All companies have an employer brand. Some care about it, others neglect it, but they all have one. The employer brand is the way a company is perceived as a workplace.

Employer branding is an activity that improves this perception.

Employer branding: an example

Let’s imagine we have to choose a new PC.

We start by doing our research, we spend several days combining a list of laptops, until we reduce our list to 3 products very similar in price, technical features, aesthetics, weight, size.

I mean, we’re convinced that all three products are right for us.

The first PC, however, is produced by brand A, which we have heard is not very fast.

The second PC is brand B. In the past we had a tablet of the same brand, but we didn’t get along so well.

The third PC is C-brand, which everyone always talks about very well, even if we have never tried it personally.

Now, regardless of actual performance, we’ll probably have a more positive assessment of the C-brand PC.

Something similar is also happening in the recruitment world. If your company is known to be a place where employees are happy to work, you probably won’t need to look for new candidates, but they will look for you. Furthermore, high employer branding will certainly help you to reduce the negative turnover in your company.

So what can you do to develop your Employer Branding?

How to improve your reputation

Employer branding talks about you and your corporate culture.

How to identify areas to improve employer branding

In order to improve the image of a workplace, it is first of all necessary to see how it is currently viewed by the market.

How do the candidates see you? Why did they decide to run? You can find out a lot of these things by asking your candidates directly during an interview. This will allow you to have the judgment of an “outside” eye on your company, and at the same time give you an idea of the candidate’s motivation for the position.

In the same way, it is also important to check what the company’s employees think. In fact, in some cases the company may be much more attentive to the image it offers to the outside world than to the actual well-being of its employees, who may be dissatisfied.

Creating too high expectations in candidates could lead to some disappointment once they are hired, and this could increase turnover further.

Comparing the expectations of the candidates with the perceptions of the employees is likely to reveal discrepancies or negative agreements between the two, clearly highlighting areas to improve on. These two elements should first of all be aligned while prioritizing what is most useful on the basis of:

1. Hiring targets: how many applications you wish to obtain by a given date
2. Type of candidates you wish to attract

Writted on August 5, 2020