Employer Branding: How firms can enhance their employer brand.

The first step to build a powerful and reliable employer brand is to find and aim at a clear spot in the mind of jobseekers.

As in every positioning strategy, the first question to answer is “What am I? What distinguish my offer from the rest of the market? i.e. What can I promise and deliver to jobseekers?” Having clear the type of firm you are and what jobseekers can gain from an experience in your company, without failing their expectation, is fundamental at this stage of the process. It is not that simple, thou. If you are an IT, highly innovative firm, it is straightforward you mainly need to attract talented developers and programmers. However, your firm still needs capable marketers or sales managers. Therefore, the problem is to find a common spot in the mind of the different profiles your company needs to attract.

How to do so? Be clear and point on the values and the culture (and less on the core business). I know it seems anachronistic. However, if one feels comfortable (virtually) walking your corridors and (virtually) meeting your teams, he/she will be more positive towards your company. Easily and clearly describing the company culture and the values at the base of the business will increase the likelihood and the facileness for a talent to dive into his/her future career, to picture him or her in approaching daily tasks in your company. All of these will construct a clear image of the firm as potential employer.

Since this approach is untied to the core business of a firm, it is replicable in every industry and to any profile of firms, that is to say, regardless the number of current employees or the spectrum of the business focus. The important is to be clear and truthful, since a powerful way to deliver a strong employer brand is through your current or former employees.

Employees’ advocacy is one of the strongest means to deliver and establish a reliable employer brand. Nowadays, social networks and Internet in general, allow personal communication between jobseekers and employees. These latters, in fact, are seen to be impartial sources of opinion and storytelling.

Making promises of high benefit level and not keeping up to them will decrease motivation and increase mistrust towards the company from the inside. This will reflect on the outside reputation of the company as employer.

Including quotes or comments from employees about benefits, culture and values is a good tactic to enhance the reliability of the company statements. And, again, this can work for every company: from the startup with less than 5 employees to the multinational giant with more than 10K employees.

It is straightforward that these pillars, “be clear, be truthful, trust your employees’ advocacy”, should be delivered and communicated in a uniform and coherent way.

This is why we decided to include in our latests companies’ pages a section dedicated to teams. Here jobseekers can see who they might work with and, through social networks such as Linkedin and  Twitter, they can even start to know them, therefore enhancing the power of a good employer branding strategy.