What is Employee Branding and How does it work

With the revolution brought in by advanced technology, today's role in an organization is more prominent than ever. It’s not about ‘do your job and get paid,’ not anymore. The most important factor of a company- its reputation, is in its employees' hands, all thanks to the idea of employee branding.

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Do you know that for 84% of job seekers, the decision to apply for a job depends on its reputation as an employer? Also, it’s not just the candidates; around 96% of companies believe employer branding can impact their revenue.

Isn’t it fascinating to see that even a single unsatisfied employee can influence the reputation, brand images, and, above all, an organization's consumer trust?

What is employee branding?

Employee branding can be defined as an employer's reputation among its workforce, or in other words, it is about how your employees value you as an employer. It can make companies more acceptable in the talent marketplace, thus hiring and retaining talented employees matching your company's culture and values.

Okay, what makes it different from employer branding?

Employer branding is all about your organization's image or reputation as an employer, highlighted to in-house employees and potential candidates outside. In short, it communicates how great it is to work at your company.

That means we can say that both employer and employee branding are mutually connected. How?

A great employer branding strategy can attract great candidates, leading to great employees and better and natural employee engagement.

Employee engagement is the act of having employees appreciate their work, becoming more productive and active employees. Employer branding is how a company sells itself to potential candidates, the way that same company might sell its products. You might think these are mutually exclusive ideas.

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According to Careerarch, social media is the most utilized channel for employee branding, with 76% of companies using it. Also, 68% of new generation job seekers visit the employer's social media to evaluate the employer's brand, Facebook at the top of the list.

Other channels include employee referrals, print media, company reviewing websites, online communities, career sites, etc. You can use employees as brand ambassadors to execute your employee brand engagement ideas.

Importance of employee branding in the modern corporate world

Building a positive employer brand can help your business in many ways. Let’s see some of the benefits of employee branding in detail:

1. Improved online visibility

An employee's voice is considered to be three times more credible than the CEO's. So, word-of-mouth marketing by your workforce's positive online presence can help get better online visibility for your company brand in the digital world. This can help in increasing the organic traffic in your online channels. This can help in getting your brand assets out there as well as increasing the organic traffic in your online channels. You can use free tools to check your organic traffic.

2. Improved employee engagement and performance

It’s not always about getting potential candidates. A better employee branding means an excellent working environment, career advancement, personal development, etc., to your current workforce, thus improving their productivity.

3. Better talent pool

Employee branding helps organizations recruit the best talents from a large talent pool of interested, potential candidates. According to the LinkedIn Global Recruiting Trends Report, around 80% of talent acquisition managers say that employer branding significantly impacts hiring great talent.

4. Lower employee turnover

By focusing on employer branding experience, companies can achieve a 28% decrease in staff turnover. How? As we discussed earlier, you will get to hire qualified candidates, the best of the best. This will reduce the chances of replacing them anytime soon.

Also, to become an employee-friendly organization, you can create a strong employer-employee bond, which will further reduce the chances of them leaving for a better opportunity.

5. Lower per-hire cost

Having a negative brand reputation costs companies at least 10% more per hire. Because a bad brand reputation equals a bad work environment, it is important to have positive employee branding since the current employees' referral and positive feedback can provide you with a ready-made talent community, ready to get hired.

Employee Branding Strategy - How is It Done?

The right employee branding techniques or strategies can improve the performance of your company. Here we are going to see how it is done.

1. Identify Your existing employer brand

The first step towards building employee branding techniques is to have a good understanding of your brand. This will give you an idea of the existing employer brands, its present challenges, improvements needed, etc. This will help you to work on your company’s unique value proposition.

How important is UVP for a company? It defines what makes your business unique. These short but effective UVP statements will help both the team members and consumers to understand your core values.

2. Conduct an employer brand audit

Now ask your internal and external research on the employer brand. You can conduct surveys, feedback sessions, one-to-one meetings, etc., with existing employees and new candidates, etc., to know how well they understand its visions, mission, and values. Also, do social media searches, read feedback and reviews from other websites too. This is a key part of employee branding techniques.

Netflix, one of the best online streaming companies globally, is a great example of listening and treating employees as valuable assets.

3. Come up with a unique employee value proposition for your brand

Next, using these insights, you have to develop a brand new unique value proposition for your company. EVP basically represents what a company stands for, needs, and offers as an employer. It is a key factor in Employee branding since it is a marketing message and a promise made to your employee, explaining what works and whatnot.

4. Educate employees about your brand

Educating employees about your brand will transform them into brand ambassadors, who can add value to the whole employee branding techniques you are looking forward to fulfilling. Please provide them with internal brand training sessions to raise awareness and recognize the brand’s vision and goals so that they can be on the same boat as yours.

5. Get support from the current employees

For job seekers, the main source of getting information on your brand, culture, and value is from the existing employees. 50% of professionals say they won’t go for an organization with a bad reputation, even with a pay rise. So, how to make your employees in favor of employee brand engagement ideas of your company?

You can offer learning and development opportunities, offer a special payout for achievements or best referrals, or organize community events for this purpose, thus making the workforce share their positive experiences in the company.

An example of providing skill development opportunities for employee branding is an executive-led training program offered by AT&T on subjects like management and leadership in partnership with Udacity to fast-track their careers.

The employee-orientated culture of Salesforce is one of the best examples of this. They leverage the employees to share diverse and inclusive posts that cover content from cooking experiments, performance awards, family milestones, and staff events.

Another example is the #InclusionStartsWithI campaign launched by Accenture. They came up with a video featuring their employees' diversity-related struggles, especially in an era in which discrimination of all kinds prevails.

6. Optimizing your hiring strategies

4 out of 5 candidates say that the candidate experience they receive while the hiring process is a sign of how a company values its people.

So, you have to ensure that the potential applicants have a smooth onboarding process. Make them excited about future roles and related opportunities, right from the start. This will help in interested employee brand engagement ideas in the long run too.

Digital Ocean, a cloud infrastructure service provider, sets the best example of how to make the onboarding experience better for a candidate. They have added a ‘candidate resources & help’ page in their career section. It is basically a guide on what a candidate should expect at the interview, with some commonly asked questions and answers. Interesting, right?

Are you looking for an employee engagement solution to increase your company’s productivity? Empuls can help you build a workforce that is engaged and motivated with affordable plans that scale with your requirements.

Share testimonial videos, fun posts, photos, and slideshows through various channels like social media to tell your employee's stories, preferably by the employees. A study by Weber Shandwick, a global public relations firm, shows that 98% of employees use at least one social media site for personal use, of which 50% are already posting about their company. So make the best out of that for employee branding by trying out various employee brand engagement ideas.

Want to learn more about employee branding ideas? Learn from the best. The best example of this strategy is the tech giant Google itself. The facilities, benefits, and other perks offered by Google to their employee perks are something that inspires talented jobseekers to dream about working for them.

Swiggy is yet another Indian start-up with a great LinkedIn presence where they display glimpses of life at Swiggy and encourage employees to engage. Check out the invitation to a performance by B Minor, a music community, of Swiggy employees or ‘Swiggsters’ as a part of the Swiggy Communities Unwrapped series.

And Most Importantly...

Today it’s all about being ‘in the front row.’ The same goes for the reputation of a company, in which employee branding plays a major role. So, try to communicate with your employees about what your organization stands for- your values, vision, mission, goals, and their role in it.

2/3 of recruiters predict that the importance of employer branding in their organizations will rise in the next 12 to 24 months. That is, nowadays, companies are more interested in employee branding than employee branding. This dramatic shift from the ‘idea of creating a perfect working place where employees love to work’ in to’ transforming the working space in a way employees like’ will make some heavy changes in the way businesses work in the future.

Give some time for the employee branding ideas to get implemented. This way, you can hire top talents, improve your existing employees' efficiency, and reduce salary spending, ultimately increasing the overall productivity and revenue.

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