We headed to World Employer Branding Day in Lisbon this month. Founded in 2015, World Employer Branding Day set out to create a vision to advance excellence in employer branding practice, allowing companies from around the world to share their insight. From big names such as Microsoft, Unilever, Mars, Vodafone, Barclays and many more you are able to discover a world wide view of their employer branding knowledge. This conference brings together over 650 people allowing you to be able to discover techniques, ideas and theories to improve and create your Employer Brand. Here are our key takeaways.
Employee storytelling is important
To get the real company culture experience, employee storytelling is a great way to display an immersive experience into your workplace. Engaged employees inspire stories and reinforce the culture, which allows candidates to become engaged in your cultural experience. Culture evolves and creates important experiences for employees so that candidates and workplaces can react. Enabling your company to become it’s own character and showcase values and personality.
Telling stories about situations which are harder to express in the form of a graphic or text is a great way to get your point across. Some of the most popular stories Stories Inc have displayed is their benefit of hybrid / working from home. For many this is a benefit they desire, however showcasing this to make it exciting and accessible to potential candidates can be tricky. By telling a story to display this benefit through team meetings, home working and a good work/life balance. Organisational storytelling is a method for surfacing important cultural moments that impact your people and using those stories to engage targeted audiences. To make a story compelling you need to give a real insight into the culture at your workplace whilst being specific and personalised. Your story must paint a realistic, authentic picture so that candidates can get a true understanding of what it is like to work for you. Through this you are able to project your company personality to candidates.
Culture is the new brand currency
Landor and Fitch discussed how this world has changed more for talent and employees in the last 2 years than it has in the last 10 years. Essentially, there is no better way to use your work platform than for action. Culture is the new brand currency. A role is now more than just the tasks you do, it’s about how you feel working there. Company culture has to reflect personal culture, which would spotlight equity and inclusivity. With today’s technology advancements you should use this to enhance your brand as a way to communicate this to the wider community. Brand-led culture is a lived experience that begins before hire and goes beyond exit, which is something to bear in mind when creating your culture.
Unlock an authentic people led brand
Defining a people led brand allows candidates to see the brand from the inside out. Finding what makes you unique and pushing this through your brand is a great way to stand out from the crowd. You need to be authentic and clear with this vision, so that anyone engaging with this brand can see that its values and beliefs are real. From here it means you can engage more meaningfully with candidates and customers so that they are involved in the brand from the get go.
Omnichannel approach
Showcasing your Employer Brand through multiple channels is the perfect way to get maximum reach. By utilising multi platforms allows candidates to see your company at different touchpoints. You can use these different channels to communicate your brand in different ways. Companies are now using Instagram to show images of social events, office life and wellbeing days. Through an instagram account you can monitor engagement scores of which are performing better than others to increase your brand awareness. As well as posting about what is currently happening in your company, news and updates, these photos can be spread across other social media platforms. Each company should try to be on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter to grasp a further reach. Social Media Strategist Jeff Bullas reports that posts with photos receive an average 37% increase in engagement.
Create foundation that employees can shape
Every business purpose and values are malleable. As the business grows it changes year on year, so don’t worry about having an architecture in place that will never be changed. If you set out to have achieved something and that is achieved, thaen setting your next milestone and ambition is a great way to grow as a company. Being able to shape your brand as new employees join means that it will be constantly authentic and a true reflection of who you are.
This is what we find really exciting! This year’s event saw over 750 employer brand industry leaders gather from across the globe, with 45 different nationalities in attendance! More and more companies are beginning to invest in employer branding at a strategic level and understanding how it can help them to attract, engage and retain great talent. A huge shout out goes to Brett Minchington and the Employer Brand International team for putting on such a fantastic event – excited to see where 2020 will be held!
To find out how you can improve your Employer Branding further, get in touch with a member of the team today on 01244 739 350 or email us at [email protected]!
