How to improve your employer branding | 4 steps to create an irresistible employer brand

Are you looking to sweeten the pot when it comes to attracting the best possible talent for new vacancies, while simultaneously ensuring your current staff are proud of where they work? If so, you need to focus your efforts on improving your employer branding, and we’ve got 4 actionable steps you can take to get the ball moving today.

Your employer brand is essentially how you as an organisation are perceived by the workforce: both your own workforce of employees, and at large by potential jobseekers.

Consider the extremes of the employer branding spectrum. If you’re achieving carbon neutrality and delivering amazing opportunities for your staff (and publicising it through the appropriate channels), then that’s gangbusters for your employer branding; if you have high turnover, poor relationships with suppliers, and impossible workloads, then it’s fair to say your employer branding is in the toilet.

Most companies sit somewhere in the middle, but even if your company is objectively the best place in the history of jobs to build a career, if you’re not promoting why that’s the case, you’re missing out. In modern society, the value of working for a socially responsible company can carry a lot of weight, both for jobseekers in their search for who to align themselves with, and for existing employees debating whether or not you’ve earned their loyalty.

So, if you want to create an irresistible employer brand, here’s how to get started…

1. Audit your company’s current employer brand

The first step is to assess your company’s performance in 4 key areas. Those are:

• Work-life balance
• Work environment
• Career and training opportunities
• Corporate social responsibility (CSR)

The first 2 areas look at whether or not people are happy working at your company, and whether or not working at your company is viewed as sustainable in the long-term. If there are opportunities to train and progress, it means your company is a place where people can develop within your organisation. If you have any CSR projects in place, such as green policies, or initiatives to eliminate cruel or irresponsible practices from your supply chain, how much impact are they having, and how good a job are you doing of promoting them? Is everyone onboard?

You can get a good picture of these areas by utilising a number of techniques. You can check platforms like Glassdoor and Indeed to check for company reviews, monitor social media sites for mentions of your organisation and see what’s being said, and customise Surveys to canvass employees, your social media followers, and even job applicants as part of your recruitment drives.

This can be gamified, both by utilising the Survey format in the Drimify catalogue, but also by customising a more playful gamification experience to engage employees in a branded experience, and including an open question in a data collection form asking them for their assessment of issue X or Y, or even for their general impression of the company.

Following this first step lets you assess if you already have an employer brand worth shouting about, or if you’ve got work to do.

Pro tip: You always have work to do. Some sort of audit of your employer brand should occur at least annually to check everything is on track and make any adjustments.

2. Redefine your unique selling proposition and use it to inform your employer value proposition

When it comes to their place of work, people like clarity. This applies as much to their day-to-day duties as it does to understanding what their place of work does, how they fit into the bigger picture, and what it stands for.

Take what you learn from step 1, and look to ensure your brand has a clearly defined identity. Without pause for thought, you need your staff to be able to say: “This is what we do. This is why we do it. This is why we’re the best. This is how I contribute.” A clearly defined mission and clearly defined roles are easy to get behind.

The ways to achieve this are to first look at your unique selling proposition (USP). Is it still accurate? Does it need to be improved or updated? Once that’s clear, you can create or update a mission statement and company values that support and celebrate your USP. From these, you can determine your employer value proposition (EVP). In short, EVP is a soapbox upon which you show potential candidates, “What’s in it for me?” Yes, this includes salary, but it also includes benefits, training opportunities, potential progression, and being part of an organisation that does X, Y, and Z to be socially responsible.

3. Look to deliver value-added gamified training, and where possible, opportunities for progression

Regardless of the size of your business, there should always be opportunities for training and development for your staff. You don’t hire people and expect them to be static in their knowledge and skill level. You expect them to improve, and to diversify and specialise in line with operational requirements.

If your business is big enough, or is growing, you should also look at providing opportunities for career progression within your organisation. People want to go to a place of work where there’s room to grow, or at least an opportunity to develop their skills and learn new things.

Pro tip: Gamification is incredibly effective when it comes to creating workplace training courses. This is because it’s interactive, autonomous, and plays on people’s competitiveness and curiosity to improve learning outcomes. You could look to use the Dynamic Path™ format to create multi-level courses that pose different scenarios through Quizzes, text, and audio-visual content, to both educate and assess employees in all sorts of areas.

This method of training is incredibly efficient, as it can work on everyone’s individual schedules, and be distributed whether employees work on-site, or remotely. The gamification approach to staff training is also less labour intensive to produce and administer as once a course is created, it can be played through again and again by hundreds of staff, and updated as necessary. By contrast, someone administering training to a room of 10 to 100 people would cost far more in labour, and involve them delivering the same lessons over and over again for different cohorts.

4. Make an employer brand road map

The first pro tip was: “You always have work to do.” This is because whether you’re just starting to make employer branding a focus, or your employer brand is already well developed and promoted to good effect, it should keep evolving to reflect your organisation and your people.

It’s important to remember that developing your employer brand takes time, so you should be patient and committed to your objectives, and invest in the process. It’s a habit, not an act, a result of consistent actions as opposed to a big overhaul or one-time effort.

You want to create a road map regarding your employer branding objectives, and communicate your targets and your progress as part of your internal and external communications.

Pro tip: Transparency and honesty is key in developing your employer brand. Communicate your achievements, aspirations, and progress honestly for best results.

Key takeaway

Employer branding has never been more important, both for cultivating loyalty among your employees, and for attracting new talent in an increasingly competitive recruitment market.

You need to connect your brand to the aspirations, the values, and the well-being of your employees and prospective employees.

These 4 steps are actionable starting points for any business looking to develop their approach to employer branding.