What is Employee Branding? How to Attract and Retain Top Talents Easily?
January 3, 2023
Attracting and retaining talented people in the business is harder than ever before. With constant switching from one job to another and seeking competitive packages, recruiters can not rely solely on higher salaries to get top talent in their firm.
Traditionally, recruiters post job vacancies and get hundreds of applicants looking for a job. But now the times have changed. There are so many opportunities and cut-throat competition amongst companies to hire the best person for the job. This has changed the hiring procedure and made the recruiters' jobs strenuous.
Although, there are still many companies that do not face this problem. They get an overwhelming number of applications for their job vacancies, and people are ready to switch if they get an opportunity. So what makes these companies stand out from the crowd?
This blog will look into one of the most effective ways to attract and retain top talent- Employee Branding. Moreover, we will discuss how recruiters can leverage it in 4 easy steps.
What is Employee Branding?
Employee branding builds a positive perception of a company's work culture by sharing employees' experiences with others. Recruiters focus on showcasing company culture, values, vision, mission, and other business aspects that impact employees' experience.
Employee branding depicts the employee as a hero! It focuses on a healthy work environment and experience to attract and retain top professionals.
It differs from employer branding, where recruiters try to simulate a positive perception of a company's culture and values amongst employees, candidates, and other stakeholders. Employer branding aims at building a strong company brand, while employee branding focuses on sharing employees' experiences.
In employee branding, companies share day-to-day employee stories to reflect a healthy work environment and create a positive image. They share employees' experiences on their careers page and social media or communicate directly during interviews to influence potential candidates.
But employee branding benefits are not restricted to attracting and retaining top talent. Recruiters must realize that employee branding is not a 'nice-to-have' element to the hiring process. With many companies and competitive packages to lure skilled people, employee branding is more critical than ever.
So, not only does employee branding impact the hiring process, but also the overall company image. Let us look at 8 reasons why employee branding is crucial for every business.
Hire New Employees Easily
A strong employee brand portrays a healthy working environment. This makes it easier for recruiters to get more people interested in the vacancy and convince the top talent to switch.
Moreover, more employees happily refer people to fill in the vacancy. Not only are referrals cost-effective, but they have a high retention rate. Additionally, with positive experience and feedback, employees can attract more people interested in the company.
Create a Strong Company Culture
Employee branding roots in a company with a positive working environment and employees enjoy working there. Thus, to improve employee branding, companies often invest in building a strong company culture, values, and policies.
This involves having a documented company mission, vision, and values deeply inculcated into the work culture. Recruiters have realized that company culture drastically impacts employee satisfaction, retention, and turnover. Employee branding motivates the management to keep strengthening the work environment and experience.
Reduce Recruitment Cost
Employee branding means more applicants and easy-to-convince people to switch. This reduces the overall cost of marketing the job vacancy as job seekers will actively look for open job roles. Moreover, recruiters cut the chase by providing a competitor package for desired candidates. Overall, the cost of hiring reduces drastically.
Employee branding also creates a positive image for new hires, reducing employee turnover. Reduced employee turnover implies better ROI on hiring efforts and effective utilization of resources.
Retain Top Talents
Who wants to switch from a company with a positive working environment which prioritizes good working conditions, policies, values, etc.?
With a good employee brand comes the responsibility to create a healthy work culture. This automatically simulates the top employees' stay with the firm. A healthy employee brand also implies robust internal communications and constant feedback to understand and prioritize employee needs.
Employee branding can make your employees the brand ambassadors, which not only drives more job seekers but more consumers as well. When employees share personal stories related to work, they attract more people to know and get interested in the business.
Motivated Employees
Employee branding communicates the work culture, environment, and experience. This directly stimulates the management to offer better workplace conditions.
A healthy working environment will improve productivity as employees will be more motivated. A positive work culture will satisfy employees' security, social, and self-actualization needs.
Improved online visibility
Employee branding can boost companies' online visibility. Moreover, 78% of job seekers refer to social media while looking for jobs on channels like LinkedIn. Hence, it is crucial to share employees' experiences to enhance the company's image and online presence.
Employee branding efforts can add up as a marketing channel. Hence, recruiters must ensure a healthy workplace culture to have a positive branding effect!
So, employee branding is more than an effort to get more skilled people to the firm. It impacts marketing and consumer perception and reduces hiring costs by big margins. Let us understand how recruiters can build an employee brand that drives a positive impact.
How Is Employee Branding Done?
Employee branding includes sharing employees' experiences and working culture and environment. Here, employees talk about the company work environment and day-to-day work instances. However, recruiters can not merely ask employees to talk about the company.
The HR team starts by conducting an audit of the current employee brand. What are employees sharing, or how much are they talking about the company?
This is achievable by conducting surveys, getting feedback about the work environment, and checking employees' current social media activity. It becomes the basis for building insights to find weak and strong points and improve the working environment.
After the research process is finished, one can finally move to the employee branding procedure. Here is a 4-step way to build a strong employee brand.
#1 Identify Employee Value Proposition
This step involves analyzing the business needs and current employee working conditions.
Firstly, clearly define your company's work culture, mission, vision, and values. This includes looking into existing brand material, company vision, and mission statement and introspecting internal communications. These elements directly impact the employee experience.
Secondly, identify what qualities you are looking for in the open job role. Instead of mapping out skill requirements ambiguously, reverse engineering business needs to define job requirements.
For instance, a tech company requires writers with experience and understanding of the technical aspects of the product. This becomes the basis for skill requirements for a writer. In this way, companies can directly anchor the job requirements to business goals and needs.
Lastly, outline the employee journey in the business. This means visually mapping out the employee stages that s/he goes through in their tenure.
After the recruiters have all this information, they can identify and define the employee's unique proposition.
For instance, based on the employee journey, recruiters might identify that people leave within 2-3 years of working, so they can anchor the job role to a long-term growth opportunity or compensation method such as ESOP and communicate the same with the potential candidates. This becomes the employee value proposition.
#2 Communicate Employee Value Proposition
The next step is to communicate the value proposition. Recruiters can use different platforms and do A/B testing to find the most effective channel.
Companies can leverage the company website, recruitment material, careers page, LinkedIn pages, and many other channels to communicate the value proposition. Recruiters should use a mix of all the media instead of relying solely on one. The value proposition can be presented in multiple ways, such as employee stories, employee quotes, highlighting the mission statement, etc.
For example, Cisco gives a glimpse of the employee story on its career page and calls attention to three substantial sections about the job- benefits and perks, job available, and communities.
Another way to communicate the value proposition is during the interviews with the candidates. Alternatively, if recruiters engage in passive hiring, the same can be discussed while building relationships with potential candidates.
Ask employees to share testimonials, personal stories, and experiences. This can be done in various formats featured on company websites, company social media, or personal social media profiles of employees. Many companies have their employees share work-related stories on their social media. For example, employees of Lemlist share their working culture on their profiles.
Source: Mihaela Cicvaric (Content Marketing Manager at Lemlist) shares a fun experience with the team, which reflects the work culture and positive employee experience.
Share day-to-day work stories of employees on company social media. This helps to strengthen the marketing effort of the company because this impacts both employee and employer branding. This could be in the form of Instagram reels, tweets, LinkedIn posts, or a bi-monthly blog format.
#3 Strong On-boarding Process
The onboarding process is a crucial stage in employees' tenure at the job. It includes the first few weeks of understanding the work environment and colleagues and getting hands-on experience with job-related tools and software.
An effective employee onboarding can improve the retention rate by 82%. Moreover, a poor onboarding process can increase employee turnover leading to poor branding. It reduces the chances of referral via new hires in the team.
An effective onboarding process must engage the employees and not restrict them to paperwork and mundane processes. It should include team building and getting to know colleagues. Moreover, the new hire should get the chance to experience the work culture along with orientation and job-specific training.
The onboarding process should focus on instilling a positive image of the company. This involves sharing the company's mission and vision clearly. Moreover, the employees should be motivated to share company stories and communicate effectively within the organization.
The most critical part of onboarding is getting new hires familiar with the work process and tools. Recruiters shall give clear instructions to the new hires and lay forward the role and responsibilities of each employee.
#4 Check the Analytics
The final step of employee branding is looking into key metrics related to employee experience. It is crucial to measure the results to understand the scope of improvement and take a strategic approach. Here are a few metrics to look at to check the analytics.
Candidate Quality- Are you getting qualified candidates? This is measurable based on the interviews and assessments during the hiring process.
Applicants to Interview Percentage- Are people showing up at interviews? Recruiters must look into the number of people that turn up at the interviews and its difference with the number of applicants.
Cost per Hire- How much does it cost to hire a new employee? It includes costs related to posting job vacancies, marketing the open role, assessments, and other relevant expenses.
Source of Hire- Where are your new employees coming from? Referrals? Job boards? Or some other channel? Identifying the most effective channel can help recruiters save costs on ineffective channels. Moreover, recruiters can double their efforts on effective mediums.
Offer Acceptance Rate- How many people accept the job offer after clearing the interview? Recruiters should check into the rejected offers and the reason behind them. Rejected offers not only lead to futile efforts but also resource wastage.
Employee Referral Rate- How many employees refer people for open job roles? This clearly indicates how employees perceive the work environment and if they refer it to people. A high employee referral rate can reduce costs and increase retention per hire.
Employee Retention Rate- How many people leave the job within a specific period, let's say a year? Job markets are dynamic, and people are constantly switching in search of the best job opportunity. Recruiters should identify reasons for low or high employee retention rates and take steps to ensure a high employee retention rate.
Employee Satisfaction Rate- Are people in your company happy and satisfied? This is measurable by conducting surveys and taking anonymous feedback from the team. In case of a low satisfaction rate, the HR team must meet employee needs to build a positive employee brand.
Employee Turnover Rate- How many employees leave their job within a few years of working? This percentage indicates the number of employees that leave the job within a specific period. It is crucial to understand the reasons behind leaving the job and take corrective measures. Companies must ensure a low turnover rate. Otherwise, it might lead to a poor brand image.
There are other metrics that a recruiter can look into based on business needs. This 4-step employee branding strategy will help you improve the company culture, attract and retain more talent, and improve the overall employee experience. The cost per hire will reduce, and the company will be able to enhance internal and external communications.
Tips To Improve Employee Branding
Employee branding must be analyzed, tracked, and improved to reap all the benefits consistently. Recruiters must build and strengthen the employee brand to hire qualified people effortlessly. Here are the top 4 tips to enhance the employees' experience and brand.
Create a healthy diversity and inclusive team to accommodate people from different cultures. This ensures that recruiters can tap potential talent globally and not restrict their reach to physical boundaries. Companies like Google take care of diversity in the workplace to have a healthy work culture and reflect their company values.
Improve candidate experience during the entire employee journey, starting from the pre-interview assignments. This includes healthy communication practices and constant feedback. Moreover, recruiters shall put effort into an effective onboarding process. Further, the company shall also cultivate a positive work environment to ensure employee well-being and good mental health.
Focus on current employees by offering them growth, learning, and development opportunities. Recruiters can retain top talent and develop the employees during their tenure with the company by strengthening internal communication to ensure feedback and understanding of the employee's needs.
Communicate via social media and websites to share the company story, employee stories, company mission, vision, and much more. Recruiters must use a multichannel approach for employee branding, just like marketing! They should devise a comprehensive strategy to use various platforms to establish a healthy employee brand.
Employee Branding Made Easy With Nurturebox
Employee branding is not a one-day job. It requires consistent effort to improve the work environment, communicate the employee value proposition, and provide a delightful working experience to employees. Recruiters can attract and retain desired qualified people in the firm easily by strengthening the employee brand.
How can we at Nurturebox help you?
Nurturebox is a talent CRM tool that assists you in communicating and nurturing relationships with potential candidates while it takes care of all the mundane admin tasks for you! You need to download our chrome extension, integrate it with your hiring tech stack, and start sourcing and hiring people.
Amidst today’s noisy digital world, brands find it challenging to create meaningful connections with their customer base and target audience. Getting the target consumer’s attention and persuading them to buy from you gets even trickier. Hence, content marketing has become more crucial than ever for brands to attract, educate, and retain customers.
Content creation is a top priority for 80% of marketers, and there is no reason it shouldn’t be. Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts your audience’s decisions through education and persuasion.
Depending on your business goals and requirements, the role of Content Marketers you hire will vary. The primary responsibilities revolve around forming consistent brand messaging and deciding upon a unique and identifiable voice, style, and pitch across various distribution channels.
From raising brand awareness to attracting a relevant audience to your website, boosting social media presence and engagement, generating leads, and building brand loyalty – content marketing drives all the growth efforts for your brand. When done effectively, it can help you:
Build positive brand awareness
Make your audience stick around for longer
Get better traction on social media
Gain more trust of your audience than ever
Generate qualified leads
Improve conversion rates
Boost business visibility with SEO
Position your brand as an authority
Cultivate loyal brand fans
While content marketing is a broad role with numerous areas of expertise involved, it’s vital to thoroughly understand your company’s current marketing goals and the related requirements. In this blog, we will dive deep into the step-by-step approach to hiring a Content Marketer.
What is The Role of a Content Marketer?
A Content Marketer must be deeply passionate about telling your brand’s story to the world. The objective is to educate and nurture the target audience to establish brand authority using thought-leadership and drive more people to buy from you.
As a candidate is expected to be a mediator between the brand and the target audience, they are primarily responsible for planning, creating, and sharing valuable content to grow their company’s awareness and engagement to bring more business.
To be more specific, the role of a Content Marketer requires a perfect blend of creativity and attention to detail in an individual. It’s a balancing role, as they need to ensure creating content that resonates and strengthens business relationships, using strategies that position your business as authentic and problem-solving.
Take a look at the core responsibilities of a Content Marketer that most businesses expect them to take over:
Research and Competitor Analysis: The first and foremost step to creating a content marketing strategy is effective initial research. It not only helps a Content Marketer understand the nuances of the industry through competitor analysis but also study and understand the target audience thoroughly.
Building Content Marketing Plans: Once the competitor research and target audience analysis is done, a Content Marketer needs to work on the different plans for all the business objectives, targeted channels, segments of the audience, and the bigger marketing strategy. A content marketing plan typically consists of:
Specific goals along with a pre-decided timeline
Various channels to be targeted for content distribution
Types of content to be created
Budget for the entire staff, outsourced services, and paid promotion (Collabs and Ads)
Creating Editorial Calendar: Creating, managing, and maintaining a content calendar is one of the most crucial responsibilities of a Content Marketer. It is a centralized visual document that enables effective collaboration among the marketing team and helps Content Marketers ensure on-time production and delivery.
Content Creation: Once the strategy and calendar have been approved by relevant stakeholders, Content Marketers need to do the on-ground work. This task usually depends on the scale of your company and content marketing strategy. Suppose an organization already has a set of writers, then the Content Marketer doesn’t need to create content by themselves.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Producing quality content that educates your target audience and resonates with them, isn’t enough. You need to optimize your content creation to make it search engine-friendly. While most companies need a dedicated SEO specialist for keyword research and planning, Content Marketers need to closely collaborate with them and should be well-versed in the basics of SEO.
While the practices discussed above are primary responsibilities of a Content Marketer, they also need to be proactive with
Content editing and ensuring adherence to a certain style guide
Continous publishing and distributing content
Measuring and analyzing performance
How to Hire a Content Marketer: Step-By-Step?
Content marketing has become the key to driving growth for businesses. Unlike a few years ago, it’s not possible now to get away with a one-person team for content marketing. You need deeply trained individuals for specialist roles.
Let’s now dive into the step-by-step approach of hiring a Content Marketer. But before you even source your first candidate, you should have a clear expectation of the skillset and experience to look out for top content marketing candidates.
Top Must-Have Skills in a Content Marketer
Apart from having relevant industry experience, a good Content Marketer must possess the following skills.
Excellent Writing Skills
A Content Marketer’s prior skillset should be writing excellent attention-grabbing content. From long-form blog posts to website copy, ad copies, social media content, video scripts, emails, newsletters, e-books, whitepapers, and more – a Content Marketer should be able to adapt to the business’s specific requirements and create quality content.
Audience Research
Identifying user behavior is vital for framing the story in the right direction. So a Content Marketer must know how to identify and analyze the needs and pain points to develop a buyer persona. User research can be performed through social listening, relevant communities, in-person calls with customers, analyzing sales call recordings, and more.
Keyword Research
Creating valuable thought-leadership content isn’t enough. Researching the right set of keywords is an essential skill to further educate your target audience on the Whys, Hows and Whats of your business, and have your website rank on Google.
Data-oriented Content
Content that’s not backed by relevant data points does not build enough trust. Experienced content marketing professionals would always prefer data over hollow claims. No doubt that only data doesn’t help a content piece succeed, but it’s essential..
Project Management, Planning, and Publishing –
A Content Marketer is also expected to break down and analyze the pain points to turn keyword research into content ideas. So a professional must be able to identify and solve content gaps.
Further, they must know how to create a content calendar, decide the different types of content, and choose relevant platforms to publish and schedule marketing campaigns.
Content Promotion
Creating a valuable content piece, for example - an ebook, isn’t enough. Your content marketing team needs to promote it proactively for bringing enough attention and engagement.
Performance Analysis
Setting up goals and plans is one thing, but continuously executing, measuring, and analyzing content performance is another. A Content Marketer should always be monitoring key performance parameters to figure out the upcoming plans with the necessary updates required.
Not to forget - stakeholders and marketing heads need the performance reports regularly. So Content Marketers must be able to collect and comprehend all the data to make it worth presenting.
Step 1: Create a Candidate Persona
Let’s sort out the priorities first, and decide the type of content marketing candidates you want to recruit. From exceptional research skills to storytelling, communication skills, relationship building, audience engagement, and more capabilities must be comprehensively considered. Identify and break down the skill requirements for Content Marketers:
What are the educational qualification criteria for the role?
How many years and what type of work experience do you want in candidates?
What are the specific skill sets you’re looking for?
Which industry experience would you primarily prefer?
Are there any tools your candidates should be hands-on with?
What are some personality traits that will fit your company?
Where do they look for a new job?
What are their career and life goals?
Forming a candidate persona by answering all these questions would ensure you are not shooting in the dark while sourcing candidates. Further, it helps you determine the traits of the ideal candidate, and plan your sourcing and recruitment strategy further.
Step 2: Document the Role Requirements and Decide on Your Recruiting Process
Next step is determining your role requirements suiting primarily to organizational needs and business goals. A content marketing professional is expected to own the entire content strategy, creation, and distribution. But what about your business’s unique requirements?
You might need someone comfortable with frequently creating long-form content pieces like blogs, ebooks, or whitepapers, or creating engaging video content based on your industry trends.
Talk to various relevant stakeholders for seeking the complete detailed company requirements for the role.
Before you enter the recruitment funnel, outline your talent acquisition process. Identify various strategies, channels, and other informational insights you would need – and maintain a collaborative document.
As you update the tactics and tweak your recruitment process for meeting hiring requirements optimally – keep your document up to date.
Step 3: Prepare a Content Marketing Job Description
Once you have finalized the role requirements with respect to your current content marketing goals and team, you can start sourcing candidates. Preparing the job description is the first task you’ll need to do.
Here are the necessary components you must have in your job description:
Job Title: The position you’re looking to fill. For example - Content Marketing Specialist or Content Marketing Manager.
Roles & Responsibilities: An outline of the candidate’s day-to-day activities. From ideation to implementation and the impact on the organization, everything should be covered.
Skill Requirements: Skills and abilities a candidate must have to perform the job successfully.
Perks and Benefits: The compensation details, perks of the job, and any other benefits.
About the Company: Why should a candidate consider working with your company?
Content Marketer Job Description Template
Role
The job of a Content Marketer is to perform competitor research, create user persona, and write plagiarism-free content for blog articles, social media, and the company website. They need to stay updated on the latest SEO techniques.
Responsibilities
Develop, write and deliver persuasive copy for the website, email marketing campaigns, sales collateral, videos, and blogs
Build and manage an editorial calendar; coordinate with other content crafters to ensure standards
Measure impact and perform analysis to improve KPIs
Include and optimize all content for SEO
Contribute to the localization of processes and content to ensure consistency across regions
Review and implement process changes to drive operational excellence
Requirements
Proven content marketing, copywriting, or SEO experience
Working knowledge of content management systems like WordPress
A well-maintained portfolio of published articles, blogs, copy, etc
Proven experience of working under pressure to deliver high quality output in a short span of time
Proficiency in all Microsoft Office applications, Google Suite
Fluency in English or any other required language
Soft Skills
Excellent verbal and written communication skills
Excellent writing and editing skills
The ability to work in a fast-paced environment
The ability to handle multiple projects concurrently
Strong attention to detail and the ability to multi-task projects and deliverables
Step 4: Source Candidates
Once you have the tailored job description in hand, it’s now time to do the groundwork and source candidates. Create an attractive job post to promote your job across job boards and social channels.
Begin with what to expect from the role at your company?
Prepare an impactful job post and also execute paid job ad campaigns if required. The next step would be promoting your jobs on various job boards and hiring platforms. You can leverage the following platforms for hiring Content Marketers:
LinkedIn
Indeed
Instahyre
ZipRecruiter
Monster
GlassDoor
CareerBuilder
Not to forget - almost 3/4th of the workforce includes passive candidates, so you cannot miss out on passive talent sourcing as well. Reach out to qualified candidates on communities, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook to offer them suitable opportunities.
Step 5: Evaluate Candidates and Interview Shortlisted Ones
Once you have filtered candidates based on their experience and skills listed on their profile, it’s time to evaluate them deeply. Ask them to create a content strategy for your website, along with a value-adding content piece like a small blog. The topic of the article must fall within the scope of the strategy.
Interview the candidates whose profiles got shortlisted. Keep in mind the parameters covering skills, relevant experience, and personality traits of candidates.
Step 5: Make the Hire
Reach out to selected Content Marketers and communicate about the compensation.
Further, extend your offer letter to all the candidates who have been selected. In the case of passive sourcing, extend to only those who were aligned with you on the compensation and are willing to move forward.
Ensure having a deadline for the joining date and mention the necessary documents required by your recruiting team.
Get the required documents and set up the offer agreements with candidates
Organize an orientation session for the onboarded candidates
Introduce them to the entire team and the marketing teams they will be working with
Guide the new candidates about your company management tools and communication channels
Provide candidates with forms for benefits and perks like Health Insurance.
Supercharge Your Hiring for Content Marketer with Nurturebox
Inbound candidate sourcing doesn’t work effectively anymore. Do you also find challenges in closing quality candidates through job posts even after spending on ads?
Don’t worry, passive candidate sourcing can be an optimal solution for hiring top content marketing candidates.
Nurturebox is a one-stop talent sourcing and engagement platform which is powered by automation. Here’s how you can source product managers from LinkedIn using Nurturebox:
On your LinkedIn profile, start sourcing Content Marketers with boolean searches stating the required experience from targeted locations and including other criteria
Add the qualified candidates to your sourcing campaign pipeline with just a click
Automate the candidate engagement through email, Whatsapp and LinkedIn direct messages for reaching out and nurturing candidates at scale.
Recruitment insights you won’t delete. Delivered to your inbox weekly.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
