Why You Need Employer Branding

Businesses are working on bettering their relationships with their employees as today’s workforce seeks good values and company culture from their employers. This is referred to as employer branding or managing your business’s perception and reputation as an employer. Read on to find out what it can do and why you need it. 

What is Employer Branding?

The fact is, you have a brand as an employer, whether you invest in it or not. The same principle applies to those who use social media and those who don’t - someone will have tagged your business, but you’ll have no direct influence or control over what is shared. That goes hand in hand with the fact that businesses today understand that the people who work for you can make or break your business. They are the ones who take care of your customers and ensure your business is operating at its best (or not). Fuse these two together, and you get employer branding.

From an employee’s point of view, it comes down to accountability in the workplace. Thus your business’s brand as an employer can indeed hold the key to your business’s success (since it’ll attract quality candidates and customer loyalty), identity (through your reputation and perception), and positioning (in the marketplace).

Reasons for Employer Branding 

Strengthen Your Brand

Branding is not merely a public relations mechanism that concerns the consumer. Businesses are increasingly transparent, so what your brand stands for needs to permeate throughout the business, including the way its run internally. Employees can easily review their employer online, which can influence future candidates as well as your consumers. 

Attract Top Candidates

Times have changed - people care about businesses, and it goes beyond the ones you support as a consumer. Nowadays, they want to make meaningful contributions and dedicate their time and energy to deserving employers. This is what attracts people to your business and can improve the candidates you draw in when advertising vacancies. This can also decrease your cost-per-hire rates. 

Retain Employees

Attracting new employees is one thing; keeping them is another. With the hiring process being a lengthy endeavor and training costing a company, the idea is to keep employee turnover rates to a minimum. The goal is to build experience and invest in those who work for you with training that’ll pay off over time. When your employer branding is solid, you’ll have people who are happy to be working for you and advocate for your business as ambassadors in a professional sense. 

Manage Your Reputation

How you operate and who you are as a business have undue influence over your reputation. This is why you’ve got to have a strong company culture, as a bad experience from within your business can be just as bad as one experienced externally by a customer. You can improve your reputation by managing the perceptions of your business through employer branding. This extends to the views held by employees who leave your business - bridges should not be burned. 

Believing in the power of Employer Branding is one thing; investing in it is another. There is no exact way to implement it or to measure it. Instead, the results are intangible - and yet, it can improve your business invaluably in more ways than one. Like your company culture, it is built over time. A strong employer brand is not only about how your employees view and experience your business, but it also creates a competitive advantage within the industry. Therefore, businesses should include this in their corporate branding to ensure that there is a holistic strategy in place. 

How to Build Your Employer Brand 

When developing your Employer Brand, you’ll need to assess your business as it stands and tackle any grievances and employee issues. This includes job security, management styles, and the company culture. It’s about building your brand value proposition, from how you treat your employees to the opportunities you offer them. Business values need to be applied throughout the business. 

Next, devise a plan on how you’d like your brand to be and detail the steps required to achieve it. This will need to be implemented throughout the business, with all employees involved and responsible for deliverables. The uncontrollable factors are the perceptions held by your previous employees, and what you build will affect the ones to come. With these, it’s all about managing and responding as best you can, for instance, responding to reviews online and becoming the type of business with candidates knocking on the door. 

Once you’ve developed the foundations from within, it's time to market the message. You’ll need to create brand awareness and increase its visibility. There are many aspects you need to work on for this, from having a well-designed website to assessing your competitors to build your commutative advantage and having professional and effective hiring and onboarding processes in place. This can be completed and managed by an agency with experience in the field since marketing your business in this sense is very different from marketing to your customers. Public relations become a lot more prevalent as we’re dealing with reputation management.

In Conclusion

Employer branding speaks to who your business is behind closed doors in a world where those doors are transparent. It is multi-faceted and requires an investment of time and effort, yet it has the power and ability to pay off in several ways. Employees seek strong relationships with their employers, believing they are making a valuable contribution and can enjoy their time in the workplace within a positive working environment. 

Let’s Work on Your Employer Brand

Book some time with us at Nexa - we’re here to help you assess, develop and measure your employer brand. As an award-winning creative digital agency, we’ve got the specialists and tools needed to help with all aspects of creating a brand.