The Ultimate Recruitment Playbook — Chapter 4: Employer Branding & Personal Branding

*This post is part of our Serena Recruitment playbook:

• chapter 1 on Building an A-player organization
• chapter 2 on Candidate experience
• chapter 3 on Sourcing
• chapter 4 on Employer Branding
• chapter 5 on Tool & KPIs
• chapter 6 on Compensation

Now, here we are, at the 4th stopover of this ride, ready to spend some time talking about Employer Branding!

In fact, the balance of power between recruiting companies and candidates has started to switch in favor of the latter, and I do think it’s now companies’ turn to tell the world how cool it’s to work for them.

Thus, I couldn’t agree more with Frédéric Mazzella (cofounder of Blablacar) when he explains that “The development of a strong employer brand is your most powerful long-term lever” to attract scarce talents.

In the meanwhile, we also know that 56 to 75% of job seekers read about a company’s brand and reputation before they apply to an open position. Yes, that’s a loooot — and you’re probably one of them… at least I am!

Lastly, let’s be honest: crafting a strong Employer Branding is especially essential when your industry is not the sexiest. In fact, I do have many examples in mind of companies that are dealing with sectors that are really faaaaar from being super appealing (at least at first sight…) but which still manage to attract plenty of talents thanks to a robust Employer branding strategy.

In short: having a strong Employer Strategy is critical (even more for some than others), and the good news is that I have plenty of tips for you 🚀

Let’s get started…

The 5 key steps when building an Employer Branding Strategy

Obviously, there is no silver bullet, but here are the 5 key steps I recommend you don’t miss!

1. Analyze your company culture

Ideally, you want to start by identifying your key differences: what makes you unique from the others. For instance, Alan claims for its Radical Transparency, its Freedom & Decentralized Ownership.

To reach this goal, you have several options: survey, collective brainstorming sessions, face-to-face interviews… They’ll help you identify what your employees love about the company, but also the rooms for improvement you can work on.

2. Choose your tone of voice

A voice in marketing is an intention and a bias that takes place in a specific context. Having one will make you easily recognizable by your audience and enable you to create a conversational brand. For instance, not only BlaBlaCar relies on a powerful employer branding identity but also invents its own vocabulary that underlines its culture (BlaBlaBreak, BlaBlaSwap, BlaBlaEmployee, …). Whether you are the CEO, the Chief People Officer, the TAM and you don’t feel comfortable with this concept; do not hesitate to rely on your marketing team!

The important questions you need to ask yourself before starting:

3. Develop a Content Strategy to Promote your Employer Brand

To build a strong employer brand, you must craft a comprehensive, multi-channel content strategy to engage your target candidates. Just like a marketing strategy, think about your ideal candidate personas to help you create personalized content that will resonate with the value of your targeted candidates.

For instance, if collaboration is one of your key values, find a way to illustrate it through your corporate communication.

Your Employer Brand must be consistent and infuse all your internal and external materials (website, job offer publication, social media posts, oral/verbal startup pitches, and presentation regardless of your stakeholders, blog posting, position papers, blog articles, press releases). Every public communication is an opportunity to speak out and promote your corporate culture.

4. Leverage Social Media

Social media is a critical channel. LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook… are super-efficient tools to engage with your targeted candidates. You need to adapt your message to each channel but you don’t have to target the same persona in each channel.

For example, Doctolib targets mainly its customers on Linkedin and speaks mostly to targeted candidates on Instagram.

5. Test & Measure

How to measure the success of your campaign and/or strength of Employer Branding, when by definition a brand is immaterial?

• Check your review and ratings on Glassdoor: are there recurrent comments?
• Retention rate (different from natural internal turn-over)
• Source of hire to identify a privileged channel and intensify your effort in this direction
• Number of inbound applications
• Traffic (career) website
• Numbers of followers
• Engagement rate (number of Likes, Shares, Comments)
• Measurement of your employee satisfaction

When reading those 5 steps, you wonder how to implement them with no big budget or team to manage it? Don’t worry, you can start small, and rely on your employees — i.e you don’t have to do all the work by yourself 🎊

Employee Advocacy: relying on your teams to promote your company

Employee Advocacy is a way of involving your employees in defending and promoting their company and its brand on social media, thus turning them into ambassadors. If you tell me that Employee Advocacy sounds to you like the real-life translation of your employer brand… I’ll answer you got it right! ;)

Why do I recommend relying on it?

First, because you don’t need to be big or rich to start doing it (that’s the magic of social networks!). Second, because letting your employee speak for you is the most effective way to build your brand credibility and the most convincing way to attract new talents.

How to do so?

(1) If you don’t have established culture/values yet, focus on areas for which your company is extremely good at (e.g onboarding, candidate experience, leadership, quality of the missions proposed to your employees, etc.).

(2) leverage this key comparative advantage on LinkedIn. Here are examples of content you can share:

• your successes
• your own content
• new job opportunities
• content positioning yourself as an expert
• your experiences

A last few tips for the road…

1. Get no gap between employer branding promise and real-life employee experience. Be authentic!
2. Define your Employer Branding Strategy the same way you would think of your Marketing Strategy and involve your marketing team.
3. I will never repeat it enough but you don’t need to be rich or big to start building your Employer Branding. Rely on you (as a leader) and on your team to communicate positively about the company!
4. At the beginning of your Employer branding construction, if you have to focus on 1 unique social media: choose LinkedIn!

And here we are, you now have all the keys to craft a solid Employer Branding ;)

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