Become an employer of choice by developing a clear brand strategy.
The subject of recruitment has came up in a lot of my conversations lately. Across all sectors there are labour and skills shortages that are putting a strain on employers and their businesses. In particular I have been paying close attention to professional services, construction and of course the agency / advertising space.
I's an employee's market. And if businesses are to have half a chance of recruiting and retaining the best people, then they must get off on the front foot, positioning themselves as an employer of choice. But how?
A solid employer branding strategy is essential to becoming an employer of choice. But the foundations of employer branding start from the inside, which is where many businesses are completely missing the mark. It's not just a case of saying your business is a great place to work, you need to practise what you preach by demonstrating clear and consistent evidence of your culture if you want to attract and retain the right people.
But this isn't just about recruitment. Because usually when it comes to last minute recruitment, you're too late. Not having a strategy to nurture your organisational culture, and develop a first-class employee experience, often results in poor staff retention and a vicious cycle of hire-lose-hire. Treat the root cause, not the symptom.
47% of people cite company culture as their driving reason for applying for a job, so how do you make future employees recognise your business and it's culture? Build an employer brand that your current employees love!
Building a good employer brand starts with identifying how happy and engaged employees already are, building a cohesive plan to improve this across the whole employee lifecycle, before finally establishing how to clearly communicate this culture to future employees.
What is an employer brand?
Similar to the way a corporate brand works (which offers a value proposition to customers, defining products or services in the marketplace), an employer brand includes the market’s perception of your business as an employer, but also describes your promise (or employee value proposition) to employees in exchange for their skills, experience and talents.
Employer branding is simply how you market your business to future potential employees and job seekers. Once you have a clearly defined and authentic culture in place, you do this by showcasing your businesses' unique points of difference, amplifying them through communication to position yourself as a great place to work.
Done well, an employer brand will communicate that your business is a good employer and a great place to work, not only cementing your culture and motivating existing employees, but also attracting new motivated employees who are compelled to join your tribe. And when authentic employer brands really flourish, you begin to see employees sharing their positive experiences to their networks which creates amplification of the brand to other clients, customers, stakeholders, and potential future employees.
What is an employer value proposition (EVP)?
It's hard to know where to start with employer branding, but an employer value proposition encompasses your companies mission, values, and culture, and is a great place to start.
Think of it as a value exchange. Your companies EVP is everything that you can offer an employee, in return for the skills, experience, talent and connections they bring to the table. Now put yourself in a skilled employees shoes, they bring a wealth of knowledge and an impressive track record to the table, and all you can offer them is a salary that's slightly below market rate, and no career progression or additional perks. There's a value imbalance that doesn't add up.
That's why establishing a well-designed Employer value proposition is so important, as it can attract and retain the best people, help with objective and goal setting, re-engage dispassionate workforces, improve company wide performance and reduce costly hiring costs.
The messaging you use to broadcast your employer brand isn't just a list of perks and benefits you offer, that's a job description! It goes much deeper than that and should be a collection of well considered component parts that make up the whole experience of working in your company. These should have been identified, defined, and tested with your current team in a collaborative way. Here are a few examples to consider:
Company Moral code and guiding principles (Do's and Don'ts)
Companies Vision
Company values and culture
Company location and facilities
Salary and compensation
Flexible working policies
Ongoing employee recognition
Professional and personal development
Career progression
Team structure and communication style
Quality of work
Approach to mental wellbeing
Benefits and perks
Sustainability and environmental policies
Stance on social issues
Job security
What makes a good employer brand?
The employee market is constantly changing, and employee needs are no different. As the world moves, what employees want from their working experience does too. So its important for businesses to shape their policies, processes and culture to match.
There's no one culture fits all solution, but there are a few key trends that have developed in recent years that would be worth paying attention to:
1. Don't focus on compensation
Of course people find salary important, but there are other more meaningful elements of a job that people value, particularly the younger Millennial and Gen-Z generations.
People are not just workhorses, they can be multi-faceted and have passions, hobbies and responsibilities to pursue outside of work, therefore flexible working can be very important.
Your Employer Value Proposition should be unique, compelling, and tuned into the deeper motivations of why a person might want to join your team, going way beyond the basic compensation. Someone will always have deeper pockets, and be willing to offer slightly more in terms of compensation, and that doesn't leave you in a very good position.
2. Employees have purpose
Employees are aware of the current roster of potentially catastrophic challenges that face humanity, and they expect their employers to be aware of this also.
You may not be in a position to change the world with the work you do as a company, but employees do expect you to be doing your bit, and rightly so!
Whether it's a commitment to learning about social causes, evaluating your environmental impact, Implementing ESG, or looking closer at your governance, through commitments like becoming A BCORP. Employees want to work in a company that has an acute level of awareness about it's impact on the world and want to know that what they are doing matters.
Employees also want to know that you recognise their efforts, knowing that the part the play in the company, contributes in to the wider impact that it can have on the world. Having good processes in place for recognition are important to attracting and retaining good people. It's less about money, and more about meaning.
3. People want progression, or they’ll look for it elsewhere
People are more future thinking than ever before. In recruiting and retaining the best people, it's imperative that you communicate with clarity the career progression opportunities that exist in your organisation.
Having well developed structures in place for career progression and professional development is a good way to articulate this to potential employees, so that they can make a confident and informed decision about joining your team.
Its important to look at the whole employee lifecycle. When a person is evaluating joining your company, they need to be able to see how their career can develop into the future.
The employer branding process
So we have chatted through the basics, but here's a step by step guide on how to get started:
Step 1. Diagnosis
This is an incredibly important step, because if your employer brand lacks authenticity, employees will see right through it and avoid you with a barge pole.
Looking within, and seeking to understand and define your companies unique attributes is the first step in developing an employer brand.
Being sure to involve key stakeholders and reviewing your vision, mission, values, and culture as a business is the first step in the process. Understanding what your company objectives are, what type of business you want to build, what success looks like, how you are going to get there and what sort of team is required to achieve this is of vital importance.
My team at Outlaw Creative are experts at facilitating workshops to help define these core elements of a brand's culture.
Step 2. Audit your employer brand
You may already know how your brand is perceived by customers (If you don't you need to speak with Outlaw Creative) but you may not be as aware of how your company is viewed by your current employees or potential employees in the job-seekers market.
Engaging in conversation with your team to establish how they feel about your culture and to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the employee experience is a great starting point. Leading on from this valuable exercise you can also look externally to the market perception of your brand by conducting interviews or surveys with potential future candidates.
Step 3. Define your employer value proposition
Defining your employer value proposition is a bit of an art. How do you curate a message that clearly communicates the unique elements of your workplace and your culture?
The most efficient way to do this is through expert facilitation. For example the team at Outlaw know how to select the right exercises to extract all of the unique quirks and benefits out of a culture, before consolidating them into a clear value proposition.
It's possible to do this yourself, with a whiteboard, post-its, and a good cross section of employees, but my advice would be to hire a wordsmith to condense your thoughts down into a powerful value prop afterwards.
Step 4. Develop your guiding policies
Once you have a clear understanding of your employer value proposition, a logical next step is to define and record how you will act as an employer. I like to think of this as your brands moral code, and its a fun exercise to do with your team.
In step 1 while exploring your employer brand, we covered 'values', which are simply the descriptive words or phrases that encapsulate how you act as a brand. Your guiding policies are an extension on these values and create the basis of a decision making framework for what you will and won't do as a brand.
For example, at Outlaw Creative one of our guiding policies is:
"We start with an accurate diagnosis, then we create a strategy, and then we create brand assets that align with the strategy. Everything we create must fix something.”
"Everything we create must fix something" is one of our core values, and by building it out into a guiding policy, it provide a clear framework for all employees to build it into their decision making processes on a day to day basis so that when is comes to creating something internally or for a client they critique it to ensure that is solves a business need.
Guiding policies are the rules that you live by as a brand, so make sure that they are well written and easy to understand.
Step 5. Build engagement among current employees
To help you become a trusted employer, look no further than your current team. Your employees shape your company’s culture, live your values, achieve your objectives, and manifest your company’s mission. Without their participation, your employer brand would be nothing.
When it comes to potential employees doing their due diligence on applying for a job, it is your team that they are likely to reach out to to ask about culture and the role.
Here are a few ways to get your workers more engaged with your employer brand:
Hone the message. Use a set of words or phrases that become a part of the company’s vernacular, as a way to describe your company’s values and what the experience of working for your company is all about. Keep it simple, clear, informative, and unique. Use this language in HR or recruiting meetings, and focus this language for your career pages, recruiting sites, social media accounts, and anywhere else your employer brand can be leveraged.
Regularly monitor culture. It's not a case of writing your employer value proposition and that's it. Your culture is forever evolving and requires constant attention, discussion and tweaking to keep fresh, authentic and relevant. Engaging is monthly, quarterly or bi-annual stakeholder meetings to review culture and policies is important to maintain an employer brand that has actually been developed with employee consultation.
Foster Professional and Personal development. One of the best ways to develop skills in your organisation is to encourage career development. By investing in courses, training, and learning opportunities for your team you will strengthen your culture, and your customer experience. What's more, your team will be proud to share their development in a public domain, which will foster the communication of your employer brand as one that invests in it's people.
Shine a light on your employees. LinkedIn or other professional networks are a great place for your employees to build meaningful relationships and to establish their own personal brand. Leveraging the experiences, expertise, and personalities of your employees by allowing them to engage in speaking events, networking, panel opportunities, or mentorship roles in relation to their particular field of interest is great for professional development but also a beacon of positivity onto your employer brand.
Wider reach through employee profiles. With an authentic culture that your employees believe in, it's more likely that they will want to proactively engage in conversation about the brand. Company news, job opportunities, and updates will be much more powerful when shared from individuals in your company, than just on your company channels alone. The average network size of a company’s employees is 10x larger than its own, therefore a good step in an employer brand strategy is to help employees use LinkedIn and other social media networks to represent themselves and spread the word about your company.
Step 6. Share it with potential candidates
Job descriptions are often the first contact candidates have with your company, so they’re a perfect way to promote your employer brand. Taking all of the unique elements that make up your workplace, culture and brand, you can now craft an engaging and compelling job description that stands out in a sea of competition.
Be sure to take your time when writing a job description and avoid some of the common pitfalls such as not putting a salary range, not clearly articulating employee benefits, and not conveying your culture and brand personality through careful use of language and tone of voice. You want your job advert to speak to your ideal employee, so make sure its crafted in a way that speak to members of your tribe that share the same values and characteristics.
Need some help?
What people want from today’s brands is authenticity; for brands to actually be what they claim to be. Purpose and values aren’t decided upon in a board meeting; they are discovered and evidenced.
Outlaw Creative are a brand strategy agency that helps businesses reflect their brand behaviourally, tonally, and visually. We create robust brand strategies for the companies that want to ensure that their future business decisions are coordinated, concentrated, and utterly authentic.
A big part of brand strategy is authentic culture, and employer branding plays a crucial role in this. If you would like to find out more about how brand strategy can help you to develop an employer brand then email us at hello@weareoutlaw.co.uk.