8 Ways to Attract Top Talent with Brand Marketing

With unemployment reaching record lows across much of the world, hiring for vacant positions is becoming harder than ever before. Jobseekers are in a position to be much more selective and are overwhelmingly looking for more than just a paycheck when it comes to where they will be spending their 8 hours a day. More and more companies are therefore using brand marketing to attract candidates and not just customers. As a result, “Over 80% of leaders in the [LinkedIn 2017 Global Trends] survey acknowledge that employer branding has a significant impact on their ability to hire talent.”

Here are 8 of our top tips to help improve your brand marketing to make sure you stand out from the crowd and attract the best applicants to grow your team:

1. Have a Clear Mission Statement

Before you can convince people to come work for you, your company needs to know exactly what it stands for and have this clearly defined.  You will want to make this easy to find on your website so people will know what your company is all about. 

Whichever service you may be providing or whatever you may be selling, you need to show potential employees why they should care about your brand and entice them to spend a good portion of their day helping make the company better. Nowadays employees, especially the younger generations, need to identify with their work and ensure their values align with the company they are working for. Workers who can’t find meaning in their day-to-day are not going to stay around long. This will increase your turnover, ultimately costing you much more in recruiting and training.

2. Manage Your Workplace Satisfaction

How happy are the people at your company? Oftentimes, employees only share negative opinions about company culture, management, and policies in private settings, like with friends and family or anonymously online. Rather than risking these employees ultimately quitting and leaving negative reviews in public venues, like Glassdoor, solicit honest feedback from your workforce via anonymous surveys. This way you are preempting a negative public image, showing your employees that care about their workplace experience, and then using this feedback to find out where you can improve.

Not every business has the ability to provide free meals, pool tables, or on-campus gyms, but smaller, budget-friendly steps can be taken to improve company morale.  Something as simple as providing fresh fruit once a week can be enough to brighten people’s day.

3. Testimonials from Existing Employees

Happy employees will be your best brand marketers.  You can leverage your superstar marketing team’s skills to the max, but if your employees are not positive about your brand online, people will see your company culture branding as disingenuous. On the other hand, your most satisfied employees will likely be more than happy to share their experiences in writing or on camera for testimonials.

Take the time to find employees in different roles across your company who will share what they do and what they like most about working at the company. Have them throw in a few anecdotes to really highlight the uniqueness of your company. With a few short videos, you’ll have great material to promote your workplace when you next need to bring on new people.

4. Website UX and Mobile-Friendliness

Your website is the first place a candidate will likely go when they have applied for a position or received an invitation for an interview.  If your site is clean and clear, this speaks to the professionalism of your company and leaves the candidate with a good experience and thus, positive first impression of their potential future workplace.  However, if the user experience is difficult, with broken links, hard-to-read pages, or pop-ups, they might not have the best outlook when you meet them.

Additionally, while your desktop site may look great, make sure it is also optimised for mobile.  The majority of users access the internet on their phones these days, so you need to ensure your site is mobile-friendly for candidates on the go.

5. Careers Page 

Once you have the basics of your site covered and an About Us section where people can learn what makes your company tick, but don’t forget to have a separate Careers page as well.  Here you’ll be able to highlight all of the great benefits of working with you and post openings. This is a venue where you’ll have full control over your brand marketing. You can post some of the employee testimonials or even put together a short promo video about your workplace, staff, and company culture. This day in age, video is king and going beyond just written content will appeal to many more job seekers.

Include a section that lists what employees will gain from working at your company that goes beyond just the paycheck. Examples of this could be flexible work arrangements, upskilling and career progression opportunities, or company-sponsored team building events. 

Providing resources for potential employees to get acquainted with the hiring process and corporate structure will improve the candidate experience as well, allowing them to be more informed when applying.

6. Streamline your Hiring Process

Applying for jobs is incredibly stressful and time-consuming. If your company works to make this process simple and pleasant, even unsuccessful candidates will likely still have good things to say in their social circles about your recruitment practices.  

Providing feedback to applicants is the most important factor. Not hearing back, especially after a phone or in-person interview, is a major source of frustration for job seekers. Understandably, your hiring managers or recruiters are very busy people and cannot get back to every applicant. This is where automation can step in to help with volume responses to unsuccessful candidates.  

For those who have cleared at least one round of selection, providing a timeline of your process is a great second step.  Knowing if you’re looking to on-board over the course of the next two months will put a candidate at ease if they haven’t heard back within a couple of days. Alternatively, if you need someone to start as soon as possible, make sure the candidates are aware of this so they can plan accordingly to be available on shorter notice.

7. Social Media 

Once you have great content like employee testimonials or a promo video, make sure you’re broadcasting it far and wide! Few people will come directly to your site to research this. If you’re trying to attract great talent, you have to find them where they are–and that’s on social media. Most people already have jobs, so you need to reach out to this passive candidate pool.  They may be looking for the next step in their career, but they need to hear about you first. Sponsored posts will give your content a boost and public engagement on your posts will show that you’re somewhere people are interested in working.  

Don’t let social media just be for your customer base. Apply similar brand marketing tactics to attract the best talent available to come work for you!

8. Manage Your Corporate Online Reputation

By engaging on social media and other online platforms, you will inevitably face negative comments or posts by unhappy former employees.  You’ll need to respond to these sentiments in a way that shows you care and are listening, but without, for lack of a better term, “feeding the trolls.” There will invariably be someone out there who just gets a kick out of making other people angry, but as long as you don’t engage with them, they will eventually stop due to a lack of response.  However, not addressing any complaints is not a great tactic, as your company will be perceived as unengaged and uninterested. You want future employees to see that you have a positive company culture–that criticism is taken seriously and reviewed in order to make improvements in the workplace.  

Are you looking to grow your team? Why not join InstaHire and let us help you hire staff FAST?