Today’s employers are facing profound challenges as they seek to build organizations equipped to adapt with agility and innovate with vision.
Rapidly shifting consumer behaviors and fluctuating market forces have left many professionals reeling with uncertainty and coping with a sense of fatigue. Recruitment has become fraught as businesses grapple with diminished resources even as professionals demand more from employers than ever before. Attracting candidates who are positioned to usher an organization into the future is far from easy.
At precisely the moment when organizations most need an agile, creative and engaged employee body, it has become incredibly challenging to foster one.
For many companies, the answer to these myriad challenges can lie in a unified employer brand strategy — one that has the power to energize staff, establish a shared sense of culture, encourage alignment across functions and support the realization of key business goals.
How can organizations tackle these challenges?
1. Commit to a holistic employer brand strategy
Not that long ago, most companies considered employer branding synonymous with recruitment marketing. But in today’s era, with its fluctuating labor marketplace, skyrocketing worker expectations for authenticity, and candidate reliance on online employee reviews, companies can no longer afford to separate recruitment messaging from the reality that employees experience once they take the job. At KVA, we have always seen employer branding as a foundational piece of strategy — and today more than ever before it is essential to employee engagement, the success of core business initiatives, and effective change management.
2. Take an honest look inward to build your foundation
A comprehensive employer brand strategy geared toward employee engagement, external recruitment, and unified internal messaging can alleviate staffing challenges while serving as a springboard for internal efforts to ignite employee passion and alignment around key business priorities and initiatives.
As a first building block toward such a complete strategy, companies must first do an honest evaluation of what they have to offer employees, how that fits with the needs and wishes of their ideal candidates, what sets them apart from the competition, and what elements of their desired employee experience are more aspiration than reality. The answers to these questions can be used to shape an organization’s employee value proposition — or EVP — the most foundational element of any employer brand strategy.
3. Shape your strategy to match your business needs
Once completed, the EVP can be used to power impactful recruitment marketing campaigns. Strategy can be brought into further focus for high-priority functional areas through persona creation and the development of functional value propositions (especially useful for roles in high-demand areas such as software engineering and data analytics). For organizations addressing challenges in the DE&I space, targeted persona creation and diversity value proposition work can be used to support more equitable and effective hiring practices.
4. Create a virtuous cycle
Internally, the EVP can become a key tool for increased employee engagement and employee advocacy, especially when supplemented by engagement campaigns shaped to fit the specific challenges of an organization. When the EVP is shared effectively with leaders, it can help to power and define internal culture on a team-by-team basis. When communicated with employees at every level, it can help create a shared narrative that boosts morale, clarifies priorities, and establishes shared goals. This strengthens business outcomes and leads employees to become advocates and employer brand ambassadors — ultimately improving retention and boosting the recruitment efforts already underway — creating what we like to think of as the Employer Branding Virtuous Cycle.
Need an employer branding strategy that strengthens recruitment, boosts retention, crystallizes culture, engages employees and helps your organization reach its business goals?
