The scales are tipped in favour of candidates, meaning your employer brand takes on a new level of importance. How can you make your organisation stand out from the crowd? Adrian Cernat, CEO and co-founder SmartDreamers shares the best examples of employer branding to give you some inspiration.
Today’s job market is competitive. Like, really competitive. For the hiring company, that is.
With the scales tipped in favour of candidates, employer branding has taken on a new level of importance. There just aren’t enough candidates, and those who are looking to change jobs often have their pick of several competing offers to consider. How can you make your organisation stand out from the crowd?
Make sure your employer brand is top-tier.
The public, potential candidates, and active and passive job seekers pay attention to how your organisation is treating your people. Your organisation’s social media presence, and how you interact with them online, even how you react to criticism from both employees and the public plays a huge role in how your organisation is perceived. Not to mention how it looks as a place to work.
Smart organisations are getting ahead of the game by developing employer branding campaigns and strategies that take this new reality into account. Examples abound, of course, so we’ve narrowed it down to our four favourites. These are companies who understand employer branding and the impact it can have on their candidate pool, evidenced by the lists of people waiting to work for them when they announce a new job opportunity.
The coffee giant gets it right, starting with calling employees “partners.” Starbucks goes the extra mile with industry-leading benefits packages that include things like education stipends, parental leave, and health coverage for even the partest of part-time partners. They foster an environment that encourages creativity, promotes from within, and understands the service part of “service industry.”
They also understand social media, with accounts on Instagram and Twitter that are dedicated to HR and jobs-related posts. They make great use of their existing people, featuring them in testimonials, photos from partner events, and more. These accounts are also run by social media savvy marketers, as evidenced by their friendly, informative interactions with followers and the appropriate use of branded hashtags in nearly every campaign they run.
The longest standing company on our list (founded in 1909), L’Oreal shows that even the most well-established companies can learn to play by new rules. When they recently hit the milestone of 300,000 followers on LinkedIn, rather than trumpeting their success by bragging, they decided to showcase their people. L’Oreal tapped their massive talent pool and highlighted individuals by asking them to share, in their own words, their stories of life at L’Oreal. In this way, they directly addressed the estimated 70% of their followers who were looking to find a job with the business.
This campaign nailed one of the most difficult and often overlooked aspects of maintaining a corporate social media presence—engagement.
By posting employee stories, told by their employees, the company took the opportunity to engage with their followers, directing them to the individual’s profile when appropriate, or to the corporate careers page to encourage them to look for relevant openings. All of this combined to create more enthusiastic brand ambassadors, both inside the company, and out. Oh yeah, did we mention they featured these same individuals in video testimonials that they then cross-posted to Youtube and Facebook? Like we said, they get it.
Salesforce is another titan of industry that dominates the customer relationship management (CRM) software sector. For such a big player, they’re doing a fantastic job of adapting to the new recruitment reality by making excellent use of even the newest platforms, Instagram and Snapchat.
Professional photos with intelligent captions is just one way that Salesforce is winning recruitment marketing on these platforms. Branded hashtags go a long way toward helping them maintain their already stellar reputation as an employer of choice in this growing segment of the software world. Their use of Snapchat is so good, they’re even beginning to see applications come in based solely on their presence on that channel.
After being voted one of Glassdoor.com’s Best Places to Work in 2018, Hubspot’s social media presence came under intense scrutiny. Do you know what people found? A company that takes the time to listen to their employees, featuring their opinions and stories heavily in posts on almost every channel. They found a company that values company culture, and puts their people’s experience as employees above nearly every other priority. It’s this culture focus that Hubspot works to promote in their employer branding campaigns, and seeing as how they’re an inbound marketing company, they’re doing a pretty stellar job, we have to say.
Among other techniques they’ve pioneered, they use comments and feedback from their followers and the general public alike as launch points for future posts, videos, and even interactive content. This encourages new followers, because we all know how cool it is to see ourselves featured in a company’s content, right?
Employer brand matters. Glassdoor reports that 69% of candidates would refuse a job offer from an organisation with a bad online reputation, even if they were currently unemployed. That speaks volumes of the importance of cultivating and maintaining your employer brand on the various social media outlets as well as watching for and responding to feedback on job boards and review sites. A little effort delivers massive payback in the future. Expect to see increased interest in candidates applying for roles, following your accounts to keep updated on openings, and interacting with your organisation online.
These four companies understand the importance of their online presence and are going the extra mile to ensure they have a solid reputation. They’re using social media to present their employer brand, spotlight current employees, and interact with the public. These efforts are paying off big time, too. With scores of people applying for each opening they have, these organisations are not having any problems with a dearth of qualified applicants, avoiding a major pitfall of the current employment market.
Adrian Cernat is the CEO and founder of SmartDreamers, a platform that helps companies reach more, better candidates in record time by automating recruitment marketing activities to accelerate online talent acquisition. SmartDreamers was founded in 2014 and currently operates in Europe, the US and the APAC region.
Connect with Adrian
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AdiCernat
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrian-daniel-cernat-49b71714/
SmartDreamers: https://www.smartdreamers.com/