In today’s highly competitive job market, your employer brand is vital. It’s the key to attracting top talent, retaining your existing employees, and distinguishing yourself against a backdrop of ever-increasing competition.
And, while a compelling Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and an authentic, attractive culture are both important parts of a world-class employer brand – for global companies, few things are more crucial to connect with candidates than personalized, localized messaging.
This means more than just writing job descriptions in relevant languages or using local imagery in your onboarding materials. For the best localized employer brand messaging, it’s important to tailor your marketing assets to the cultural sensitivities of local markets.
Imagine you were recruiting candidates in Japan. Because Japanese work culture tends to value collectivism, where a company is often viewed like a family, you would want to create content that centers around your team members and company culture.
However, this ‘team-focused’ recruitment strategy likely wouldn’t spark the same interest with American job seekers. In this instance, you might speak to this region’s individualism by highlighting employee perks, learning and development opportunities, or flexible working options on your adverts.
Respecting a culture’s unique nuances is essential for attracting and retaining top talent. It shows them that your company values their specific requirements, rather than pushing ahead with a generic, one-size-fits-all message for your global workforce.
But what more does localized employer branding do for your company? And how do you actually implement this in your marketing? In this article, we’ll dive deeper into the topic of employer brand localization and show you how to get started.
Why is region-specific employer branding so important?
According to recent figures, as many as 75% of global firms have found it hard to get the right talent through the door. If you’re one of the thousands of employers in this difficult position, you’ll know that long-term vacancies can cost your business dearly in time, money and productivity.
To give yourself an edge in local talent attraction, regional employer branding allows your roles to better resonate with job seekers right out the gate. By wrapping your collateral in imagery or elements that speak to their culture or surroundings, you already demonstrate that your brand aligns with them directly.
This can help you fill your positions up to 50% faster, and boost your chances of securing a quality hire by as much as three times.
Plus, by engaging your existing employees with job materials that reflect their culture and location, you can improve retention internally by as much as 28%. Aside from easing the pressure on your recruitment and hiring processes, engaged workplaces can be 17% more productive and 21% more profitable.
On top of this, localized employer brand content lays the foundation for a more positive global reputation. Even if your internal employees and job seekers aren’t the target audience for your corporate branding, giving these groups a positive experience sends a strong signal to customers, stakeholders and other audiences in these territories.
How do you translate a global employer brand to local markets?
A localized employer brand strategy is a proven way of improving the speed and quality of your talent acquisition efforts. It can also empower your existing staff, enhance productivity and contribute to a trusted reputation.
But how do you unlock the full potential of this strategy? Like any employer branding initiative, the right approach is essential.
Understand your ideal candidates and existing staff
Before committing any time or resources to localized content creation, it’s important to understand exactly who your regional audiences are and what they stand for.
Do you want to appeal to candidates in a brand-new market? Are you trying to counteract high churn in a particular regional office?
Your objectives will dictate the look, feel and direction of your employer brand campaigns, so it’s important you have a clear picture of the employee personas you’re targeting from the very beginning. Without this, it can be impossible to know how to tailor job postings and employee engagement strategies to best resonate with the right people.
Plus, when you consider that every country has their own idea of work, culture, benefits and more, ensuring your adverts, onboarding materials and internal branding pieces are as impactful as possible relies on the insight you gain through these personas.
So, how do you create these crucial documents? At their core, your employee personas should ask:
- What region is my audience located in?
- What goals and motivations do they have?
- What are their key demographics?
- What personality traits do they demonstrate?
- What challenges do they face?
- What do they want/expect from a workplace?
Stay organized with robust Digital Asset Management software
Once you have a solid idea of exactly who you need to target, the next step involved in translating your employer brand worldwide is to prioritize organization.
The last thing you want is for an off-brand job advert to find its way into the hands of a potential candidate, or a new recruit to receive an outdated version of your onboarding package. Why? Because inconsistencies like this can shatter people’s trust, set false expectations, and undermine the good will your employer brand has worked so hard to build.
But, with potentially thousands of assets to organize across dozens of countries, keeping on top of everything can quickly become a full-time responsibility.
Here, a dedicated Digital Asset Management (DAM) system can be really helpful. Acting as a central, digital repository where every asset can be tagged, organized and easily accessed, getting the right materials in front of the right candidates becomes a simple, straightforward task.
Coupled with regional brand portals that house your local style guidelines, EVPs and exemplary assets, your provincial teams can get immediate access to the content relevant to their audience. This makes it faster and easier for your global departments to run effective recruitment campaigns, all while streamlining internal communications.
Invest in on-brand content creation tools
While giving your teams access to the right assets is an important part of delivering a locally-tuned employer brand, if you operate in multiple territories, chances are you’ll have a long list of different audiences to create collateral for – and the time, resources or capabilities to deliver only a fraction of it.
Coupled with the inconsistency that can arise when your decentralized teams begin adapting your core assets (or create their own materials altogether), it’s clear to see how content production is one of the greatest challenges for delivering a locally-relevant, globally spanning employer brand.
And with signs suggesting that the demand for collateral is only going up, how do you and your teams deliver employer branding at scale in the long term?
In our view, the right on-brand content creation tools are invaluable. By giving your central and frontline personnel the ability to swap out things like imagery, copy, colors and more in a matter of clicks, as the core facets of your brand guidelines remain fixed, smart templating technology can streamline production in a big way.
In practice, this means your central marketing departments can prepare core materials on budget for every region, all while your locally-based teams have the tools to create or tailor assets to their target markets without undermining the consistency of your brand.
Plus, with ease of use central to most content creation tools, anyone across your business can produce the materials they need, freeing up your marketers and creatives to focus on fleshing out your employer brand strategy.
Put simply, the right solution can revolutionize the way you deliver collateral to candidates and colleagues around the world.
Inspire your existing employees to become advocates
Another great way to translate your global employer brand to local communities is to use employee ambassadors.
It doesn’t matter if you’re conducting localized hiring drives or spreading awareness of your presence in a new market. The bottom line is, people trust employees significantly more than companies themselves.
So, who better to offer first-hand insight into your workplace than your regional team members? Their unique access and authenticity can demonstrate specifically how your workplace reflects the cultural nuances of the area.
This can give talent a clear picture of life at your organization, form genuine connections with people in the area, and ultimately attract candidates to your career site.
Furthermore, by getting your staff to play a more active role in your employer brand and rewarding their efforts, you can encourage your teams to stick with you for the long term.
Ready to realize the full potential of your employer brand?
As the competition for talent intensifies – and job seekers become increasingly discerning – successfully recruiting and retaining talent demands a local approach to employer branding.
However, with each country having their own cultural traditions and expectations to honor, crafting and coordinating content that resonates with each of these audiences is no easy feat.
By putting the insights we’ve covered in this article into practice, we hope you’ll have everything you need to reshape your employer brand into one that connects with candidates and colleagues from one region to the next.
