Employer Branding For Dummies. Richard Mosley

a presence there and join various relevant groups where the targets you want to attract are active. (See Chapter 11 for more about engaging talent via social channels.)

      ❯❯ Job boards: Certain job boards automatically scrape company career websites and web pages to gather job postings. Others allow you to post jobs for free or for a fee. You have numerous job boards from which to choose, including the biggies – Monster (www.monster.com), CareerBuilder (www.careerbuilder.com), and Indeed (www.indeed.com). You can also find plenty of specialty job boards for a variety of talent, including sales, technology, and marketing.

      ❯❯ Search engines: You can leverage the power of search engine optimization (SEO) to improve your search engine rank and drive more traffic to your company career website or blog. You can also use search engine marketing (SEM) to pay for sponsored ads that appear in search results. Using the two together often creates a synergy with paid advertising improving your organic search engine rank.

      ❯❯ Programmatic: A relatively new option, programmatic automates the process of advertising placement through analytics. Primarily used for placing online advertising, programmatic is expanding into traditional media, including TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines.

      ❯❯ Traditional channels: Traditional channels, including newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, and even billboards, can still be effective tools in recruitment advertising and building a strong, positive employer brand, as long as they further the objectives of your employer brand strategy.

      ❯❯ College campuses and internships: Establishing a positive physical or virtual presence on college campuses is a great way to recruit college students, graduates, and graduate student. It’s so effective, in fact, that we devote an entire chapter to the topic (see Chapter 13).

      

Companies with the strongest employer brands increasingly hire through referrals from current and former employees. As you reach out through social channels, don’t lose sight of the fact that the employees you already have can be your most valuable source of high-quality applicants and new hires.

      Staying True to the Promise of Your Employer Brand

      Common sense dictates that in order for promises to be of any value, they must be kept. Employees who feel as though they’re working for one of the best employers in the world are more likely to refer friends, family members, and professional contacts to the organization and sing its praises on social channels, such as LinkedIn and Glassdoor. Employees who are disappointed by their employment experience may start to think that the EVP and any new employer branding initiative is an empty promise at best, and a self-serving gesture at worst.

      

To continue to earn employee trust and engagement, do the following:

      ❯❯ Stress to the CEO the importance of creating an exceptional employment experience. The CEO must make it her personal mission to earn a reputation for being an employer of choice by shaping a healthy organizational culture and supporting a consistently positive employee experience. Ideally, the senior team should take the lead in launching the employer brand (including their key future commitments) and briefing management on what is required from them to deliver on the brand promises.

      ❯❯ Do more in a distinctly better way. Strive to continually do more in a distinctly better way for employees. Your goal is to create brand-signature experiences – elements of your company’s employment experience that make the experience unique and superior to that offered by organizations competing for the same talent. Brand-signature experiences are of value to employees and to the organization, but they also serve as constant reminders of the company’s culture and values.

      ❯❯ Take a customer service approach to HR processes. Manage the employee experience as carefully as you would manage the customer experience. Strive to make every important people management interaction (or touch point) with employees a signature experience and every stage in an HR process a consistently positive “on-brand” experience for the employee. Follow the customer service model practiced by most airlines, in which the customer experience is managed from the time the customer starts shopping for a flight until he boards and ultimately exits the plane.

      Monitoring Your Employer Branding Success

      Becoming the employer everyone wants to work for requires considerable effort, expertise, and coordination, so you want to make sure that everything you’re doing is having the desired effect on your employer brand. If it’s not, then you know you have to do it better, or do it in a different way. To gauge the impact of your employer branding initiative and activities, analyze both short- and long-term outcomes:

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      Short-term outcomes: Metrics for measuring the short-term outcomes of employer branding activities relate to the level of engagement your marketing content is generating, the number and quality of the applicants you’re attracting and hiring, as well as the total cost-per-hire. Use analytics software and any other tools at your disposal to track the success of your overall recruitment marketing strategy, your recruitment marketing campaigns, and specific recruitment marketing activities used in each campaign. Analyze the channels through which you recruit candidates, as well, to determine which are most fruitful for attracting the desired talent. (See Chapter 17 for details.)

      

When tracking short-term outcomes, measure the success of a marketing campaign, activity, or channel in terms of the objectives for each campaign and the type of talent you’re recruiting. A social channel that’s very effective in engaging IT professionals, for example, may be next to useless in recruiting sales staff. Make sure you understand the difference.

      ❯❯ Long-term outcomes: Metrics for measuring long-term outcomes of your employer branding efforts are related to your brand awareness, overall attractiveness as a potential employer, and employer brand image. Internally, long-term outcomes can be measured in terms of employee pride and advocacy, employee engagement and performance, and the number and quality of referral applicants and new hires. Ideally, you should also seek to evaluate the long-term outcomes and return on investment (ROI) of your brand investment in talent, in terms of business performance measures, including productivity, customer satisfaction, and sales. (See Chapter 18 for details.)

      In addition to tracking short- and long-term outcomes of your employer branding efforts, you need to look to and plan for the future. In many ways, employer branding is like trying to hit a moving target. Constant shifts in talent availability, competitive positioning and activity, your organization’s goals and objectives, and evolving talent preferences all play a part in influencing what your organization must do to attract, recruit, engage, and retain the best and the brightest. To keep from falling behind, you must continually look ahead.

      Chapter 2

      Preparing for the Journey

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      ❯❯ Integrating employer branding with other branding efforts

      ❯❯ Evaluating talent needs and opportunities

      ❯❯ Pitching employer branding as a key to business success

      ❯❯ Getting buy-in from the right people

      If employer branding is a new concept for your organization, you have plenty of work to do to lay the groundwork that will make it a success. You need to

      ❯❯ Find the right fit for employer branding, so it aligns with everything else your organization is doing to achieve its goals.

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