If you want to recruit the top talent for your business, you’d better give them a darn good reason to want to work for you. That’s why some of the savviest souls in talent acquisition are getting busy turning their employees into company advocates on social media and hiring writers, designers and videographers to spruce up their employer brand.
However, without the right focus, this sort of action could all amount to simply throwing money at the problem. If you’re looking to boost your employer brand with your content, you need to target the right topics – the topics candidates actually give two hoots about and might offer the right incentive to apply.
With 83% of talent acquisition leaders agreeing that employer branding significantly impacts on their ability to hire great candidates – according to the LinkedIn Employer Branding Playbook – what topics should you be focusing on in order to get the best bods for your business knocking your door down for a job?
Your ideal candidate
Just as your business designs buyer profiles to target its content correctly, you need to formulate a clear talent profile, defining the qualities, interests and qualifications you’re looking for in your employees. This will enable you to market content to specific groups and help you lure out the talent you’ve been looking for.
Some companies are already blazing the way with content that showcases their ideal candidates – just look at L’Oreal’s global careers homepage and the way the brand clarifies exactly what it’s looking for in candidates for every position. Tailored content such as employee profiles and interesting insider tidbits are then allocated to each of these areas with content designed not just to interest target candidates but make it abundantly clear what sort of person would be the right fit.
Your company’s culture
In order to land superstar talent, you need to be a superstar employer. More importantly, you need to use your content to showcase what makes your company’s culture stellar and what sets it apart from your competitors. Instead of flailing around aimlessly flinging out content that makes you look and sound halfway decent, it pays to make a plan, otherwise known as an Employee Value Proposition. This clearly lays out the beliefs and qualities that make you special – and not just special in the way your mother thinks your special but special to the candidate of your company’s dreams.
This might seem like the most obvious topic to cover in your employer branding efforts but you’d be surprised. Only one-third of managers in medium to large companies and a quarter of those from small companies said they focused on points that made them different to their competitors when defining their Employee Value Proposition, according to a survey of global employers by employer branding experts Universum. If you don’t want to let the best employees slip through your fingers and land in the hands of your competitors, you’d better bring out the big guns and show not only what makes you better, but what makes you unique.
Your company’s values
This is the age of Millennials, and Millennials are motivated by authentic companies with their values in the right place. According to The Talent Board’s 2015 North American Candidate Experience Research Report, the number one consideration applicants cared about was whether a company shared their values and objectives; 41.8% chose this type of marketing content to be the most valuable before applying to an organisation.
Heavyweight brand Adidas dedicate several sections on their careers page to content that shows their commitment to protecting the environment as well as diversity and inclusion. Be proud of and clearly emphasise your missions and values through your content to attract the candidates you’re looking for.
Of course, content creation is a time-consuming process – at least, it is if you want to get it right. If you’re tied up running your business, why not pass the task over to the professionals. And as luck would have it, we have quite a bit of experience in this area…