The Brightest Brand Wins

Research from Careerbuilder has shown that organizations that possesses a strong Employer Brand will be “more effective at recruiting, have lower recruiting costs, have improved quality of candidates, possess more engaged employees and have lower employee turnover.” Further research from Michigan State and University of Wisconsin-Madison showed that firms on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For in America Listperformed better than companies from the general market.

If we combine these insights with research from the FT Online which shows that more than half of US employer are struggling to fill vacancies, it becomes clear that businesses must adopt an effective Employer of Choice strategy, if they are to be competitive. A positive employer branding strategy will enable a business to attract the appropriately skilled people and establish a stable human capital pipeline, enabling them to meet their business goals.

So how does an employer implement an effective ‘Employer of Choice’ strategy?   The typical process involves an employer conducting an internal engagement survey to assesses employee attitudes to the employee offering in terms of reward, career development and training opportunities, ethics, management style etc… The results of the survey will reflect the strength and nature of the employer brand. As well as employee engagement levels data, another good indicator of employee brand is employee turnover or average tenure. For example, low turnover and high average tenure can indicate that employees are happy and that a business has a strong employer brand.

Having gathered all this excellent data which demonstrates exactly how powerful your employer brand is, exactly how do you go about externalizing this data? How do you ensure that job seekers and interviewees are fully aware of the employer brand so that the top talent chooses you over the competition?

The first step is to work with your marketing team to establish six or seven key messages which can form the blueprint of the employee brand, for example:

• Excellent training and career development opportunities
• Supportive working culture
• Challenging and purposeful work
• Opportunities for internal advancement and/or rotation
• Market leading pay and benefits
• Ethical Business and Employment Practices

These messages would of course be tailored to suit you target market and demographic audience. Having established your six or seven key brand messages, these should be present in all your external job advertisements, conveyed in your website, (especially the job application portal), echoed during company presentations, and placed in as much company literature as possible.

In a world where talent is in such short supply, holding the status as an employer of choice is a key differentiator. This is because the most talented job applicants will most likely have multiple job offers. A strong employer brand may be the deciding factor, which means the star candidate chooses you over the competition.