The days when entrepreneurs could rely only on corporate branding to build successful businesses are long gone. In the last few years, employer brand is becoming increasingly important for business people who want to go one step ahead of their competitors. It’s a relatively new phenomenon which represents a company’s reputation in a job market as an employer.
But why did it become so important? The reason is simple – it answers the needs of the generation of Millennials. They are young people who determine the quality of an employer by taking numerous factors into the calculation. For instance, almost half of Millennials will choose workplace flexibility over pay.
In such circumstances, you need to know the best ways to build your employer brand and convince the most talented Millennials to join your team. We will show you how to do that in this article.
How to Prepare Employer Branding Strategy
Theodore Hicks, an HR expert at ResumesPlanet, said that the only way to build your employer brand successfully is to truly understand your target group: “You have to take into account that Millennials are much different from Baby Boomers. They are more tolerant towards minority groups, they care about corporate social responsibility, and prefer a healthy work-life balance.” According to the recent survey, almost 90% of Millennials want to choose when and where they work rather than being placed in a 9-5 position.
You need to keep all this in mind while creating an employer brand and if you prepare a good strategy, you’ll be able to recruit the best young professionals, improve their efficiency, and increase retention. But how exactly can you do that? Let’s take a closer look.
- Keep the website updated
A company website is a digital ID and the first thing an average Millennial will search for before answering your job invitation. More than 70% of Millennials claim that the Internet is their main source of information. This is why you need to keep the website updated and filled with relevant information about the company. At the same time, occasional blog posts made by your most prominent workers will certainly add to the employer brand value and make you look more credible in the eyes of a Millennial.
- Exploit social media
Social media attract millions of users and you must take advantage of it in employer branding. Of course, you don’t have to be active on all networks but go for at least two or three of them. LinkedIn is the safe choice because it targets professionals in all fields of work. With more than 2 billion users, the second option should probably be Facebook. You should be proactive online and use social networks to improve your reputation. This is one of the easiest but also the cheapest method to build an employer brand.
- Share employee stories
Word of mouth is very powerful nowadays. Millennials tend to trust other people more than the actual brand, so you should make employees your brand ambassadors. They can share personal stories about how it feels to work in your company or remember awkward but funny moments that they had experienced. This is the way to reveal a human side of employer brand and show young talents that they can expect good interpersonal relations in your team.
- Post images
We all know that a picture is worth a thousand words. It’s an old rule but it’s not obsolete. Sharing photos with interesting details from your offices, you get to meet the job seekers with your everyday routine and environment. Additionally, you will show them real members of the team and how they enjoy working for you. Images have the potential to go viral, which is also a huge advantage – with a little bit of creativity, you can score some bonus points and take employer branding to the higher level.
- Make a few recruitment videos
A recruitment video is another method to address young talents. Namely, video format makes almost 80% of an entire Internet traffic and most of the Millennials would rather watch a Youtube video about your company than read about it. This is your chance to impress job seekers, just like an audit company KPMG did in their recruitment video. Besides being funny and appealing, a recruitment video should show Millennials what makes you such a good employer and how they can perfect professional skills as the members of your team.
- Corporate Social Responsibility
We already mentioned that Millennials are not only interested in salaries and other personal benefits. They also care about contributing to the community and making the world a better place. Therefore, CSR is what you as a company should embrace in everyday business. It will strengthen your employer brand and improve company reputation in general. Millennials will consider it a big plus if they see that you are really trying to make an impact in the society.
Conclusion
Having a great corporate brand doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to recruit the most promising Millennials. Instead, you need to build a great employer brand to become attractive for this generation of young professionals. In our article, we showed you how to approach the Millennials. Make sure to use our suggestions and feel free to leave a comment if you have other interesting details to add to this topic.
This guest post is courtesy of Micheal Gilmore. He is a blogger and writer at Studyclerk.com. He specializes in building high-performance teams and delivering great products in the least time. Micheal is also a passionate career advisor and facilitator.
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nice post, thanks