Josh Greatrix
Josh is VP of our US recruitment team and is obsessed with bringing better standards of talent acquisition and recruitment support to the US facilities management market.
Think about it. Unless you’re already a global brand, there’s a very good chance that when a recruiter tells a candidate about a job with your company, they’ve never heard of you. Or they know nothing about what it would like to work for your company.
When you’re competing with 4 or 5 other organisations for their attention, what you want is for them to easily understand what your company is about and why it would be a great place to work.
And that’s where your employer brand comes in.
Your employer brand has several different jobs to do:
- It enables your recruiter (internal or agency) to articulate quickly and clearly who you are and what you’re about.
- It gives your candidates confidence that they’ll be happy and fulfilled while working for you.
- It explains to a far wider audience (which includes a great many potential or passive candidates for the future, as well as customers, clients, end users, etc) your particular USPs, your personality values and internal culture.
- It shouts about your successes, lifts and celebrates your current employees, and helps build peoples’ pride in the company they work for.
So employer brand is a pretty important thing to get nailed.
Ignoring employer brand opens you up to some risks too. For starters. you risk losing great candidates to companies that are better known or have better websites. The competition for talent is fierce. And more than ever, people are looking at workplace culture, diversity and inclusion, charity work and environmental strategies to help them choose their next career step.
If you want the best talent to choose you over your competitors, you need to talk about these things as often and as authentically as you can.
If you want to attract the next generation to your company, not investing in your employer brand would be a huge mistake. We’re always talking about how facilities management needs to attract a younger employee base. Millennials and Gen Z are more driven by culture and wellbeing than the generations before them. For them, it isn’t an optional extra.
What are the steps to getting Employer Brand right?
It’s fair to say that getting this wrong can be a pretty costly mistake, as most people can spot inauthentic employer branding a mile away, and even when it’s not obvious, you only have to look at what happened at Brew Dog to see that the truth always comes to light in the end!
So here are 5 tips for getting your employer brand right:
1. Get buy in from everyone
From the CEO right through to the frontline workers, everyone is equally important when it comes to employer branding. There needs to be an agreement across the board that everyone is pulling in the same direction, and that the messaging is right for every level of the organisation.
2. Honesty is the best policy
Don’t pretend to be something you’re not. It’s a waste of time and you’ll be found out eventually. If you’re a polished, corporate, office based environment, don’t pretend to be a laid back set up that’s relaxed about wfh. You don’t need everyone to like your style of doing things – you need to attract the people that will compliment your ways of working.
3. Find out what the current perception is
Ask around, check review sites, do some social listening. It’s important to know what people think about your brand currently, so that you can understand what areas you need to address or correct, and what gaps need to be filled in the information that’s out there.
4. Understand what your ideal employee personas are
What are the skills, characteristics and personality traits that your ideal employees have. By this we don’t mean “hard-working” – everyone wants hard-working employees. We mean things like empathy, or motivational skills, or the ability to talk the hind legs off a donkey. Once you have a clear picture of the kind of people you’re looking for, it’ll be easier to work out how to attract them.
5. Decide on your non-negotiable USPs
What is it that makes your company your company? What is it that sets you apart? What are those traits, values and behaviours that, if you removed them, you’d no longer be the same company? That is the core, the beating heart of your employer brand. You can build everything else off of those things, but those things must remain at the centre.
Obviously, this is just the start – getting your employer brand right takes patience and perseverance, but it’s so worth it. Get it right, and you won’t just be widening yout talent pool – you’ll also see your retention rates rise, and you’ll likely begin to see your sick days decrease. Win-win!
