Creating a Successful Employer Brand -From Basics To Boom

A recent webinar we held brought together Bruce Groves, CCO at Eploy, Vicki Saunders, Founder of The EVP Consultancy and Noel Thomas, Creative Director at CA3 to discuss the importance of building a successful employer brand.

Understanding employer brand is vital for candidate attraction and employee satisfaction. This blog summarises discussion points from the on-demand webinar and shares some practical tips on how to build a successful employer brand.

The difference between EVP and Employer Brand

Vicki shared an analogy of an easy to remember description of the difference between EVP and employer brand and the role each plays.

“Think of a Mars bar….a Mars bar without its wrapper, but the distinct fusion of caramel, chocolate and nougat – that is your EVP.

“Now think of a Mars bar in its wrapper. The wrapper creates its own identity. That is like your employer brand, the latent desire and built-in perception of what it is like to work for you. The Mars bar is instantly recognisable, you know what you are going to get, and the wrapper helps communicate this.

“Now place yourself in your supermarket of choice and the chocolate counter has Mars bars and competing chocolate bars. Mars bar has point-of-sale material to promote the chocolate with an added incentive to buy i.e., scan the QR code to enter a prize draw. That’s recruitment marketing” – how you share the added value to attract and engage, in this case with candidates.

Why is good employer brand awareness so important?

Beyond the challenges of finding great talent and competition being so fierce right now, employer brand comes into play with the retention of employees and supporting internal mobility. Data is readily available that shares how a good employer brand can reduce time to hire, reduce cost per hire and reduce turnover. More recently, data is available to support how a good employer brand also improves the quality of hire and dropout rates.

A good employer brand can positively impact employee satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores. Both are a healthy part of the conversation to communicate employee success stories and build connections with the right talent.

Understanding your brand awareness pain points and the financial impact it contributes to is a good place to start. It turns the softer side of brand awareness into creating actual business benefits. This then gives weight to the boardroom agenda. The on-demand webinar discusses this subject in more detail and can be viewed here.

How to successfully build and launch a consistent employer brand

The website panel suggested a good place to start to successfully build and launch a consistent employer brand is to be curious and start with insights. Understanding your audience, your typical ideal candidate and how they think and feel about you as a brand. Know your talent competitors who are highly likely to be very different to your commercial competitors. Again, the on-demand webinar shares ways to use LinkedIn Recruiter to understand which other companies have been viewed alongside you.

Once you have this base data you can start to uncover how you reach that audience and what your channel strategy might be. However, as the webinar shared, you must think outside of the box so you are exploring alternative ways to reach talent that the competition might not be.
Then as strategy and creativity come together, you can develop meaningful content specific to the insights, the channel and the audience.

Noel Thomas, Creative Director at CA3, added “Speaking to people within your organisation to get an understanding of why they love working for you and what kind of messages resonate well with them tests the pillars of your EVP. It means that when you are starting to create your employer brand, you can be confident of the messages that will resonate with each audience. The more insight you can get at this stage the better.”

Noel went on to recommend looking at your candidate journey and the different touchpoints of that journey. Creating a consistent brand message that is memorable and distinctive across the touchpoints should ensure your employer brand shines through.

Getting the basics right, such as consistency from your careers site to your ATS and having consistent recruiter packs, job descriptions, application forms and automatic trigger emails will create a consistent on-brand experience that makes such a difference.

Watch the webinar now for more hints, tips and case studies on how to create a successful employer brand.

Background to our webinar partners:

The EVP Consultancy

• The EVP Consultancy guides organisations to create and activate their own powerful EVPs in-house.
• Whether you are creating an EVP from scratch, need a refresh or want to take your activation to the next level, The EVP Consultancy can help.
• For each organisation, Vicki creates a bespoke methodology based on its strategic goals, culture and in-house capabilities. She then uses a combination of training, mentoring and "helicopter" support to supplement their in-house resource and skills.

To find out more, email Vicki at [email protected] or book a FREE Discovery call.

CA3

CA3 is a creative, employer brand agency that helps organisations engage with talent through fabulously compelling communications. They specialise in working with brands who have a unique story to tell but are finding it hard to engage with talent. And, as their name suggests, they do that in three core areas:

1. Employer branding & talent attraction – stylishly putting bums on seats
2. Onboarding – setting people up for success, often using their award-winning technology Eli
3. Employee engagement & internal communications – winning hearts and minds

Their work is hugely varied, involving advertising, video production, social media, careers websites, experiential events, innovative technology and even good old print. They take their jobs very seriously, but not themselves. They come to work smiling, even on Mondays.

To find out more, email [email protected] or visit CA3 website.