The employer brand plays an important role in the perception of the company in the outside world.
Often, potential candidates and clients choose those companies whose brands they trust more.
The question we answer – what should HR and company managers do to create the right employer brand?
The team is the key to success
“Frames decide everything” and we are not the first to talk about it. First, you need to assemble the right team. The experience of successful companies shows that the right team must be cross-functional. A distinctive feature of a cross-functional team is to focus on a common goal, regardless of the departments in which people work and the positions they occupy.
Employees from the marketing department, HR managers, and the company’s top management must take part in building the employer’s brand. The list may include representatives from other departments that are also important to your company.
The ideal team to work with the employer’s brand
The team that works on developing the employer brand should include:
Marketing specialists. They determine the external requirements for the brand, conduct research and analyze the market, and can “activate” the brand.
Employees from HR departments. They understand the specifics of staff recruitment, are responsible for performance management, and implement the reward and recognition policy in companies.
The line managers. They know the real needs of the business, first of all – the need for certain specialists, they have a certain “feel” for people, therefore they will not allow the team to get carried away with theories that are not related to practice.
Internal communications specialists. They understand the audience and know how to involve employees in the life of the company. Since they constantly communicate with people and are always in the center of events, they will be able to become the information center of the project.
Proper brand management
It is important to understand that the task of managers is not only to find and correctly describe the distinctive features of work in the company but also to manage the employer’s brand.
For this purpose, you need:
creating mechanisms for conducting value propositions externally;
development of a communication scheme with the target groups.
At the same time, communications should be addressed not only to the external audience – professional communities, experts, potential employees (as well as their family members, etc.), but also internal – to the company’s employees.
Of course, requiring a unified message adds complexity for brand developers, but otherwise, it will work against the company, and that should not be allowed!
Additionally, the message must be consistent. This means that the voiced corporate values (the stated benefits of the employer) must correspond to what happens in the company. In other words, promises must be kept.
We build a brand reputation from the inside
The good reputation of the employer cannot be built only on communication processes (this is PR)! A candidate can always talk to those who are already working in that organization and understand the real state of affairs.
What the company tells about itself must be completely in line with reality – this experience that employees receive at their workplace. Therefore, to build a strong brand, the company must first of all work “from the inside” – to ensure the strength and truthfulness of its relations with its employees.
The image of the company was not created by PR specialists and top managers. The real bearers of the brand and the best mediators of communication are the people who already work in the company! Employees embody corporate values and role models in real-life behavior, so their stories of benefits are more likely to be believed.
This means that a strong employer brand is the result of a long-term effort to develop a people-focused corporate strategy and implement the best HR technologies.