Written by

Frank Aneke

Brief overview: In my several interactions with key business leaders over the years, I discovered that many of them do not know much about their company’s reputation as an employer.  They readily complain about the challenges they face in attracting top talent to their business but seldom recognise the correlation between their company’s poor employer brand and its limited capacity to attract top-tier talent.

In this blog edition, we are going to explore five out of ten strategies small or large-scale business with authentic employer value proposition (EVP) could apply to boost their reputation as an employer of choice and improve their recruitment prospects. 

To begin with, employer brand is how an organisation brands and markets itself as an employer of choice with employer value propositions (EVP). What is EVP? Employer value proposition (EVP) is the articulation of a company’s purpose, vision, brand, benefits, and culture that creates an over-reaching sense of belonging and fulfillment of the employee’s needs even beyond their employment. Now getting the two definitions out of the way:

Here are five strategies that could help your employer branding:

1. Know Your Audience: In consumer advertising, companies present their products and services in a way that appeal to its customer needs. The same principle applies to recruitment marketing. To attract the right talent to your business, you must have a deep understanding of your target candidates needs and aspirations. The knowledge will enable you present your company and the role you need to fill in ways that align with your target talent career goals.

2. Crafting Effective Job Description: It’s very important to leverage employer value propositions (EVP) that repel many and attract few right talents in writing your job description.  One way to accomplish this is to clearly state the harsh realities and cultural norms you want prospective candidates to buy into when they join your business. (Note: I will do a blog on this topic in the near future).

3. Appraising Talent Media Preferences: There is a need to invest efforts in research of your target talent’s preferred media platforms. Being aware of their go-to media platforms will enable you channel your messaging directly to where they spend most of their time or their favourite online platform(s) for job hunting.

4. Creating an Outstanding Career Site: Your career website is the focal point for your employer branding campaign.  So, it is very important to ensure your career website shares your employer’s value propositions (EVP) and key objectives of your business.  From your business career hub, you can branch out to other online properties such as LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Twitter, and Job boards among others.

5. Tailoring Content to Target Groups: Now that you have a career website, writing branded content about your company and what a wonderful place it is to work is relatively easy but it may not resonate with specific target groups. Your content must reflect the true culture of your workplace and current employees should be encouraged to share their thoughts and experiences as well.

Having said all these, Business leaders and HR Managers must pay keen attention to their company’s online reviews on platforms such as Glassdoor, Seek, Indeed, and Google among others. If your company’s online footprints are not monitored, there are chances that could be one of the reasons why you miss out in attracting top talents to your business.

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In the next edition, we will examine the remaining five strategies in the topic: Ten Strategies to Boost Your Employer Brand (Part 2): Thanks for reading my blog.