Recruiting the Best: Leveraging Your Employer Brand to Hire and Retain Top Talent
June 2, 2016
Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Recruiting the Best: Leveraging Your Employer Brand to Hire and Retain Top Talent. You can access the complete eBook here.
One of the most crucial, yet common, mistakes we can make as hiring managers and recruiters is assuming
the candidate experience begins with an interview. Just as any good recruiter proactively researches
candidates he or she is interested in, most candidates today have grown familiar with your brand —
specifically your employer brand — long before they click submit on a job application or reply to an inMail. Potential candidates decide well before they ever hear from a recruiter or hiring manager as to whether or not they’d ever want to work for your organization.
If you’re not building out an employer brand and utilizing content, social and personal outreach as touch points for candidates, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to build your talent pipeline. By leveraging these channels, companies can put themselves one step above the competition by showcasing their unique employer brand. And with the task of hiring and retaining top talent growing ever more competitive, it’s critical for companies to understand what they’re doing right, and more importantly, what they’re doing wrong, when it comes to attracting candidates.
Throughout this eBook, we’ll highlight examples from four top hiring brands: HubSpot, New Relic, Zendesk and Quid. These companies have long standing, exceptional presence across multiple properties, which has resulted in high candidate engagement and ultimately, quality hiring and retention.
From here on out, you should think of a company’s employer brand as its reputation in the talent market,
personified not only by the company itself, but by those who work and aspire to work for it. Your employer
brand has the potential to serve as a competitive advantage to attract top talent. But, misused or underutilized, your employer brand can be a detriment to your talent pipeline and ultimately your overall employee-base and culture.
As you start to think about and formulate your employer brand, be sure to take input from your employees — and candidates — to distill what they think is unique about your organization. Use their stories and experiences to serve as external messaging for your various employer brand initiatives and properties.