Business for you: How Your Employer Brand Affects Recruiting

mercredi 26 novembre 2014

How Your Employer Brand Affects Recruiting

What’s it like to work for your company?

Do people get excited when they hear your company name? How would you feel if I told you Google was looking for someone just like you? What about Monsanto?

Your employer brand, which is slightly different than your consumer brand, is incredibly important.

The employer brand is more important than the consumer brand, because the relationship is deeper. If a customer is unhappy with a product, they can return it and get a refund. If they are unhappy with the job they just got, it’s a nightmare to have to re-enter the job market.

I recently had the opportunity to partner up with Entelo for a joint webinar called “How to Improve the Candidate Experience through Your Employer Brand” where we spoke about what recruiters generally get wrong with explaining their employer brand, and how to showcase your employer brand, with great examples.

Here is the full webinar, it’s a little long, but in my biased opinion, well worth a watch:

Let me explain more about why the employer brand is so important, and give some great tips on what you could do.

A Good Employer Brand Is A Smart Investment

According to research that we cited in the webinar, having a good employer brand helps lower turnover, and decrease your cost per hire.

Companies with a stronger employer brand have a 28 percent lower turnover rate than companies with a weaker employer brand

Candidates under 40 years old are 61 percent more likely to have their job consideration levels associated with employer brand

Companies with a weaker employer brand report a cost per hire that is almost double that of companies with a strong employer brand

Employer brand is almost three times as likely to be tied to job consideration among managers and lower-level employees

How To Write A Good Job Description

I’ve written an entire blog post about this subject in the past, and the example I used of a company that gets job descriptions right is Google (more on Google later).

From the blog post:

The point I’m trying to get across is, to write a good job description you need to be honest, transparent, and conversational.

Pretend you’re just having a chat with your friend, and you’re pitching them the job. Make it fun, make it short, and show candidates why they should want to work there.

One of the big themes that we focused on during the webinar was how recruiters often sell the “product” and not the “role”. Remember who your audience is.

Focus more on what it’s like on the day-to-day for the specific role. Don’t write your job description as if you were talking to an investor, write it for someone wondering what it would be like to do that role in that company.

Companies That Get It Right

There are many great examples, but the three we mentioned in the webinar were Google, Zappos, and AirBNB. Let me explain why they’re so good.

They all have common themes that you should incorporate into your careers page.

The tone is very conversational

They explain the culture

They use video and imagery (real, not stock)

They talk about the “why” of what they do, not the what

As for social media profiles, what some of the cooler companies are doing is being very visual, giving candidates a view into what the culture is like. Some of my favorite examples are: