Five Major Employer Branding Mistakes and Tips to Avoid Them

Employer branding is one of the best mediums to attract top talent to your company. Every company today needs to have a strong employer branding strategy in place to kick start their branding efforts. But sometimes, the hiring teams fail to carry out these employer branding activities and end up making some of the major employer branding mistakes. This blog will tell you about these mistakes in brief and give you some tips to rectify them.

Why do companies need employer branding?

The recruitment industry has become more candidate focused in recent years. Job seekers conduct a background check on your company before sending in their applications. They wish to know about your company culture, the work environment, in addition to the perks and benefits you offer. They want to know about your company beyond what you say in your job description.

Employer branding offers the following benefits to your company –

• Strengthens your company identity
• Attracts the best talent to your job postings
• Delivers a great candidate experience
• Ensures lesser employee turnover and helps in retaining employees
• Promises the financial stability of a company

Employer branding in the recruitment industry today

Employer branding is a must for all companies today. You need to use your employer branding strategies to engage your candidates with your recruitment process and thus, your talent brand. With the talent market growing all competitive, there is a high possibility of losing the best candidates as well.

There are some common employer branding mistakes that companies do so frequently without knowing its consequences on their company brand. And, many recruiters and hiring teams are doing these mistakes without even knowing that they’re making them.

Owing to the competition to find the best talent, companies have now realized the importance of having a strong employer brand. They have started focusing on building their employer brand. To be great at employer branding, you have to do a lot more than just find the right candidates on social media.

You can portray yourself as an employer of choice by speaking about your company culture, the work-life balance opportunities you offer and other perks. You can also really boost your candidate engagement and your employment brand.

Employer Branding Mistakes You Should Avoid Making

Here are the top five employer branding mistakes that you should avoid making.

1. Lack of an authentic connection

Hiring teams who try implementing employer branding strategies often say one of the biggest problems is having an authentic connection with the candidates they’re targeting. It is a real issue because you are not only up against every single other recruiting team out there. But, you are also competing against these employer brands.

Candidates can also be considered as consumers. And on social media, it becomes extremely obvious to initiate and build a cordial relationship.

It is true that you cannot match the resources and strategies of big brands. However, you can go for building the human touch and a friendly relationship with your target audiences. Instead of just pushing out blasts about jobs, you can start by striking a conversation with the candidates.

Your job advertisement might look like any other job advertisement that candidates ignore on their social media. You can add some videos regarding your job in addition to adding a written job description.

By engaging candidates in a conversation, there are higher chances that they apply for your jobs and have a positive idea of your brand. Instead of trying to convince everyone to apply, build a connection with those that you want to apply. It will help you on a long term basis.

2. Not having an employer branding strategy

Employer branding should be an ongoing process. You should go about implementing it one step at a time. In order that your employer branding efforts are successful, you should first plan out your employer branding strategies. This is mandatory to maximize the return on your investment into employer branding.

Setting up your employer branding goals is not a complex process. You simply need to find out your goals and define your employer value proposition. Furthermore, you should plan out the ways how you will be carrying out the branding activities. You can leverage images, videos, infographics, PowerPoint templates, and more, and track your success.

Think about what success in employer branding will look like, whether it’s how many candidates a day you engage with, how many retweets of your recruitment post, and more. You can only improve your strategies if you know how they are doing.

3. Not monitoring your brand image

Employer branding is tricky because a brand that you have built up painstakingly over months can be destroyed in a few minutes by harmful allegations. For this, you need to set up a brand monitoring strategy so you know what your potential candidates are saying about your company – the good as well as the bad.

If your candidates are praising your company, look at them as a potential applicant. You can use some online tools or software that can alert you when people mention your brand. You should make sure you have someone that can get in touch with those people right away to increase engagement and enhance your brand image.

Your existing employee experience also plays a major role in this regard. You can request your team to write their review and experience working in your company. In addition to these company review websites, you can also showcase their testimonials on your career site.

4. Putting quantity over quality

One of the biggest mistakes many recruiters make is going for volume instead of quality. By putting out tons of social media content, you are not making an impact. Instead, your strategy is more focused on blocking out the competition. The only way this strategy would be successful is if you have a huge team of constant, original and engaging content that you can continuously post to keep your standards up.

To be more effective with your employer branding strategy, try to post less content and focus on high-quality efforts for employer branding. It will not only help you in getting candidates to follow you but also engage with your employer brand.

5. Not promoting shares

When you are a recruiter or an HR professional, you should be doing a lot more than finding the right candidates. You should boost your employer brand and expand your audience so you can appeal to even better talent.

Your goal should be to post content that will not only capture the attention of your potential candidates but also be engaged with the same. This includes likes or shares by your audience. Engagement on social media increases the chances of your post being seen by a larger audience, and hopefully top candidates.

Before you post something to promote your talent brand, ask yourself if the content you are posting is something you would be sharing by yourself. If your answer is a no, then you may want to review your content to make it more shareable and engaging.

Employer branding is not the easiest type of marketing to dive into. But by knowing the common mistakes that occur, you can improve your own strategy and find success.

Jobsoid offers some advanced tools and features to help you build an amazing employer brand. It takes care of almost all aspects of employer branding. You can also sign up for a free Jobsoid account and start streamlining your employer branding efforts.