It’s one thing to create an enticing employer brand, one that cuts through the noise and captures the attention of top candidates in your industry. However, it’s another thing to know how this talent brand is perceived and the impact it makes on your target market. If your employer brand and Employee Value Proposition (EVP) don’t connect with your audience, then it won’t help your future recruitment efforts and could be a waste of time and effort.
In the current tech recruitment market, it’s harder than ever to connect with tech talent. Skilled tech candidates are approached by recruiters multiple times a day and so, employers have to work harder to stand out. This is where your EVP and employer brand come in; it’s what will set you apart from the competition, underpinning everything from your mission and values to company culture. Your employer brand is how people perceive you and what makes you unique in their eyes, and it shouldn’t be taken lightly.
When you unveil your EVP to the world, that is just the beginning. You must then work to leverage your talent brand both internally and externally, getting your current employees to believe in your mission and gaining prospective candidates’ attention. Doing so can not only help talent acquisition but employee engagement and experience. This is where tools like social media and digital attraction campaigns come into play, and more traditional brand awareness techniques for internal use; never underestimate the power of posters in the office!
However, it’s no use promoting yourself as an employer with no insight to inform your decisions; otherwise, how will you know if what you’re doing is working and gaining the right attention? How will you know if you’re sending the right messaging into the world? If your brand isn’t remembered and you aren’t receiving the applications you were expecting, it’s safe to say you may need to consider altering your EVP strategy including messaging and communications. Perceptions are everything.
In a competitive talent market, it’s time for brands to build and promote themselves as an employer but also to monitor their talent brand to ensure what they’re doing is working and cutting through the noise. This is the only way you will boost employee engagement internally and also attract leading tech talent.
But how can you monitor an employer brand’s success? Large numbers of quality candidates for your advertised roles can indicate that your strategies are working. However, if you’re not actively recruiting and are shifting your focus towards brand awareness, there are many metrics you can track, from website visits to email opens. But these metrics don’t tell us the true impact made and opinions formed by your employer brand communications. In fact, they tell us very little. Social media engagement can be an indication, but to get an accurate idea of what people think of your employer brand, recruitment market research methods may be the ultimate solution.
Conducting surveys and market research with focus groups of employees, candidates, and future candidates are becoming a crucial part of the employer branding process. To monitor how well your talent brand promotions have worked and how you are perceived as an employer, you need to have conversations and ask the questions; otherwise, you run the risk of wasting marketing budgets and not engaging the workforce. These insights can have many advantages and help you gain a competitive edge in attracting tech talent.
Know your positioning
When competition for tech talent is growing more and more fierce, it helps to know where you stand against the competition. In the same way, you’d like to know if your product is favourable amongst customers; knowing whether you’re an employer of choice for talent can give you a competitive edge and identify any areas for improvement. Weighing yourself up against the competition will help inform your employer brand and EVP activity and highlight where work should be done. For example, through surveys with relevant job seekers, you can identify whether candidates have heard of you and whether they’ve considered you as an employer before. If they haven’t and your competitors seem more favourable, you know that more work needs to be done. You can look into what your competition is offering their employees and establish a unique point of difference that will help you appeal. Then you can leverage this to win the battle for tech candidates.
Informs your digital strategies
Knowing whether candidates know about you and think of you as an employer they’d like to work for can inform your employer brand marketing and digital attraction strategies. For example, if you’re spending your entire budget on LinkedIn and your research still finds no one has heard of you, it may be time to adjust your strategy. Instead, you could try raising brand awareness on more general, consumer-facing marketing platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
Similarly, if tech talent has heard of you, but your survey reveals they don’t want to work for you, you may need to ask why. This may mean adjusting elements of your employer brand to show different aspects of who you are. Things like amending your campaigns’ focus to tell employee stories or focus on the technology behind the role can help change perceptions. Aspects of your digital campaigns like targeting, messaging and creative concepts need constant monitoring to ensure they are successful regardless of platforms. Continually optimising these digital attraction campaigns is the key to success, but these optimisations must be informed and backed by research; otherwise, they’re rendered useless.
Allows you to alter messaging
By monitoring perceptions of your employer brand, you’ll be able to gain an idea of how your current messaging is received. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, messaging can miss the mark. It could be that it doesn’t quite stand out enough to tech talent, or maybe it’s not highlighting their key priorities. Through employer brand monitoring, you can also ask questions about your messaging. You can ask both candidates looking for jobs if they’ve seen your ads and their opinions on the messaging and your internal employees, to check that your messaging is an accurate representation of the workplace. This means making informed adjustments to help portray your true, authentic employer personality.
Better quality of candidate
The right messaging will directly affect the quality of candidates that apply for open roles. If your EVP messaging is on point, you’ll attract candidates with not only the right skills but the attitude and dedication you need. The ultimate metric for measuring your talent brand strategy’s success is to assess the quality of candidates put forward. If you aren’t getting the quality of candidate you expect and applicants aren’t meeting your benchmark, it may be an indication that more work needs to be done. This is where monitoring your employer brand can work in your favour; you’ll be able to learn why these high-quality candidates aren’t considering you by benchmarking yourself against your largest competitors. You’ll realise if more work needs to be done to raise brand awareness and the changes that must be made to your talent brand strategy to attract quality candidates.
Helps to improve retention
Having a good employer brand can help to improve your retention rates amongst your employees. If your team can support our mission and see that you’re an employer many people want to work with, they’ll be more likely to stay with you long-term. Therefore, monitoring your internal perceptions regularly is imperative if you wish to maintain strong retention rates. Monitoring your talent brand internally ensures that your team is happy with you as an employer.
Your talent brand remains an authentic representation of what it’s like to work for you and identifies any discrepancies. Involving your employees in your talent brand, whether it’s the fundamentals or in the promotion, will improve loyalty, and they’ll think more highly of you as an employer. Therefore, put your people at the centre of your EVP and employer brand, have the conversations, ask the questions and monitor perceptions often. This will make sure your communications remain enticing and authentic. A misleading or exaggerated employer brand is likely to deter employees. They’ll leave you pretty quickly if you don’t live up to expectations, especially when tech talent demand is so high.
Talent Works are experts in building and leveraging employer brands within the tech space. As an employer branding agency, we are experts in making scaling tech businesses and more prominent, established names employers of choice for the brightest talent. With in-house recruitment, insight, creative and digital teams, we have the tools to create research-driven, standout talent brands and ensure they’re promoted to the right audience. If you’d like to discuss your employer brand strategy, contact our team to start a conversation.
