3 Characteristics of Compelling Employment Branding

by Allison Reilly

employment brandingAn employment brand is just like the brand that's associated with a company and its products and services. The only difference is that an employment brand is meant to engage employees and potential employees to work or to stay with the company, instead of encouraging someone to make a purchase. Your employment brand is ultimately what your employees and potential employees think of you as an employer. If you're not communicating your message well, or if you don't have a solid positioning statement outlining your organization's values, then what your employees think about the brand will be very different from you what think it is or ought to be. Here are three characteristics of employment branding:

Have a Content Strategy

Most organization's promote their employment brand on social media, on the company website, at networking events, and other online and offline outlets. No matter the channel, you will need content to promote your brand. Therefore, you need to have a content strategy, the idea of how to help your target audience/employee become smarter and better informed. Content strategy isn't necessarily about getting people to apply or telling your target audience what you want them to know. Content strategy means telling your auridence what they want to know in ways that are credible, transparent, and trustworthy. You need to tell them the information that matters to them.

Make Your Employees the Hero of Your Brand

Just like how your company should be doing this with its customers in the stories that it tells, your organization should also make the employee the hero of the employment brand. The point of the brand is to hire and to retain the best, so if you have the best employees doing this, then tell their stories! When did they start? Why do they stay with your company? What do they love best about working there? Why should others work with your company, in their opinion? These testimonials go a long way with potential candidates, but also go a long way with employees because it shows that you appreciate the time and hard work they put into your company.

Allow Your Employees to Build Individual Brands

I used to work for a marketing company that had required its entire internal marketing team to have the same work description & title on their LinkedIn profile. Not only is that boring, but it robs each of those employees of building an individual brand on LinkedIn and using the network to make connections that could ultimately benefit the company. After all, if someone wants to get into touch with the marketing team at this company, and everyone has the same cookie-cutter description for what they do, then how is this prospect supposed to know who to contact?

The employer brand is built on the brand of individual employees. Individual employees are your most unique asset. Matt Cutts from Google is a perfect example of this phenomenon. He's built a great individual brand as an SEO guru, but by building this individual brand, he's also become a knowledgeable, welcoming, helpful face for Google as a company. Imagine if Cutts was forced to promote himself the exact same way on social media as his employees! Cutts wouldn't be able to carve the niche that he has and represent his employer in the way that he does if couldn't differentiate himself online, even if he did do the exact same work duties as his coworkers.

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