applications are coming in. Great! But what comes next? It can be easy to become so focused on the process of reaching candidates that we forget about the importance of the next steps.

In today’s market, the candidate experience can make or break your hiring pipeline. Once someone acts on your call to action and begins researching your company, you are, in a sense, the interviewee.

Think of each step that a candidate must pass through when applying to your company as a chance to show them how good the experience of working with you will be. Make sure that you shine at every turn and that the candidate experience is positive from the start. Particularly for high-level candidates whom you are targeting to fill top positions, seeing that you value their time and are willing to work with them to find a win–win arrangement can be the difference that leads to success.

To lower barriers and deliver a great experience, be sure that you:

  • Streamline your application and process
  • Make everything mobile friendly
  • Maintain regular contact with candidates
  • Communicate clearly and be flexible

Top talent, already employed and not actively looking to change jobs, will have little tolerance for a cumbersome process.

By combining creativity, branding insight, and technology, you can create long-term, sustainable recruitment strategies that strengthen your talent pipeline and allow you to continually engage passive job seekers. It all starts with a strong foundation on which is built an engaging brand, supported by a holistic perspective on engagement with prospective candidates.

See for yourself what an advantage an ATS can give your organization, and how little it costs. Book a free demo today at: https://www.zookeep.com