The importance of employer branding

The strength of your employer brand determines how well you can attract new employees, engage your existing team and prevent them from wanting to leave.

Beyond that, a strong employer brand can positively impact your entire business; from day-to-day operations right down to your bottom line.

Let’s break this down further:

🧲 It builds your pipelines and talent pools

Candidates will approach you to apply for your roles – therefore you won’t have to work as hard to go out and find them.

💰It saves you money

Firstly, because your attractiveness means you’ll have to spend less money to reach the talent you want in the first place and secondly because you’ll much less likely need to overpay a candidate to secure their talent.

🤝 It helps you deliver to customers

Now you’ve secured the talent you want, you’ve got more capacity, more competence and employees who are really driven to see your business succeed.

A negative reputation as an employer may even prevent customers from wanting to work with you in the first place. This is something we have seen among businesses during the pandemic, whereby the negative impact of poorly communicated decisions has permeated both employees and customers. News of poorly managed mass redundancies or company changes swept across LinkedIn and the media, leaving a sour taste in the mouth of former employees, potential candidates and current customers. A scarred employer brand affects much more than just candidates. Employees, customers and investor relationships are also at stake!

So, now that we have an understanding of its importance, what does a strong employer brand look like?

🎨 Personalised

Your employer branding content (social media, careers website, onboarding documents) should be designed specifically for the type of talent you’re trying to attract to your business. You need to speak the language of the talent you’re trying to engage.

To do this, you need to start by asking yourself who those candidates are. What do they want to achieve? What drives them? Build out personas for them, in as much detail as you can, and use this as the anchor for every piece of employee-facing content you produce.

🌱 Encourage training & growth for existing employees

Whilst external courses and accreditations for employees may not always be feasible, you can still foster an internal environment where learning and development are encouraged.

Ensure employees have access to a clear, detailed competency framework that shows them exactly what is expected of them, technically. Gather your company values and behavioural expectations into a single, centralised document or repository so your team can understand what is expected of them behaviourally. Check out FitXR’s Hub on Notion for a great example.

📱Stay active on social media

Utilise the enormous reach social media offers to tell the story of your company – Why do you exist? Then, alongside company posts, leverage your employees as advocates of your business and empower them to tell their own stories about your business and where it is taking them.

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Case study: evolving an employer brand with Feast It

During our project with Feast It we worked as true storytellers. We focused on helping them defining their brand message so that we could reach, attract and hire outstanding talent. We also worked on re-designing their careers page and rewriting the job descriptions to make sure the right message was being communicated. As a result we hired 6 amazing candidates, built a new interview process and implemented a new on-boarding strategy.

“We partnered with Canda over a period of three months, and in that time it was
great to see how much they were able to help us level up how we communicate
our culture and our hiring practices.”

Yousif Oghanna, Head of Finance

Read the full Feast It case study, including how we saved them over £11,000 and 75 hours’ hiring time, here