Maintaining a top-notch employer brand

A major component of any successful organization’s employer brand is how adaptable, resilient, and constantly evolving it is to address the marketplace and to meet the needs of your employees. While it’s never a good idea to change things just for the sake of changing them, top employer brands need to be checked, tweaked, and maintained.

World Employer Branding Day Canadian Country partner, Bluivy Group provides a few simple ways to ensure your employer brand is consistently performing its best.

Develop an ongoing employer brand strategy

There are a couple of things to consider while developing your employer brand. Firstly, great employer brands are rooted in emotion and real-life experiences, and the same employees that bring emotion and real-life experiences to your organization are ultimately the ones who tell your story best. Secondly, a truly genuine employer brand begins with internal buy-in and then the word spreads organically. Many companies think they can develop an employer brand once and forget it. It is those same companies that usually fail to attract and retain top talent. You must carefully formulate your employer brand and then nurture it.

Understand your threats and how you’ll address them

When asked about his training philosophy, Michael Jordan said that “My attitude is that if you push me towards something you think is a weakness, I will turn that perceived weakness into a strength” and we all know how Michael Jordan turned out. It’s not a stretch to say his advice pays dividends when applied to your employer brand. Identify your weaknesses, develop a plan to address them, and before you know it, what once seemed like a pain point will become an area of strength.

Solicit ongoing feedback

There are four key groups you need feedback from to ensure your employer brand is set for ongoing success: leadership, current employees, potential candidates, and customers. Your leaders should value the same things your employees do, and they need to play a continuous role in engagement, productivity, ambassadorship, customer loyalty, and corporate performance. Your current employees should easily be able to identify why they come into work each day, beyond the paycheck—an internal survey is a simple, anonymous, and effective way to do this. Figure out what your customers appreciate about their experience with your organization, and distill that into a single reason why they should refer you to their friends and family. If you can’t put this into one sentence, try again –it’s too complex. Lastly, potential candidates give a window into why they’re interested in your organization, and why they plan on accepting or rejecting an offer of employment. Again, surveys are very effective credibility checks for your employer brand, providing you with opportunities to make further tweaks.

Pay attention to your reputation

Research with over a thousand Millennials across North America in 2015 uncovered that close to 80% of them use employer rating sites in their job search activities. This isn’t necessarily to find new jobs—rather, it is to get the inside scoop on organizations from former and current employees. Employer rating sites act as a proxy for employees to publicly share information they wouldn’t normally share, acting as a litmus test for an organization’s EVP. While you can’t regulate what people write about you, a Free Employer Account will let you make basic edits to your company’s profile page, flag content you feel is inappropriate or uncalled for, and most importantly, will give you the ability to respond to reviews of your organization. As any politician knows, anything posted online can be retrieved years down the road, so it’s a good idea to proactively maintain your employer brand online.

To join 200 leaders at World Employer Branding Day click here