Photos: Photos of employees, teams, innovations, company picnics, and so on are a simple and proven way of attracting more views and comments.
❯❯ Video clips: YouTube, Snapchat, and other social channels make posting video easy. Short, captivating video clips often go viral. Deloitte pioneered the practice through its Deloitte Film Festival, encouraging employees to post short video clips in answer to the question, “What’s your Deloitte?”
❯❯ Games: Simple game mechanics incorporated with more traditional content can be highly effective in attracting and engaging the talent your company is looking for. This may include tests, challenges, competitions, or visuals that indicate progress through a series of steps.
In addition to posting content on your own online properties, consider posting in relevant forums you don’t own, like Medium, Tumblr, GitHub, Facebook, and other platforms. When you’re engaging with talent online, become an active member of the communities they belong to.
Spreading the Word through Various Channels
With a compelling EVP, distinctive brand framework, and engaging content in hand, you’re ready to start promoting your brand and reaching out to key target prospects. Where you choose to share your content depends on where you’re likely to reach the talent you’re looking for, but you have numerous options, including the following:
❯❯ Company career website/page: At the very minimum, you should have a company career page with job postings and a way for interested prospects to submit applications online. A step up is to have a separate company career website or a section of your company website devoted to career information and jobs at your company. (See Chapter 9 for additional guidance on building a company career website.)
❯❯ Company career blog: A company career blog is a great venue for sharing career information and insights, stimulating relevant conversations, and engaging with prospects. When you assign different levels of access to different users, you can set up the blog in a way that anyone and everyone in the organization can contribute content and engage with prospects. Perhaps best of all, blogs often draw the attention of search engines and earn higher-than-average search rankings.
❯❯ Social channels: You have plenty of options to engage with prospects on popular personal and professional social channels, including LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, and Pinterest. You can create your own company career account or page on most of these sites to establish a presence there and join various relevant groups where the targets you want to attract are active. (See Chapter 11 for more about engaging talent via social channels.)
❯❯ Job boards: Certain job boards automatically scrape company career websites and web pages to gather job postings. Others allow you to post jobs for free or for a fee. You have numerous job boards from which to choose, including the biggies – Monster (www.monster.com), CareerBuilder (www.careerbuilder.com), and Indeed (www.indeed.com). You can also find plenty of specialty job boards for a variety of talent, including sales, technology, and marketing.
❯❯ Search engines: You can leverage the power of search engine optimization (SEO) to improve your search engine rank and drive more traffic to your company career website or blog. You can also use search engine marketing (SEM) to pay for sponsored ads that appear in search results. Using the two together often creates a synergy with paid advertising improving your organic search engine rank.
❯❯ Programmatic: A relatively new option, programmatic automates the process of advertising placement through analytics. Primarily used for placing online advertising, programmatic is expanding into traditional media, including TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines.
❯❯ Traditional channels: Traditional channels, including newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, and even billboards, can still be effective tools in recruitment advertising and building a strong, positive employer brand, as long as they further the objectives of your employer brand strategy.
❯❯ College campuses and internships: Establishing a positive physical or virtual presence on college campuses is a great way to recruit college students, graduates, and graduate student. It’s so effective, in fact, that we devote an entire chapter to the topic (see Chapter 13).
Staying True to the Promise of Your Employer Brand
Common sense dictates that in order for promises to be of any value, they must be kept. Employees who feel as though they’re working for one of the best employers in the world are more likely to refer friends, family members, and professional contacts to the organization and sing its praises on social channels, such as LinkedIn and Glassdoor. Employees who are disappointed by their employment experience may start to think that the EVP and any new employer branding initiative is an empty promise at best, and a self-serving gesture at worst.
❯❯ Stress to the CEO the importance of creating an exceptional employment experience. The CEO must make it her personal mission to earn a reputation for being an employer of choice by shaping a healthy organizational culture and supporting a consistently positive employee experience. Ideally, the senior team should take the lead in launching the employer brand (including their key future commitments) and briefing management on what is required from them to deliver on the brand promises.
❯❯ Do more in a distinctly better way. Strive to continually do more in a distinctly better way for employees. Your goal is to create brand-signature experiences – elements of your company’s employment experience that make the experience unique and superior to that offered by organizations competing for the same talent. Brand-signature experiences are of value to employees and to the organization, but they also serve as constant reminders of the company’s culture and values.
❯❯ Take a customer service approach to HR processes. Manage the employee experience as carefully as you would manage the customer experience. Strive to make every important people management interaction (or touch point) with employees a signature experience and every stage in an HR process a consistently positive “on-brand” experience for the employee. Follow the customer service model practiced by most airlines, in which the customer experience is managed from the time the customer starts shopping for a flight until he boards and ultimately exits the plane.
Monitoring Your Employer Branding Success
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