Employer Brand and Value Proposition: How To Increase Competitiveness

Have you given much thought to your employer brand and value proposition? It can be powerful tool for increasing talent attraction and ensuring a continuous pipeline of high quality candidates. Read this post sharing how to align it with your recruitment goals:

Many organisations will be reviewing and aligning their business and recruitment plans this quarter. Deciding how budgets will be spent; targeting areas for growth; and identifying those departments or functions that need additional resources in the form of new recruits.

Whether you plan to start that recruitment process now, or wait for later in the year, it is a good time to consider your employer brand and what your value proposition is.

Employer Brand: Why Is It Important?

A strong employer brand is a powerful tool for increasing talent attraction and ensuring a continuous pipeline of high quality candidates. For those organisations who’ve never given their employer brand much thought, this doesn’t mean you don’t have one. However, if you haven’t defined it then it’s probably fair to say that it’s currently out of your control.

If you’re not in control of your employer brand it could actually be detrimental to your recruitment goals. If you’re not proactively promoting what your organisation is like as an employer and what it’s like to work for your company in a targeted way, potential employees could well be getting the wrong message.

Just as you would market your product or service to a specific target audience, so too should you be providing the content and materials that support your employer brand; targeted at exactly the kind of talent you want to attract.

This is not about job adverts. This is about communicating with people long before a vacancy arises, ensuring they are queuing up to work for your company – becoming their employer of choice.

Where to start?

The ideal place to start is your company’s mission, values and culture. If you want to attract candidates that are a good fit for your business, it makes sense to target those that share and identify with these.

Have a good look at what you say about your organisation and how your value proposition relates to existing employees. What is it about working for your company that differentiates it from your competitors? What key values do your employees share with your organisation? What makes your employees stay? The factors that retain staff are also incentives for attracting them too.

Within the value proposition there will be aspects that reflect your company culture. Culture is an important differentiator and tool in attracting top candidates. In fact offering ‘good’ culture can often make your business more attractive to a candidate, even if you’re not offering as high a salary as your competitors. Working for a specific company can be a lifestyle choice as much as a hard-headed career decision.

Also think about what factors candidates are looking for in the ideal employer. It could be that you tick lots of these boxes but aren’t actively promoting them.

Promoting Your Employer Brand

Typically, many businesses will have areas of their company website that provide a place to share their employer brand. ‘Work for us’ pages can include content that gives prospective employees an insight into your organisation’s value proposition, as well as vacancies.

But don’t bury this valuable content deep in your website. Your employer brand can also be a differentiator for clients who are keen to work with a company that has a good culture, so don’t be afraid to promote widely. Share what it’s like to work for your business on social media; create video content specifically targeted at potential recruits; and if you have a large recruitment requirement, set up LinkedIn or Facebook groups for candidates with the goal of creating a forum for engaging with them throughout the recruitment process.

Your existing employees are likely to be your top employer brand advocates, so enlist their help in getting the message across. You can do this by providing content they will want to share with their networks – for example share your team’s achievements on social media, or photos of social events. Current employees may have contacts with excellent candidate-potential, former colleagues and alumni, and many of them may also share the same values and experience.

If you have any thoughts on employer brands and how to differentiate your business from that of your competitors, share them here! Leave a comment below.