Employer Branding For Dummies - Richard Mosley

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an EVP workshop. Run your workshops as brainstorming sessions to explore research findings, gather insights, and generate ingredients needed to formulate your employer brand’s core positioning statement and pillars.

      ❯❯ Clarify the give and get of the employment deal. What does the company need from employees and what is it willing to offer employees in return? Think beyond financial compensation.

      ❯❯ Balance strength and stretch. An effective EVP reflects current strengths but also incorporates realistic future aspirations.

      ❯❯ Differentiate your company from its competition. Far too many companies take a “me too” approach to employer branding. Be distinctive by offering your employees a unique experience and then marketing that experience in a creative way.

Establishing employer brand guidelines

      A brand’s impact is primarily a function of standout and consistency. Brands need to catch people’s attention and maintain that attention within a crowded environment through a clear and consistent identity. Employer brand guidelines (commonly referred to as the brand framework) help to maintain a consistent look, feel, and overarching message that differentiate you from your competition. The brand framework commonly includes the following:

      ❯❯ EVP: The EVP establishes the key ingredients of your employment offer, particularly the elements that distinguish you from your key talent competitors.

      ❯❯ Company logo(s): These guidelines generally cover how and where the company logo is presented within typical digital and print communication formats, including websites, advertising, brochures, and presentations.

      ❯❯ Design elements: Guidelines for design elements cover graphics other than the logo, such as background texture, line style, white space, and color blocks, that must be consistent in order to reinforce brand recognition.

      ❯❯ Color palette and fonts: These guidelines establish the range of colors and fonts suitable for brand communication.

      ❯❯ Photography: These guidelines may specify a range of acceptable images to be used when communicating the brand or, more loosely define, a recommended style of photography (with illustrative on-brand and off-brand examples).

      

Your brand must be consistent to build reliability and trust but flexible enough to adapt to different target audiences and changes in candidate and employee preferences over time. A brand framework generally accomplishes this goal by preserving the core while allowing changes around the periphery – closer to where the core meets the audience. At these touch points, the brand must flex to address the unique needs of each talent group.

Giving your target talent a reason to tune in

      When your goal is to build a strong employer brand, the worst that can happen is that the talent you’re scouting for doesn’t care enough to visit your company’s career website, check out your list of job openings, or submit an application. You need to give them a compelling reason to tune in and engage, and that reason comes in the form of relevant content that the heads you’re hunting deem valuable in some way – educational, entertaining, engaging, enlightening, or perhaps all four.

      

As you strive to attract and recruit the best talent for your organization, keep in mind that content is king. Here are a few content categories to stimulate your imagination:

      ❯❯ Employee profiles: The last decade has experienced a significant increase in employee-focused content, as opposed to content primarily focused on the company. A wide range of profiles are possible, including the following:

      ● Job profile: A story in which an employee presents her unique perspective on her position within the organization, including her responsibilities and typical “day in the life” challenges

      ● Culture profile: A story that captures the attitudes, values, and behaviors that everyone in the organization shares (or ideally you would hope should share)

      ● Passion profile: A story in which an employee is given creative license to reveal his personality and outside interests and show how these resonate with his work

      ● Hero profile: A story about an employee who overcame a significant challenge with the encouragement and support of the organization

      ● Team profile: A story of how the collaborative efforts of two or more employees within the organization achieved something neither of them could have done on his own

      ● Inside stories: A backstage pass that gives prospects a behind-the-scenes look at what really goes on in the organization

      ❯❯ Facts and figures: Cold, hard data that’s relevant to the audience and can’t be found anywhere else is often enough to draw the attention of the right people. For example, you could include your average annual investment per employee in training or the number of employees working outside their home countries. Infographics are often a great way to present data in a more accessible and appealing format.

      ❯❯ Photos: Photos of employees, teams, innovations, company picnics, and so on are a simple and proven way of attracting more views and comments.

      ❯❯ Video clips: YouTube, Snapchat, and other social channels make posting video easy. Short, captivating video clips often go viral. Deloitte pioneered the practice through its Deloitte Film Festival, encouraging employees to post short video clips in answer to the question, “What’s your Deloitte?”

      ❯❯ Games: Simple game mechanics incorporated with more traditional content can be highly effective in attracting and engaging the talent your company is looking for. This may include tests, challenges, competitions, or visuals that indicate progress through a series of steps.

      

The best content is often free. Posting on blogs or discussion forums often sparks active discussions in which the participants generate content for you. Consider posting questions or introducing relevant issues for discussion and allowing others to create content for you. If you own the blog or forum, be sure to monitor it closely to ensure participants treat each other respectfully.

      In addition to posting content on your own online properties, consider posting in relevant forums you don’t own, like Medium, Tumblr, GitHub, Facebook, and other platforms. When you’re engaging with talent online, become an active member of the communities they belong to.

      Spreading the Word through Various Channels

      With a compelling EVP, distinctive brand framework, and engaging content in hand, you’re ready to start promoting your brand and reaching out to key target prospects. Where you choose to share your content depends on where you’re likely to reach the talent you’re looking for, but you have numerous options, including the following:

      ❯❯ Company career website/page: At the very minimum, you should have a company career page with job postings and a way for interested prospects to submit applications online. A step up is to have a separate company career website or a section of your company website devoted to career information and jobs at your company. (See Chapter 9 for additional guidance on building a company career website.)

      ❯❯ Company career blog: A company career blog is a great venue for sharing career information and insights, stimulating relevant conversations, and engaging with prospects. When you assign different levels of access to different users, you can set up the blog in a way that anyone and everyone in the organization can contribute content and engage with prospects. Perhaps best of all, blogs often draw the attention of search engines and earn higher-than-average search rankings.

      ❯❯ Social channels: You have plenty of options to engage with prospects on popular personal and professional social channels, including LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, and Pinterest.

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