Unemployment rates are at historic lows, resulting in high demand for quality employees. How can/does a company’s corporate brand help to attract talent?
Your corporate brand is the first impression people get when they interact with your company — and that’s not just true for the people in your target customer market; it’s true for prospective employees too. When done well, your corporate brand showcases your company’s uniqueness and personality in addition to your expertise. It invites engagement and inspires the talent you’re seeking to click on that next page or next piece of content and interact with it. An effective corporate brand motivates viewers to go deeper and achieve an experiential sense of your business that goes well beyond the “nuts and bolts” of the services you offer. If your corporate brand isn’t inspiring from glance one, it’s detracting from much-needed opportunities to connect with the talent you’re competing for.
What’s the difference between a corporate brand and an employer brand?
Your corporate brand is the ultimate expression of your company’s value proposition. It should reflect your external offerings (i.e., products and services) in alignment with a clear company personality to external audiences such as existing and potential customers and potential employees.
Your employer brand, on the other hand, needs to reflect your internal offerings (i.e., trainings, growth opportunities, personal wellness culture, work-life balance) in alignment with your corporate brand personality to both internal existing employee audiences and external potential employee audiences. The elements of your employer brand that you choose to be externally facing should directly reflect the aspects of your internal culture that you want to highlight for prospective employees.
How consistent should a corporate brand and an employer brand be?
They are closely tied, but distinct. Your corporate brand personality should definitely inform your employer brand. That said, your employer brand can be more personal and even informal depending on the venue you’re working within to express it.
For example, the employer brand as expressed on your website might include a culture page that showcases professionally photographed or filmed experiences of what it’s like to work at your company. On the other hand, you could have a less formal expression of your employer brand on social media by empowering employees to use selfies and self-created videos from their mobile devices to share personal snapshots of why they enjoy working with you. Which types of employer brand tactics you use will partially be determined by the overall tone and personality of your corporate brand. They should work cohesively together.
We have all of our job openings on our website; is that enough? What else can/should we be doing?
Unfortunately, it’s just not enough these days to have open jobs listed on your website. You need a strategy to engage with the talent you want to attract, and that begins with honing the strength of your employer brand. What do prospective employees find when they look through your website? Are you really showing and not just telling what it is like to be a part of your team? What content, visual, and interactive elements on your website and various social media channels are designed specifically to demonstrate your internal culture and values — and how consistently and effectively are you leveraging those elements? It’s a “buyer’s market” for employees right now, and you’ve got to attract them with a clear “why” that shines through and inspires engagement.
Candidate’s top priorities increasingly have less to do with salary, and more to do with culture. How can marketing help?
Marketing is a clear, consistent, and effective path to connecting the dots for candidates between what they’re looking for and what you’re offering. It’s a tool that points engaging content squarely at your desired audience to achieve the results you want. And beyond that, marketing is a reputation builder. It both shows and tells the world why you’re a preferred business partner and employer.
What do you want candidates to know about working with you? Will they have opportunities for professional growth? Work-life balance? Great benefits? Use marketing to let them know you check all their boxes, while at the same time showing them how your company does that in a unique and inspiring way. Great marketing brings right-fit tactics (i.e., website upgrades, video, social media, and more) together in a harmonious way that appeals directly to the talent you want to attract.
Corporate social responsibility issues are increasingly important to job candidates. How can marketing help address these questions?
The first question to ask is whether your company currently prioritizes corporate social responsibility. If so, marketing is the ideal tool to showcase your efforts and your commitment tastefully and effectively for candidates considering whether to apply or accept an offer. If not, one thing many business leaders may not be aware of is that internal culture-building strategies around these issues are absolutely something that can be included within the context of marketing consultation. As we touched on when talking about corporate brands versus employer brands, marketing is not just a tool for interfacing with external audiences. It can also be used to bolster and nurture internal culture-building efforts — which then inform the story you’re able to tell external audiences.
About the Author
Lea LaFerla