What’s standing between you and your ideal talent?
You could be sourcing in the wrong places, competing in a crowded market, or simply failing to attract the right applicants.
In our experience, it’s relatively easy to identify flaws in talent sourcing. But a less obvious, more subtle challenge that many growing businesses face is their employer branding.
Your employer branding defines how talent perceives your company, directly affecting the type of applications that hit your desk.
And thus, common employer branding mistakes can dismantle your recruitment strategy. So it’s crucial to avoid them. To help you out, we’ll go over the mistakes that are rampant and how you can protect yourself from them.
1. Having an identity crisis
Your brand is not for everyone. This holds true from both a customer and an employee perspective.
Your company will have particular values and a specific culture that shape its work environment. And when you set out to strengthen your employer branding, understanding what defines your company is vital.
It’s tempting to look at how your competitors are branding themselves, but it’s important to resist the urge to copy them. If your branding is a carbon copy of theirs, then what reason will talent have to choose you over them?
We see far too many companies overlook this foundational stage of employer branding, making it impossible to outline a clear value proposition.
The fix: outline a value proposition for prospective talent, just like you’d do for customers. Uncover what your brand uniquely has to offer, and project this message throughout your employer branding.
2. Not knowing who you’re looking for
Do you know who your ideal candidate is?
Organizations will never initiate marketing operations before documenting their Ideal Customer Persona(s) (ICP). But we find many functional recruitment initiatives that adopt a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach.
Unfortunately, this unfocused approach can harm your hiring efforts. If you’re not actively calling out to your ideal talent while discouraging unfit applicants, your recruitment funnel will suffer from unnecessary complications.
You’ll increase the pool of applicants, but the lack of a filter won’t improve the quality. As a result, your recruitment team will expend more time and resources on vetting applicants.
The fix: Outline your ideal talent persona(s) (ITP)
To outline your ITPs, you’ll need to consult (a) existing data and (b) your team. Some important points to include are:
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- Required hard skills.
- Required soft skills.
- Cultural fit. What qualities make a candidate a good fit for your company’s culture?
- Cultural add. What qualities is your team missing? What do you want to add to the existing culture?
- Motivations. Where does your ITP want to be in five years? What gets them out of bed every morning?
- Aspirations. What does your ITP want to achieve? And how can you help them meet their goals?
Moreover, by consulting existing data, you might find demographic overlaps that help you focus your talent sourcing efforts.
3. Not being authentic
Are you a fast-growing startup with a dynamic culture? Do you need self-starters who can eventually manage themselves?
If so, you’re not alone. Many growing businesses have fast-paced environments, just like corporate environments can be demanding. There will inevitably be talent that thrives in your company environment, as well as employees that won’t successfully integrate into your company.
And that’s alright – it’s normal, and job hunters expect diverse working environments. However, problems arise when companies fail to be authentic about their work culture.
If you project your company culture as self-paced and relaxed, the talent you attract will expect this culture. Thus, you may end up with hires that are not the right cultural fit, resulting in costly employee turnover.
And that’s how inauthenticity can harm your hiring efforts.
The fix: be authentic. It’s that simple. Your employer branding should accurately portray your company culture, so you can attract the right fits. To sum things up…
“If the reputation of a company’s products and services is its face, the talent brand is its heart and soul”
– Hank Stringer & Rusty Rueff (source)
4. Not involving your employees
Your employees don’t just know your work culture; they are the culture. This makes their input invaluable to the recruitment process.
Employees can help recruiters outline the necessary skills for a given role and evaluate applicants for cultural fit. They can even help you refine your job description.
Unfortunately, many HR professionals don’t engage department team members when planning their recruitment strategy. This puts your employer branding strategy at a severe disadvantage – by robbing you of inside insights. Insights that reveal why employees chose your company in the first place, and which factors swayed their decisions.
The fix: get your employees involved. Of course, it’s important for HR professionals to avoid relying on employees entirely. However, you should engage team members where possible and get their input on your employer branding strategy.
5. Failing to stay current
While your employer branding’s fundamentals will mostly stay the same, updating your strategy to keep up with evolving trends is essential. The changes brought by the COVID-19 pandemic are a perfect example of the need to stay up-to-date.
When the pandemic struck, businesses were forced to reevaluate their day-to-day operations and take most of their workforce virtual. Some organizations were more successful than others, but the need to adapt was apparent.
Now, many organizations realized the value of remote work and have proceeded to provide employees with flexible work options. Even companies that are not keeping fully-remote models are entertaining hybrid work.
Remote and hybrid work models are popular amongst modern employees, so it’s crucial for employers to keep up. If not, you might miss out on attracting the best talent.
6. Thinking short-term
If you treat employer branding like a short-term strategy, the results will be fleeting, too. Successful employer branding requires long-term preparation and consistent execution.
Unfortunately, many brands don’t think long-term. They don’t take the initiative to strengthen their employer branding across key channels, like social media platforms. They don’t launch initiatives to nurture their talent pools and build relationships with prospective applicants.
Instead, some organizations are caught up in viewing employer branding from a narrow lens. They treat it like a tool for propelling recruitment campaigns, and otherwise box it away for the next hiring initiative.
This shortsighted approach to employer branding not only reduces the effectiveness of your campaigns but also prevents organizations from reaping a crucial benefit; talent attraction.
Strong employer branding can bring talent to you, without you having to launch rigorous hiring initiatives driven by paid advertising. A solid employer branding strategy makes applicants want to seek out employment opportunities with you.
The fix: realize that successful employer branding is a long-term effort and make the necessary investment. Work on building your employer brand across key channels, nurture your talent pipeline, and improve your sourcing efforts.
7. Not embracing diversity
In 2022, there are two types of employers: ones that are hiring diverse talent for the sake of diversity hiring, and ones that have realized the need to create inclusive, diverse workforces. In an ideal world, most employers would be of the second kind.
Unfortunately, many companies still take a lax approach to diversity and inclusivity. And this approach is not sustainable. It’s not enough to allocate a diversity quota and launch recruitment initiatives to fill the roles.
Organizations must realize the importance of diverse workforces. Diverse teams cultivate a culture of inclusivity and invite different perspectives. They also make your work environment more appealing to external diverse talent, improving your sourcing efforts.
The fix: to create a truly inclusive, diverse employer brand, you’ll need buy-ins from the company leadership. After securing executive buy-ins, HR teams can launch necessary initiatives to create a more inclusive workforce by improving talent sourcing and hiring for cultural add.
8. Not measuring the right KPIs
It’s tempting for recruiters and HR teams to use HR metrics and KPIs to evaluate employer branding performance. Unfortunately, this approach is rarely accurate, simply because your HR metrics are influenced by several factors. And attributing success to a single factor is risky and invites inaccuracies.
Take a metric like your interview to offer conversion rate, for example. Your employer branding will undoubtedly influence this rate, but other factors will, too, such as salary and competing offers the candidate may have received.
Similarly, your employer branding can improve employee retention, but it will never be the sole influencing factor.
The fix: move beyond HR metrics and measure other KPIs that directly influence your employer branding. For example, you can collect social media talent engagement metrics from marketing and press recognition from communications. You can also conduct in-house surveys to determine employees’ perceptions of your employer branding.
Leverage an integrated strategy to build your employer branding
You might have picked up on a common theme among these employer branding mistakes; most of them can be reduced with external input. On an individual level, your employees can help you:
- Identify gaps in your employer branding
- Strengthen your value proposition
- Create a more diverse, inclusive workforce
- Refine job descriptions
And on an organizational level, marketing and communications teams can help you strengthen, propel, and measure the effectiveness of your employer branding.
Successful employer branding starts with securing executive buy-in and getting your employees involved. And as for where the process ends – it doesn’t. Nurturing your talent pools and adapting your employer branding is a continuous process.
So make sure you lay the right foundation.
