Together with your ideas, the employees represent the foundation of your business and brand. They are the force that keeps your business moving and contributes to its growth so choosing the right employees is essential for success.
However, if talented and laborious people don’t apply in the first place, your careful choosing won’t make a difference. This is why you need to act proactively and attract the people with skills and education your business can benefit from. And to achieve this, you need to offer something in return, so here are a few strategies to build an employer brand appealing to that particular group of people.
Assess the current state of affairs
Before you come up with a sound plan of action, you first need to analyze your current situation. You have to know some basic data concerning the number of people that quit your company during the last year, as well as those that were made redundant by your management. Talk to the HR team to see what were the reasons behind both of these scenarios and take note if some particular reason was reoccurring.
For a more unbiased perspective on things, you need to look into online reviews. Naturally, there is a chance of them being false due to their anonymity, but they can still offer important insights into your company culture that you may not be aware of. Once you know the good, the bad, and the ugly things your employees and trainees think, it is time to get down to the business of improving the situation.
Include social media to your strategy
Social media has long ago become an inseparable tool in your marketing efforts to attract customers, but they can also be used for attracting quality workers. After all, we are all online whenever we get the chance so it makes sense that your future employees will be checking your brand’s social media profiles to get a sense of your offer and how it would be working for you.
Posting images on social media without any strategy doesn’t work when you want to win over customers so it will not work on your (future) employees either. This is why many brands leave their employer branding strategy to experts who know just the right mechanisms to present your company culture in the best light across social media. Besides that segment, they can also take care of the strategy from beginning to end if you need them to.
Offer development opportunities
While older generations lived in a world where getting a job was difficult which is why they held on to it tight, newer generations have significantly more employment options. This means, among other things, they don’t want to work somewhere where they cannot learn and develop their skills. In short, they want to have enough opportunities for growth.
If people know that you as an employer give your best to offer your employees additional training and education, you will attract hard-working and talented people. The reason behind it is simple: when you are considered as a good employer who offers a lot to its employees, you can afford to accept only the people that would fit into your company culture. Such people should be meticulous and value your investment in their development.
Improve internal communication
It is hard enough to attract the right people, but the question is how to make them stay? Bonuses, increases in salary, and opportunities for development are all fine reasons to stay, but there is another one that is often overlooked by employers – internal communication.
Your employees need to feel comfortable enough to report any kind of inappropriate behavior or harassment and to know exactly who they need to speak to. The more your business grows, the difficult it is to oversee such things so it is essential to create an atmosphere of trust. In addition to that, it is imperative that everyone communicates internally because that is the only manner for employees to remain productive and to feel comfortable in their working environment.
Create an employee advocacy program
As mentioned, your employees are the most important asset of your business because they are the ones that get your business going. If you worked hard to make them satisfied with their job and the company culture, why not leverage the positive attitude they have towards your brand?
What you can do is make an engaging blog post or snap a photo of the atmosphere during a brainstorming session and put it on social media, prompting your employees to share it. Mind you, this mustn’t be compulsory since that would defeat the purpose. Instead, stand back and simply observe the effect of your investment in employee satisfaction. It goes without saying that this kind of recommendation, from one employee (current) to another (potential) means more than any gaudy job advertisement.
Over to you
Each of these strategies can prove useful in your endeavor to attract and retain quality employees but the key is to be consistent. It is not enough to follow them only while there is an empty position to be filled in. Building an employer brand is a long-term process because you want for the bright hard-working individuals that come to your company to remain working for you in the year to come.
Guest Author, Raul Harman, s a B.Sc. in Innovative entrepreneurship and has a lot to say about innovations in all aspects of digital technology and online marketing. While he’s not enjoying travel, football and great food, you can find him on Technivorz.com.