Mistakes are important. They help us learn, grow and improve over time. Unfortunately, many brands fall into the same bad habits in their attempts to attract, recruit and retain an evermore sophisticated wave of graduate recruits. 

At the same time, today’s graduates can access and assess potential employers more closely than ever before – researching company culture, values, career development opportunities and more in a matter of clicks.

Repeating the same mistakes with your graduate brand prevents you from engaging this fresh, hungry generation and losing top talent to your competitors. To help you better tap into the graduate talent pipeline in an increasingly fierce job market, this guide will help you steer clear of common blunders. 

As a company with years of experience empowering organisations worldwide to unleash their employer brand, below we outline 4 major graduate recruitment mistakes and our top solutions to avoid them.

Graduate recruitment mistake #1: Not understanding your audience

The core of a strong employer brand is knowing your audience. What are potential new hires looking for from an employer? What do they know of workplace culture? How do they like to be communicated with?

These questions will encourage very different answers, depending on the age, experience and background of whom you ask. A graduate fresh out of university or college will have different wants, ambitions and tendencies than someone who has worked for 2 or 3 decades.

So, to ensure you connect with the next generation of candidates, you must tailor your employer brand strategy to meet their expectations. And for that to succeed, you must understand what Generation Z wants from employers.

What do today’s graduates look for in an employer brand before applying?

Today’s graduates are firmly Gen Z, a generation that is estimated to make up 27% of the global workforce by 2025. They’re as digitally-driven as it gets – the first generation that doesn’t recall a time before the Internet was widely available.

As such, how Gen Z consumes content and judges an employer’s reputation is far removed from those who came before them. They are hypervisual, resilient and less entitled – and have preferences that modern organisations must prioritise in their graduate recruitment campaigns:

Gen Z candidates want transparency over salary

While Gen Z is less single-minded on salary than past generations, they still want to be paid fairly and well. 65% of Gen Z candidates say that pay transparency is one of their biggest motivators for applying for a job, so you should make this prominent in any job descriptions and adverts you share.

Gen Z candidates care about workplace diversity and inclusion

Today’s graduates prioritise a diverse, inclusive work environment more than generations before. According to research by Monster, 83% of Gen Z candidates say a company’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion influences who they apply to, and 69% are more likely to apply to jobs where the employer branding reflects an “ethnically and racially diverse” workforce.

Beyond this, graduates also have strong feelings toward sustainability efforts, environmental practices and social responsibility initiatives, and want to work for companies whose values align with their own.

Gen Z candidates are tech-savvy

Gen Z has been brought up on smartphones and social media, so employers must focus on these devices and channels to reach graduates on their level. But beyond this, Gen Z also cares about the quality of technology they’ll use in their job – 70% of these employees would leave a current role for one offering better technology.

Gen Z candidates want flexibility

Work-life balance is one of the major concerns of graduate recruits. Gen Z candidates are 77% more likely to check a vacancy that mentions “flexibility” than one that doesn’t, while 72% of Gen Z employees have either left or considered leaving a job because their employer didn’t offer a flexible work policy.

Gen Z candidates want to learn and grow in a role

Finally, Gen Z is conscious about upskilling and evolution. 67% of younger recruits want to work for companies that actively teach skills to advance their careers, so promoting learning and development programs in your employer branding is a powerful incentive for today’s graduates.

The solution? Tailor your graduate recruitment strategy

Taking what we know about graduates, Gen Z and their employer preferences, you should use this to craft a distinct employer branding separate from your other campaigns.

For example, graduate recruits typically want to see diversity and inclusivity, so ensure the imagery of your campaigns makes this immediately apparent. They want career development opportunities? Dedicate a whole section to this on your recruitment website or brochures.

By tailoring your graduate brand around this audience’s priorities – adjusted according to your specific industry and company values – you are far more likely to leave a positive impression on top candidates.

Graduate recruitment mistake #2: Failing to use the right marketing channels

As mentioned earlier, Gen Z is the most tech-savvy generation to date (until Generation Alpha enters the workforce in a few years). Old-school approaches to promoting roles and your overall employer brand are becoming less and less effective – advertising in newspapers is hardly effective when 46% of graduates apply for jobs on their mobile phones.

Where you promote your employer brand is just as crucial as how you promote it, so you must consider the right channels to get your message across.

Social media is a standout example. 95% of the UK’s leading recruiters in The Times’ Top 100 Graduate Employers utilise social media in their talent attraction efforts, while over 50% of college grads use LinkedIn to research graduate job opportunities.

Videos are another powerful tool to connect with graduates. With Gen Z having grown up on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, video content stands out as a powerful way to communicate your messages in a way they actively enjoy.

But these aren’t the only ways to successfully reach modern graduates – also consider:

• Creating a dedicated portal or page on your website dedicated to graduates, highlighting the perks and information that resonates with them
• Attending university career fairs and campus engagement events, where your representatives can speak to interested candidates one-on-one
• Developing graduate internship programs that allow them to understand your company culture and help you assess their potential
• Using online job platforms such as Glassdoor, Indeed, Monster and more that graduates readily turn to when seeking out opportunities
• Distributing brochures and leaflets at local universities and colleges to offer something different and more personal to today’s digitally-centred recruits

Furthermore, make use of your existing employees where possible. Younger candidates are far more likely to believe the experiences of a current employee when researching an employer than the employer themself.

Clever usage of employee testimonials, interviews and videos on your recruitment feeds can help graduates truly understand your work environment, and inspire graduates to examine your opportunities more closely.

But this poses a problem – with so many social networks, forums and channels you can use to reach graduates, how do you maintain an active presence on these while staying within time and budget limitations?

Investing in a powerful employer brand platform can empower your teams to produce high-quality assets for all potential digital and physical channels remarkably quickly. With smart, predefined branded templates, your teams can produce content faster for every touchpoint, giving you greater coverage for your graduate recruitment for much less effort.

Graduate recruitment mistake #3: Inconsistent branding

Today’s job-seeking graduates know the importance of protecting their own online presence. 70% of employers use social media to screen potential hires, so top recruits understand they must keep a clean, unproblematic image on their profiles.

Similarly, modern companies must take the same sensible approach to communicate a clear, unified and consistent image across every recruitment channel they use.

Think of your employer brand as your promise to potential recruits and existing employees. Any inconsistency or deviation in this image can quickly erode the confidence and trust of your audience. This costs you applications and sends top candidates to your competitors.

What causes breaks in brand consistency? There are multiple reasons, but some of the most common include:

• Departments and locations working in silos, resulting in individuals misusing your graduate brand or making errors, which over time will cloud your brand’s identity
• An overreliance on external agencies, who are not as closely tied to your employer brand, causing misinterpretations
• An abundance of recruitment channels can cause inconsistencies to creep in – having one look on your website and another at a campus presentation can create a disconnect

You never want potential candidates to get the wrong impression of your mission, values and company culture, or perceive your employer brand as chaotic or disorganised. Brand consistency is key to building trust, so how do you maintain this?

A central home for your employer brand guidelines

Establishing a distinct online destination for everything that dictates your employer branding – brand guidelines, colour palettes, your Employer Value Proposition (EVP) – means everyone responsible for producing your campaigns can refer to this whenever necessary.

Developing a true brand hub keeps your content consistent and aligned according to your core identity.

A single source of truth for your digital assets

Next, investing in Digital Asset Management (DAM) can give your teams worldwide access to a dedicated library of approved, on-brand assets, imagery, videos and beyond.

Again, this provides a single source of truth for your graduate recruitment collateral, so your campaigns never deviate from your brand message.

A collection of locked-down design templates

Using templates does more than accelerate asset creation; it also ensures certain elements such as your logo, design elements and imagery are formatted correctly on every new asset produced.

This provides a robust framework for your teams to work within, and means they can adapt content inside these bounds to translate your employer brand to local markets.

Having these as part of one comprehensive brand management solution boosts your efforts to attract top talent across the globe.

Graduate recruitment mistake #4: Having a poor onboarding process

Imagine this – you’ve successfully attracted a hungry, motivated graduate to your team, and they passed their interview with flying colours. The hard work ends there, right?

Wrong. The recruitment process may be over, but your graduate brand must still work hard to nurture a sense of belonging within your latest recruit.

Especially because Gen Z is a generation of job-hoppers. 83% of Gen Z employees describe themselves this way, while over 22% of workers aged 20 and older spent less than a year at their jobs in 2022.

Retaining top talent for the long term is a persistent challenge, and starts with your onboarding process. This sets the tone for new arrivals, and a negative experience can instantly have them eyeing the exit door.

Poor onboarding experiences may also hinder your efforts to attract graduates in the future if someone shares their negative experience online. On the opposite end of the scale, a positive onboarding experience is estimated to improve retention rates by as much as 82%.

So, what steps can you take to enhance your hiring process with effective onboarding?

Establish company mentors and “work buddies”

Entering the workplace is a daunting prospect for many graduates. Providing a mentor or buddy can help them ease into this transition and allow them to settle in far sooner.

Plus, it helps build a community within your organisation, providing your graduate hires with reassurance and familiarity from the outset.

Provide everything they need from day one

No new employee wants to arrive on their first day flustered about what they’re doing or where to go. Ensure new hires feel comfortable from the get-go by preparing everything they need to get started, including:

• Setting up their workstation
• Printing off all required paperwork
• Organising all login details and entry cards they need
• Presenting them with a schedule or calendar
• Creating a dedicated employee handbook

Invest in introductory videos

As we highlighted earlier, Gen Z is much more accustomed to video as their preferred form of content. Creating accessible, repeatable videos that explain your company culture and your new hire’s responsibilities helps them understand your business sooner, while allowing your existing employees to focus on their tasks.

Introduce new hires to relevant training programs

Finally, demonstrate that you’re invested in their career development by setting them up with training programs and courses related to their work.

By giving new hires access to these learning courses, they will feel more empowered to deliver for your organisation. Your company benefits from a more motivated, skilled employee, while they form a more positive impression of your brand.

Support your company’s future with a great graduate brand

Your graduate brand is an integral part of your organisation’s long-term strategy. Ensuring you can consistently attract, engage and appeal to the next generation of candidates is key to a sustainable, lasting workforce – so it’s vital you get your campaign execution right.

By dodging the mistakes above, you go a long way to stealing a march on your competitors to seal the services of top, up-and-coming talent. Applying the techniques and strategies we’ve outlined, coupled with effective brand management software and a solid recruitment team, you can keep yourself firmly in the focus of young, aspirational job seekers.

If your talent acquisition challenges extend beyond your graduate recruits, find more excellent tips to attract and retain top professionals in our ultimate guide to employer branding.

With job seekers increasingly selective about who they work for, it’s impossible to overstate the importance of a strong, consistent employer brand.

It’s your unique selling point against a wave of competition. Your window into your company culture. Your vehicle to excite and build trust with potential candidates. Simply put, it’s the heart of modern recruitment, and something that demands a great deal of attention.

Fortunately, today there is a plethora of software, tools and platforms designed to streamline your efforts, unite your global teams and maintain a consistent, regular flow of content to recruits and employees.

In this guide, we break down 18 standout tools you should be paying attention to in 2025, so you can activate your employer brand with complete confidence.

18 employer branding tools to check out in 2025

1. Papirfly
2. Rally® Inside™
3. Canva
4. Seenit
5. ChatGPT
6. Recruitee
7. Jobbio
8. Cliquify
9. Social Sender
10. Sociabble
11. Brandfolder
12. Employer Brand Index
13. Olivia by Paradox
14. Pathmotion
15. Greenhouse
16. TalentLyft
17. Monday.com
18. Ongig

All-in-one employer branding software

1. Papirfly’s brand management platform

Papirfly’s brand management platform empowers you with the tools to create and communicate your employer brand in one comprehensive solution. 

This platform offers numerous features to unleash your employer branding on a global scale, including:

• A dedicated online brand portal for your employer brand guidelines, Employer Value Proposition (EVP) and other key documents that define your brand’s identity
• A comprehensive, industry-recognised Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, allowing you to store and share on-brand assets for your recruitment campaigns
• Intuitive design templates that enable fast, cost-effective content creation without any risk of breaking your brand guidelines
• The capacity to rapidly adapt assets for local markets with the right language, imagery and cultural nuances to connect with job seekers globally
• Collaborative, easy-to-use campaign execution tools that keep your marketing activities aligned and well-coordinated

2. Rally® Inside™

Rally® Inside™ is a similar employer branding platform that employs real-time data and best practices to develop campaigns that attract and retain top talent.

Allowing you to identify and engage with potential candidates wherever they are online, Rally® Inside™ also helps you understand the topics that resonate with your target audiences. This can play a role in focusing your employer brand strategy around your specific goals and ambitions.

Plus, it’s free for a single account user, making it a good entry-level option for smaller employer brand teams with limited budgets.

Employer branding content creation

3. Canva

One of the world’s most recognisable names in content creation, Canva’s wide range of templates and design tools empower your professionals to produce high-quality graphics to support your employer branding efforts.

From infographics and visual storytelling assets for your digital channels, to presentations and posters to inspire your existing employees, Canva can help you maintain brand consistency and generate engaging campaigns for your audiences.

4. Seenit

Did you know that job postings with video content receive 34% more applications than those without it? This makes tools like Seenit incredibly valuable, allowing you to collect, create and distribute user-generated video content from your employees, customers and beyond.

By encouraging your employees to submit video testimonials, behind-the-scenes footage and clips that showcase what it’s like to work at your company, you can develop a library of employer brand videos that capture the imagination of ideal candidates.

5. ChatGPT

As AI continues to evolve and expand our horizons, ChatGPT can greatly speed up the production of written content across your employer brand campaigns, from feeder text on your social posts to job descriptions and email marketing.

With effective prompt engineering, you can train ChatGPT to write in your precise tone of voice, allowing you to go from raw notes to brand-consistent first drafts in minutes. Especially for teams with no dedicated copywriter or content agency, this can feel like a new member of your team.

Employer brand career page development

6. Recruitee

Recruitee is a tool that promises to reduce hiring times and increase the reach of your recruitment campaigns. This includes the ability to create a dedicated careers page through their tried-and-tested templates, empowering you to present a strong employer brand to desired candidates with little effort or coding skills.

Furthermore, Recruitee allows you to automatically post job listings on the most active job boards, including Indeed, Monster and Glassdoor. This again eases the recruitment process, and ensures your ads are where they need to be to attract top talent.

7. Jobbio

Rather than a careers page, Jobbio encourages its users to create a company channel. Similar to a social media channel, this approach lets you create a distinct profile, share employee-driven content, and gradually build an audience of relevant candidates.

From this channel, you can directly communicate with followers to maximise employee engagement, as well as create an unlimited number of job ads targeted around your ideal candidates’ skills, experience and preferences.

Employer brand social media management

8. Cliquify

Cliquify is an employer branding tool that enables companies to generate assets for their social recruitment campaigns. Primarily a content creation platform, Cliquify’s templates guide your teams to produce on-brand collateral for your various channels, highlighting your company culture, values and achievements.

This solution also allows you to measure and monitor the performance of your social media assets, helping you to refine your campaigns over time.

Employee advocacy tools

9. Social Sender

It cannot be overstated how valuable your existing employees are to your long-term recruitment efforts – up to 86% of candidates will check employee reviews on Glassdoor before applying. An army of brand ambassadors can greatly elevate your hiring process, and a tool like Social Sender helps you build one.

A dedicated employee advocacy solution, Social Sender makes it simple to send targeted company news, events and posts to relevant employees based on their positions and interests. From here they can push this content on their social networks, sharing positive employee experiences with prospective candidates.

10. Sociabble

Another effective employee advocacy tool is Sociabble, a platform offering multichannel content distribution for your employees’ social media channels. Leveraging their networks, this tool extends the reach and awareness of your employer brand through fresh, compelling content delivered by your workforce.

Plus, to keep your team members active advocates, Sociabble adds gamification to this process, letting you track your most effective ambassadors and reward them appropriately.

11. Brandfolder

Maintaining a consistent employer brand across every channel and location requires a single source of truth for your assets. Brandfolder’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution gives you a central repository of on-brand, up-to-date collateral, so your teams worldwide can access the latest approved content for their recruitment campaigns.

With the ability to categorise assets according to type, location, language and much more, your marketing materials stay well-organised and your marketers can identify the assets they require instantaneously.

Employer brand reputation management

12. Employer Brand Index

Candidates want to work with a reputable employer; a perspective backed up by 84% of job seekers who consider reputation before applying for a job opening. The Employer Brand Index (EBI), developed by Link Humans, uses data from over 6,000 user-generated sources to measure what past, present and future employees are saying about your company.

This helps you gain an objective view of your employer brand reputation, benchmark this against your competitors and address any negative feedback directly. With this insight, you can adapt your communications strategy where required on your path to becoming an employer of choice in your industry.

Candidate experience and onboarding tools

13. Olivia by Paradox

Another in the growing wave of employer branding AI tools, Olivia is an innovative assistant designed to optimise candidate capture, screening, scheduling, communication and engagement.

Guided by your brand’s tone of voice and communication strategy, Olivia automatically answers candidates’ questions and eliminates repetitive admin tasks. This streamlined approach frees up time to create a more bespoke, one-to-one recruitment and onboarding experience for each candidate, helping you nurture them into your team.

14. Pathmotion

Pathmotion enables better candidate experiences by letting your existing employees directly engage with your prospects, answer their questions and share content. This supports a more comfortable, seamless onboarding journey for new recruits, and helps candidates self-exclude themselves, saving you time and money on unsuitable applications.

Pathmotion can also host virtual events for candidates, automate nurture emails, send out onboarding materials, and integrate with your company and employee social media channels. This makes it a great tool to build a community between your current team and your future hires.

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)

15. Greenhouse

Greenhouse is an excellent Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that helps you present candidates with a consistent, reassuring experience. To do this, the platform includes several features, including:

• Talent sourcing that scales with your organisation
• Customisable career sites and application processes
• Tracking for candidate interactions and communications
• Schedules for follow-up activities and onboarding activities
• Smoother talent acquisition workflows
• Candidate scoreboards for better hiring decisions

It also tracks and measures several key employer branding metrics, including time-to-fill positions, cost-per-hire and candidate conversion rates.

16. TalentLyft

Another effective ATS solution is TalentLyft. This system can reduce the time associated with posting job ads, screening applications and scheduling interviews through one all-inclusive platform. Handling this all through one portal helps you preserve consistency across both your employer branding and candidate experience.

TalentLyft also enables you to track applications to measure the performance of your job adverts, and create a branded career site illustrating your company’s values, culture and mission.

17. Monday.com

In our attempts to achieve more for less, Monday.com promises to significantly increase the efficiency and productivity of your employer brand workflows. Through this planning platform, your teams can gain a bird’s-eye view over all tasks, from individual job postings to large-scale recruitment campaigns.

For optimal productivity, Monday.com lets you hone in on each distinct task of your employer brand initiatives. This empowers you to manage your resources more effectively, and keeps everyone aware of what must be done and when.

Employer brand analytics and reporting

18. Ongig

Want to know if your employer branding efforts are reaping results? Ongig offers up this valuable insight by scoring your job descriptions and adverts in real-time, suggesting improvements to support your diversity, equity and inclusivity (DE&I) hiring.

In addition to analysing the performance of your content, it offers templates for future job postings, and handles the publishing of hundreds (or even thousands) of job adverts automatically.

Can you have too many employer brand tools?

These 18 employer branding tools merely scratch the surface of what’s available to help you attract, recruit and retain the best available talent. Hopefully, this has helped you consider where you can streamline your processes and unlock your brand’s potential.

However, a word of warning. While these tools can benefit your employer branding in numerous ways, introducing too many can become a detriment to your long-term recruitment efforts. That’s because an abundance of employer brand solutions can:

• Increase the complexity of managing your brand and campaigns
• Confuse your employees with too many logins
• Eat away at your budget
• Make maintenance and upgrades a hassle to complete
• Require significant amounts of time to train your teams
• Cause inconsistent messaging on your various channels

To strengthen your talent acquisition efforts, it’s important to thoroughly research the right technology for your needs, prioritising solutions that fulfil multiple requirements in one platform.

And consider, if you do choose to invest in your employer brand, be sure to think about integration. If you can seamlessly bring solutions together into one united platform, activating your employer brand becomes a lot less complicated.

Take steps to activate your employer brand

Technology can play a valuable role in the reach, consistency and performance of your employer brand. But, this must be accompanied by a well-constructed employer brand strategy, high-quality assets and the support of your existing employees.

If you’d like to learn more about how to attract and retain top talent in this highly competitive landscape, read our ultimate employer branding guide.

High-volume recruitment. Bulk recruitment. Mass hiring. Whatever you call it, most global organisations have at some stage needed to sign up a large number of new employees in a short window of time.

It’s a long-established practice, but it’s increasingly challenging when demand for top talent regularly outweighs supply. Whether your company is opening a new location or needs more hands on deck at peak times, you must use every tool at your disposal to engage your target market and fill your vacancies.

While technologies such as Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and video interviewing platforms are key to streamlining this process, you must reach and connect with candidates first – and few things help you do this more than a strong employer brand.

Here, we’ll explain how well-managed recruitment branding strategies enhance your hiring efforts, and how you can activate your employer brand to attract and retain potential candidates.

What is high-volume recruitment?

High-volume recruitment is when an organisation looks to hire a significant number of candidates in a short space of time. 

Commonly used in retail, hospitality, customer service and practically any industry with fluctuating workforce demands, this strategy is deployed in many circumstances, like when: 

• Seasonal demand for products or services peaks, such as during Christmas
• A business rapidly expands or opens new locations
• Employee turnover reached a high point
• An organisation offers a lot of entry-level positions, such as call centre operators
• Contract workers are replaced

Studies have shown that approximately 65% of businesses worldwide have high-volume recruiting needs, while around 73% of large organisations depend on this approach.

Why is a strong employer brand important for your recruitment efforts?

Your employer brand is your shopfront to potential candidates. It’s the values, perks, incentives and motivators that resonate with your target audience, stretching from the first job ad a prospect sees, right through to your day-to-day company culture.

In a highly competitive talent landscape, your employer brand is your chance to stand out from your competitors and secure exceptional recruits. It’s your brand’s identity for your workforce, and is crucial for bringing the right people on board.

How does employer branding differ between high-volume recruitment and traditional hiring?

It’s easy to overlook the importance of a solid employer brand for high-volume recruitment. For entry-level or temporary roles, candidates aren’t going to care about how clean or well-managed your employer branding looks, right?

Wrong. Over 75% of job seekers research an employer’s brand before applying for a role, while 69% of candidates say they would reject job offers from companies with a bad employer brand. When you’re trying to fill roles fast, you can’t afford this degree of rejection.

In many ways, a strong employer brand is more vital in high-volume campaigns than in typical hiring cycles. Because you’re advertising on many job boards and platforms at once, a negative reputation or lack of clarity can cause candidates to question why you have so many openings.

This uncertainty may deter high-calibre candidates from applying, causing your campaigns to suffer and drag out longer.

What are the key elements of a strong employer brand for high-volume recruitment?

Employer branding in recruitment at any level requires multiple key elements to achieve consistent success:

• A clear and compelling Employer Value Proposition (EVP)
• Consistent, engaging content across all channels
• Personalised experiences for candidates, from pre-application to the onboarding process
• A well-constructed careers page outlining your company mission and values
• Carefully monitored and managed listings on employer review sites like Glassdoor
• Employee advocates who promote your organisation within their own networks

A successful employer brand strategy is layered and consistent at every touch point – and this is just as critical for mass hires as it is for individual roles.

4 ways your employer brand helps with mass hiring

High-volume recruitment is fraught with challenges. Immediately it conjures up ideas of mass generic emails, automated responses and candidates left in limbo. 

An impressive employer brand can help overcome many challenges associated with volume hiring, ensuring each potential employee feels special even when reaching out to thousands at a time.

1. Eliminate ill-fitting candidates

The biggest headache for large-scale recruitment is sorting applications to find suitable candidates. You can easily waste hours on this process, pushing your campaigns back with every ill-suited application.

With a clear, coherent and ever-present employer brand, candidates can immediately see your company values, benefits and culture, and visualise if they “fit” in your organisation. This helps reduce the number of inappropriate entries, resulting in higher-quality applications.

2. Reduce time and cost to hire

With so many roles needing to be filled, time is of the essence in high-volume recruitment marketing. A good employer brand is estimated to slash the time and cost of hiring in half, which results in substantial savings when you’re trying to fill dozens of spaces at once.

3. Improve employee retention

Focusing solely on filling positions quickly can compromise the long-term retention of your candidates. If this leads to a rushed interview and onboarding process, it becomes difficult to hold onto new hires, taking you back to square one.

Research shows that strong employer branding reduces staff turnover rates by 28%. This helps you retain top talent for longer, so you don’t lose employees to your competitors and need to rely on high-volume campaigns regularly.

4. Grow your collection of advocates

Finally, it’s no great secret that potential candidates trust the word of employees more than employers – particularly if they’re already sceptical about the number of openings available.

Encouraging your existing employees to reinforce the reasons to work for your company on social media, employer review sites and word of mouth helps silence any doubt from your prospects.

Activating your employer brand for volume recruitment campaigns

Now you understand the difference an excellent employer brand makes for high-volume recruitment, how can you best “activate” it to reap the rewards? 

Our employer brand solutions have empowered many world-renowned brands to navigate these turbulent times with ease and control, so here are our 6 top tips to help you achieve the same:

1. Understand your roles and ideal candidate personas

Knowing your target audience is even more pressing for high-volume recruitment than conventional hiring – you don’t want to be inundated with hundreds of irrelevant resumes for each role. 

Take time to distinguish what skills, experience and characteristics the ideal person would possess for every position you have available. This will ensure your job adverts are tailored to these expectations, so you receive more appropriate job applicants.

Plus, understanding what makes your candidates tick will help you adapt your recruitment branding to the values most meaningful to them – do they prefer flexible hours, remote working or development opportunities?

2. Centralise your recruitment branding strategy

A disparate employer brand strategy creates inconsistency, which damages both your reputation and ability to hire in pressing times. 

Bringing every element of your employer brand identity – guidelines, EVP, tone of voice, employee handbooks and more – under one dedicated brand hub will help ensure your materials are aligned, whether you’re reaching out about one position or dozens.

3. Harness tools to create personalised content

With mass hiring campaigns, it’s all too easy to send the same formulaic emails, adverts and job descriptions to each audience. But for the best results, it’s important to speak to candidates on a personal level – their wants, their language, their culture.

Particularly if you’re hiring for positions in a different country, it’s vital to translate your employer branding for local markets. With the right brand management platform, localising recruitment campaign collateral for specific audiences can be done in minutes, enabling you to tailor messages without major losses of time or resources.

Remember: think global, but act local.

4. Prioritise your candidate experiences

Employer branding doesn’t end with the application process. So many organisations have lost potential hires at the final hurdle due to a negative or frustrating candidate experience. You must carry your branding and company culture through this process as well.

Consider:

• What do candidates first see at an interview or video call?
• How can we streamline and uncomplicate this process?
• What materials can we provide prospects to help them understand our work culture?
• Who is best placed to support and guide new hires for a particular role?

Getting this important stage right does more than secure top talent – it can also greatly benefit your employee retention rates.

5. Stay consistent across all channels

Consistency is key to any recruitment campaign, but it’s especially challenging when advertising for many jobs concurrently on multiple platforms. Any break in brand consistency can lessen your appeal to candidates, and present your company as low-grade and disjointed.

To lock down your employer brand identity, invest in intelligent, on-brand design templates. This framework will ensure those responsible for creating your recruitment materials never deviate from your core branding, while offering enough freedom for their creativity to shine.

Furthermore, consider implementing a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution to support these templates. This comprehensive online library of assets can make sure your teams worldwide have instant access to the right content for their campaigns, keeping your local recruitment efforts in lockstep with your global identity.

6. Plan your campaigns with precision

Coordinating high-volume recruitment campaigns can be a real struggle without a centralised, birds-eye view of all activity – particularly when multiple locations or countries are involved in this drive.

Equipping your teams with proven campaign execution tools helps them organise activities more effectively. This minimises waste and provides much-needed stability during substantial times of change and upheaval within your organisation.

How can we adapt our employer branding strategies in periods of high-volume recruitment?

During high-volume recruitment, there are many ways you can adapt your employer branding to make a meaningful positive impact:

• Emphasise your employer values and unique selling points to immediately capture the attention of applicants
• Leverage technology for automated screening and personalised communication to improve the speed and quality of your recruitment processes
• Harness a wider range of recruitment channels, such as social media and job boards, to maximise visibility
• Offer referral incentives to your existing employees to encourage them to play an active role in your campaigns
• Showcase your company culture through testimonials and success stories to give candidates a tangible sense of life in your organisation

Master your employer brand, maximise your recruitment efforts

Many of the biggest headaches attached to high-volume recruitment can be reduced or eliminated altogether with a healthy, consistent employer brand. We hope this article has helped you recognise this, and advised on how you can harness it to engage candidates on a mass scale.

One final piece of advice – continue to review and refine the performance of your recruitment campaigns. Candidates’ priorities and attitudes constantly evolve, and change from location to location. Investing in real-time campaign data and analytics keeps you on top of these trends, and illustrates what assets and activities are reaping results for your organisation.

Combined with further talent acquisition software, you can build an employer brand that connects with audiences globally and locally. Meaning that whenever there’s an urgent need to bring people on board, your organisation is at the front of the queue.

In the fierce battle to recruit and retain the best talent available, a company’s reputation means more than ever. With the latest generations of candidates becoming increasingly selective about the employers they work for, it’s imperative that today’s organisations pay close attention to the strength of their employer brand.

Without positive employer branding, hiring and retaining talent becomes a real challenge – and very costly. To put yourself at the front of the queue for top prospects and establish yourself as a great place to work, a solid employer brand is no longer an option – it’s a necessity.

With decades of experience helping global organisations maximise the potential of their employer brand, we know its value and the huge benefits it can unlock. After reading this complete guide, you will as well.

• Learn what employer branding is and what it includes
• Discover the advantages of a strong employer brand
• Explore the steps to building better employer branding
• See what the top employer brands are doing to attract recruits

Want to identify, engage and secure the right talent for your organisation? Then let’s get started…

What is employer branding?

Employer branding is how you shape and promote your company’s reputation as an employer. It’s the assets, processes and values designed to attract top potential candidates, retain high-performing employees, and create an inclusive, productive work environment.

Fundamentally, a strong employer brand encourages job seekers to explore your openings and makes your existing employees feel like part of a united entity. Conversely, a weak employer brand damages your ability to attract top talent and keep employees around long-term.

What does employer branding include?

Employer branding is more than your career site or your Glassdoor profile. It’s a multi-layered approach across numerous channels:

Essentially, your employer branding covers anywhere a potential candidate or current employee would engage with your organisation. So this must all be carefully considered and interconnected under one strategy to reap the best possible results (more on this later).

What is your Employer Value Proposition (EVP)?

One of the most important aspects of any employer brand is the Employer Value Proposition (EVP). Your EVP is the core document outlining the benefits, values and reasons why a prospective recruit should join your company. It’s the shining beacon of your talent acquisition efforts.

While the contents of your EVP will be unique to your organisation, these often contain:

• Company mission, vision and core values
• Compensation, benefits and perks
• Work-life balance initiatives and details
• Flexible or remote work opportunities
• Training and career development prospects
• Social responsibility and charity initiatives
• Company social events and activities
• Employer recognition efforts

Simply put, anything you believe would entice candidates and encourage your team members to stick around should be featured in your EVP. If it doesn’t include these key elements or is failing to connect with recruits, then maybe it’s time to consider an EVP refresh?

What is company culture?

Your company culture is the “personality” and identity of your organisation. It encapsulates the various values, activities, communications and more that shape how your employees engage with their work and each other – ranging from internal newsletters, training and career development, to company outings and social events.

Typically, a good, diverse and inclusive company culture improves productivity, wellbeing and talent retention. On the other hand, a poor company culture can negatively impact your team’s performance and encourage high turnover.

What are employee ambassadors?

Employee ambassadors are employees who actively promote the advantages of working for your organisation, whether that’s on social media, review websites or simply word of mouth. They are your biggest advocates in appealing to the competitive talent pool.

Ideally, you want every member of your team to be an employee ambassador, but this is often unrealistic, especially in large, global organisations. So, it’s a good strategy to introduce perks and benefits for employees to actively showcase your company’s brand in a positive light, giving them an incentive to organically share their experience with others.

How does employer branding differ from consumer branding?

Your employer brand focuses on attracting and retaining talent in the same way your consumer brand is designed to connect with your customers and generate sales.

However, while they appeal to distinct audiences, they can often influence each other. For instance, a brand that presents a welcoming and inclusive company culture will often reflect well on today’s more socially aware consumers, who want to feel good about the brands they buy from.

Why is employer branding important?

As noted earlier, your employer brand is essentially your employer reputation. A great reputation puts you in an advantageous position to attract and retain top talent. A poor reputation means you face an uphill battle in the intensifying battle for the best candidates. 

With 9 out of 10 employers struggling to fill jobs in the current landscape, the importance of a fleshed-out, compelling employer brand is greater than ever. But its benefits extend beyond your recruitment strategy.

What are the benefits of a strong employer brand?

Improves your attractiveness to potential recruits

First and foremost, a solid employer brand helps you stand out to job hunters. The more you can say, share and promote the benefits of working for your organisation, the more likely you will appeal to the job market ahead of your competitors. When nearly 85% of candidates consider a company’s reputation before applying, this is an area you cannot afford to ignore.

It’s not only active job seekers that check out your employer brand. Approximately 82% of employees say they would switch jobs for a company with an excellent reputation. So, it not only raises your attractiveness to available talent, but also catches the eye of high performers already working in your industry.

Reduces your recruitment costs

You likely know how costly the recruitment process can be. Research by CIPD has found that the average cost of filling a vacancy is around €7,000 (£6,100). For managerial roles, this grows closer to €22,000 (£19,000).

Good employer branding can trim these costs in a big way, as you may be able to avoid employing hefty advertising campaigns or hiring recruitment agencies. Candidates who consider your brand attractive are more likely to apply of their own accord when opportunities become available.

Furthermore, if they have a better understanding of your brand’s culture, perks and values, those who don’t align with these will deselect themselves faster. This means you don’t waste time pursuing ill-fitting recruits, further benefiting your bottom line.

Increases your employee retention rates

Of course, the best way to minimise your recruitment costs is to keep your top-performing employees on board. Strong employer branding supports this by fostering a sense of belonging among your workforce, aligning people around shared values and business goals.

Research shows that better employer branding can reduce staff turnover by as much as 28% – resulting in a more experienced, stable work environment and less stress on recruiting and training new arrivals. So, by building an employer brand that addresses the reasons why people leave jobs, you can set your company up for a solid future.

Enhances employee engagement and productivity

Fostering a sense of belonging and pride naturally inspires employees to work harder because they believe in the values their company stands for. In fact, it’s estimated that employees connected to their organisation’s mission and values are 67% more engaged.

This greater engagement inspires greater productivity. If your employees feel part of a rewarding, comfortable and inclusive culture, they will likely feel motivated to do their best day in and day out.

Creates a more positive company culture

Have you heard of quiet quitting? It’s a growing trend in companies worldwide where employees focus on doing the bare minimum at work, with no ambition to evolve or pursue further opportunities. This often develops from a negative company culture, something a good employer brand helps address.

Better employer brand management can help reinforce the benefits and opportunities for progression within your organisation. This in turn can inspire reductions in stress and burnout, and positively impact employee health and wellbeing.

Encourages better company reviews on third-party sites

Did you know that 86% of job seekers look at company reviews and ratings to decide where to apply? Sites like Glassdoor, The Job Crowd and Work Advisor hold a lot of sway over your company’s appeal to recruits – too many negative reviews can cause real damage.

A strong employer brand can help counteract this threat by encouraging employees to become advocates and ambassadors. With clearly defined values and a more appealing culture, your team will be more likely to leave positive reviews, which then grows your reputation among candidates.

How can you measure the strength of your employer brand?

So now you understand the value of a strong employer brand, it might be time to assess how yours is performing. 

While there is no all-encompassing “employer branding” metric you can track, in our experience there are several areas you can use to judge how your brand is performing, including:

• Job application rate
• Job acceptance rate
• Time to hire
• Cost-per-hire
• Employee retention rate
• Source of hires
• Third-party reviews

8 steps to building your employer brand strategy

Your employer brand strategy is the foundation for how you will set your company apart in the battle to attract, recruit and retain talent. 

Establishing and documenting a set strategy is vital to ensure your employer branding efforts are aligned, consistent and effective at every touchpoint. Based on our close relationships with employer brand teams worldwide, here are our 8 key steps to a successful strategy.

1. Conduct an audit on your existing employer brand

First, determine where you are right now:

• How is your brand perceived by candidates?
• What do your employees think about your company?
• Do you communicate your values and objectives well?

These and further reflective questions will help you understand where your existing employer brand succeeds and where it struggles. It will also help you settle on the main identity, values and USPs you want to communicate to your teams and potential recruits.

2. Establish your preferred candidate persona

Who is your ideal candidate? What traits, skills and characteristics do they possess?

Much like you build your marketing around your target customer, you must mould your employer branding around the talent you seek, ranging from experienced industry specialists to graduates and Gen Z candidates.

This helps you tailor your messages to your prospects, focusing on the benefits, values and goals that speak to them.

3. Define your unique EVP

As the centrepiece of your employer brand, your employer value proposition should be drafted with careful consideration. Earlier we noted what your EVP might include, from pay, perks and benefits, to describing your company culture and mission statements.

On top of this, it can be beneficial to enlist the support of your marketing, communications and HR teams to help you draft this. Modern-day recruitment is closer to marketing than ever before, so their expertise can help you strike the right tone and translate your EVP across every channel it appears on.

4. Select your employer brand communication channels

Speaking of channels, next it’s important to decide where you will communicate your employer brand. It can take up to 18 interactions between a candidate and a company before an application is sent. So your employer brand strategy should cover all potential touchpoints, including:

• Career site or page
• Social media channels
• Job and review sites
• Current employee profiles
• Networking events and career fairs
• Email marketing
• Job adverts
• Interview processes
• Internal newsletters

By outlining all channels and how you intend to communicate on each, you put yourself in a strong position to achieve greater employer brand governance.

5. Develop your employer brand assets

It takes more than a career page and job descriptions to activate your employer brand. There’s a myriad of ways you can showcase your unique corporate culture:

• Video interviews with employees about their experiences
• Company newsletters sharing your team’s achievements and milestones
• A dedicated career portal promoting your values and brand identity
• Day-in-the-life videos or blog posts presenting your culture
• Slideshows expressing the advantages of joining your team

This is only scratching the surface. The possibilities to promote your employer brand are practically endless, but it’s critical you stay brand-consistent across every channel. Inconsistent presentation is a quick way to lose the buy-in of a top prospect.

Don’t have the time or resources to give your employer brand the attention it needs? Find out how you can create infinite on-brand assets faster with our Produce product.

Social media and employer branding

Social media is an especially valuable tool in your employer branding arsenal. With a majority of candidates using these channels to research potential employers, you should harness social media to highlight your employee stories, company events, charity initiatives and more to resonate with your ideal recruits.

And don’t restrict this to your company’s LinkedIn page. If your team members are active on social media, provide them with marketing materials to share on their own channels. After all, modern candidates trust a company’s employees three times more than the company itself to understand what it’s like to work there.

6. Cultivate your onboarding process

You only have one chance to make a good first impression; this is just as true for an employer as it is for a candidate. A structured, well-organised onboarding process can make a meaningful difference to a recruit’s initial experience in your company, and lay the groundwork for a long-term career.

Remember, 77% of new hires satisfied with their onboarding process say they could envision a long career at their organisation, compared to just 29% who didn’t enjoy this process. So from how you handle interviews to developing introductory guides, training packages and other resources, mapping out your full employee experience can be a huge advantage. 

7. Create an employee advocacy program

Your employees are among your best assets to promote and reinforce the benefits of your organisation. Setting up an employee advocacy program helps you formalise the ways you encourage your team to share materials in their social circles, with incentives including:

• Unique training and career progression opportunities
• Public recognition
• Tangible gifts and rewards
• Exclusive content and information

8. Be authentic

Finally, for your employer brand to achieve lasting success, you must practise what you preach. It’s no good making promises on your EVP that you cannot deliver on, or presenting a rose-tinted vision of your company culture. In a landscape where employees feel more empowered to share their thoughts than ever, this is a recipe for disaster.

Therefore, before you rubber stamp your employer brand strategy, reflect on everything you’ve highlighted and question whether it’s attainable. Authenticity is essential.

6 organisations nailing their employer branding

As we’ve outlined above, employer branding is more than a fancy career site. Here are 6 brands who follow this mindset and are masters at employer brand storytelling.

1. Hilton

Why not start with the brand ranked the best company to work for in 2024 by Fortune? In 2023 Hilton launched their first major employer branding campaign, “Every Job Makes the Stay”.

This innovative series of videos, ads and other materials promotes the various roles contributing to Hilton’s high-quality hospitality. This has worked to both inspire potential candidates of the opportunities available, and showcase the skills of their existing employees.

2. Starbucks

As the world’s most recognisable coffeehouse, Starbucks employs close to 400,000 people globally. With this scale of operations, they firmly focus on employer branding, largely by harnessing social media to showcase employee experiences and success stories.

From a jobs playlist on their YouTube channel, to its celebrated College Achievement Plan, Starbucks is very effective at attracting younger generations of job seekers.

3. L’Oreal

L’Oreal is consistently rated one of the best places to work worldwide, and a large part of that is their commitment to refining and evolving their employer branding over time.

In recent years, they have adapted their EVP to raise awareness of L’Oreal as a tech-driven company as much as a beauty company. This, combined with their promise of delivering a thrilling experience and culture of excellence, helps set them apart as the thought leaders in their industry, and an attractive place to work.

4. Netflix

Netflix’s employer brand is well-known for its emphasis on creative freedom, responsibility and innovation. It promotes a company culture centred on autonomy and creativity, where employees are empowered to pursue bold ideas.

This vision and identity are coupled with tangible compensation and benefits packages, and a strong focus on diversity and inclusion. That is highlighted in Netflix’s detailed and engaging career site, making it easy for potential candidates to understand their culture.

5. Zappos

Shoe and clothing retailer Zappos focuses on employee happiness and wellbeing in their employer branding, as they understand that a happy workforce inspires great customer service.

Plus, they employ an unconventional yet strategic onboarding process: every employee hired, no matter the role, undertakes 4 weeks of training followed by 2 weeks as a customer service rep. Then, they are offered full pay for this training and $2k to leave if they wish. This aims to weed out people who are only there for the money, to build a more committed team.

6. Unilever

From its impactful career site, to its aspirational business strategy with sustainability at its heart. Unilever has a well-established global employer brand that instantly expresses its diverse opportunities and culture, with many testimonials from its existing workforce.

Furthermore, by utilising Papirfly’s brand management platform, Unilever has become incredibly adept at communicating its employer brand to its many local audiences. With this platform in place, Unilever tailors its global identity to each location, resulting in more personalised messages for its employees and potential candidates.

Adapting your global employer brand for local recruits

Today’s global businesses face a significant challenge in conveying their brand across diverse cultures and languages, both for employees and potential hires. These nuances and preferences must be considered to avoid alienating individuals and resonating with local audiences.

While maintaining consistent core values across locations is crucial, adapting these messages to emphasise the values most relevant to specific audiences achieves much better feedback. So, it’s worthwhile to invest the time to research and tailor content for specific candidates.

How can you achieve this? 

• Create specific candidate personas for each location you’re based in
• Encourage your local teams to contribute to your employer branding and promote it on their profiles
• Harness employer branding software and solutions to speed up the production of assets and maintain global consistency
• Establish one place for all branded assets that your local teams can easily access, such as a Digital Asset Management system 

Want to know more? Check out our guide to translating your global employer brand to local markets.

AI: The future of employer branding?

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) evolves with each passing year, its influence on employer branding and recruitment strategies is also growing. Here are just some of the ways AI is already making a difference for employer brand specialists:

More personalised candidate experiences

Through intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants, modern candidates can now receive more immediate answers they have about a prospective employer. This leads to more personalised and responsive experiences, making the recruitment process more positive for candidates and simpler for employers.

Streamline the creation of job descriptions and materials

Training AI prompt engineering tools on your EVP and other employer brand materials can greatly speed up the generation of assets, both for your internal teams and for job seekers. In just a matter of clicks, you can generate the copy, imagery and video for a suite of recruitment ads and employee guidelines, all aligned with your values and vision.

Analysing employee and candidate behaviour

The efficiency of AI means it can analyse vast amounts of recruitment-related data in seconds, from employee engagement levels and retention rates, to candidate behaviour across the onboarding process. This can provide powerful insights on where to adapt your employer branding based on the challenges you are experiencing.

Although the use of AI in employer branding is still in its infancy, the rate at which this technology is developing means that these possibilities – and many more – are emerging to streamline and empower your recruitment efforts.

Create and communicate a compelling employer brand with Papirfly

We hope you’ve enjoyed this complete guide to employer branding, and feel ready to use these insights to enhance the way you attract and retain top talent in the future.

One of the biggest challenges facing employer brand professionals is maintaining a consistent and constant stream of assets, while dealing with ever-tightening budgets. At Papirfly, we are making it faster, easier and more cost-effective to become an employer of choice – all from one all-encompassing brand management platform.

• Point: Unite everyone on the values, visuals and voices behind your employer brand
• Place: Store, share and access a complete library of your employer branding materials in our globally renowned DAM system
• Produce: Generate on-brand, studio-quality assets at unrivalled speed and scale with intelligent design templates
• Plan: Simplify campaign execution of all talent acquisition activities with one universal planner
• Prove: Measure and refine your employer brand strategy with enterprise-grade reporting and analytics

Ready to build an on-brand culture that attracts the best talent? Discover our employer branding software and solutions today.

Papirfly and SAP recently joined forces to showcase an engaging discussion on SAP’s employer branding and employer ambassador program. 

The session, led by Papirfly’s VP Marketing Siril Jacobsen and Nneka Mmeh, Global Employer Branding at SAP emphasised strategic collaboration and innovative approaches to employer branding. Papirfly’s brand management platform enabled SAP to harness the power of their workforce in storytelling, turning employees into brand champions.

This partnership not only enabled SAP to enhance their employer branding but also showcased the transformative impact of leveraging employee experiences in attracting and retaining top talent. The discussions provided actionable insights into

• creating a compelling employer value proposition (EVP)
• emphasizing the importance of inclusivity and employee empowerment in building a strong, engaging employer brand

The power of employee ambassadors

SAP’s journey into enhancing its employer branding strategy with Papirfly’s support shows a commitment to not only attract but also to nurture talent by fostering a culture of inclusivity and empowerment. The creation of an employee ambassador program exemplifies SAP’s innovative approach, leveraging the voices of its workforce to amplify the company’s values and culture. This initiative, driven by Papirfly’s brand management platform, enabled SAP employees worldwide to share their authentic experiences. As a result, it humanized the SAP brand and significantly improved its market positioning as an employer of choice.

Revolutionising talent attraction through brand consistency

The webinar highlighted the importance of brand consistency across all channels and the role of Papirfly’s platform in achieving this for SAP. By implementing a centralised employer brand management system, SAP was able to streamline its messaging. This ensured that the employer brand resonated well with its global audience. This strategic move not only enhanced the company’s visibility but also guaranteed that potential candidates received a coherent and compelling narrative about what it means to work at SAP.

Strategic insights for employer branding professionals

For employer branding professionals, the discussion provided invaluable insights into the strategic planning and execution of a successful employee ambassador program. From revamping the employer value proposition to leveraging social media and digital platforms for storytelling, the webinar offered a blueprint for organisations looking to elevate their employer brand.

The role of Papirfly in SAP’s employer branding success

Papirfly’s role in this journey was highlighted as more than just a platform provider. It was a strategic partner enabling SAP to leverage technology for brand management and employee engagement. The use of Papirfly’s solutions facilitated a seamless integration of brand assets, storytelling, and employee advocacy, setting a new standard for employer branding excellence.

Measurable success – the impact of SAP’s employer branding strategy

• Increased engagement: SAP saw a remarkable increase in employee engagement on social media platforms, where ambassador content received higher interaction rates compared to standard corporate postings. 
• Improved talent acquisition: By leveraging employee testimonials, SAP saw a substantial improvement in its talent acquisition efforts. The data showed a notable decrease in time-to-fill for open positions. This highlights the effectiveness of a strong employer brand in attracting qualified candidates swiftly.
• Enhanced employer brand perception: Surveys conducted before and after the implementation of the ambassador program indicated a significant improvement in SAP’s employer brand perception among targeted talent pools. The positive shift in perception reflects the impact of humanising the brand through employee narratives.
• Greater employee retention: The initiative also played a crucial role in enhancing employee retention rates. By empowering employees to share their experiences and become brand advocates, SAP fostered a deeper sense of belonging and loyalty among its workforce. This contributed to a decrease in turnover rates.
• Enhancing efficiency and savings: The financial efficiency gained through SAP’s partnership with Papirfly particularly highlighted a staggering $100,000 saved in potential agency costs in 2023. This reduction in potential expenses was achieved by utilising Papirfly’s platform for in-house brand management and content creation, bypassing the need for costly external agencies. The strategic approach not only streamlined SAP’s marketing expenditures but also illustrated the effectiveness of leveraging internal capabilities to foster a compelling and authentic employer brand. This also shows the tangible benefits of SAP’s innovative employer branding strategy

A blueprint for future success

The collaboration between SAP and Papirfly showcases the transformative power of employer branding when executed with strategic intent and the right technological support. For companies looking to attract and retain the best talent, the insights shared in this webinar serve as a blueprint for leveraging employee voices to create a compelling and authentic employer brand. To discover more about how SAP utilised Papirfly’s brand management platform to get set up for success watch the webinar in full.

As a company, you’re always looking to uncover, recruit and retain the best talent out there. People who will work to achieve your goals. Fit into your culture. Have that drive for success.

But there’s a problem – your competitors have the exact same aspiration. And with the reputation of a company more visible than ever before, be it through a jobseeker’s Google search or reviews on comparator sites like Glassdoor and Indeed, presenting a powerful, compelling employer proposition is more crucial and more challenging than ever before.

With a finite pool of truly exceptional individuals that can make a difference to your organisation, it is essential that you can stand out from the crowd in attracting the talent that’s out there, as well as keeping hold of the people you already have.

That is where your employer branding strategy comes in. It sets you on the journey to locating prospects that fit with your organisation’s ambitions and clearly demonstrating why they would feel right at home in your teams.

Here, we’re going to delve into greater detail on what your employer branding strategy is and outline thirteen critical steps to developing one that connects you with the best talent available.

What is an employer branding strategy?

At its core, the definition of an employer brand strategy is a documented, universal approach to translating your organisation’s values, approaches and personality to your audience. It’s a comprehensive offering of everything you have to offer as a workplace to benefit your most important asset – your employees.

It’s how you project your employer brand – how you are viewed by your current workforce and people you hope to one day recruit. Your employer branding strategy needs to transparently and consistently promote these aspects to both your existing team and those you intend to recruit in order to achieve three salient goals:

• Positively distinguish your offering from your competitors’
• Demonstrate why someone would want to work in your organisation
• Illustrate how your brand is developing and strengthening over time

Not all employer branding strategies are created equal, and creating one that ticks all the right boxes requires clear thinking, total buy-in from your team members and refinements over time. By utilising the following best practices, you’ll find yourself in an ideal position to attract the talent that can drive your brand forward.

How important is an employer branding strategy?

As mentioned earlier, Glassdoor and Indeed are just two examples of platforms that highlight your company’s culture and processes. There’s your website and other marketing channels to consider, and word of mouth from employees spreading on forums.

If your negatives outweigh your positives, or you are not dedicating the same attention to your employer branding strategy as your competitors, you stand to miss out on top talent, and even losing current team members in the process.

Developing a brand that appeals and connects with today’s increasingly web-savvy job candidate is vital, and can result in numerous benefits, including:

• Improved employer attractiveness to talented individuals interested in working in your industry
• Greater motivation among your existing employees by feeling more connected and in-sync with your brand values
• Tangible drops in the costs associated with hiring new talent and retaining them long-term
• A workforce that actively advocates and promotes your brand, extending your reach to other candidates and customers
• A clear, unified vision for your organisation to move towards, with all people associated with your company pushing it in that direction

13 steps to best practice with your employer branding strategy

Effective employer branding strategies can be the difference-maker in an ideal candidate’s decision to join your organisation over the other options available. Following these best practices gives you greater control over the messages you project, and the ability to influence how these individuals see your brand.

1. Audit the perception of your brand

Before developing your employer branding strategy, it is important you have a clear understanding of how people view your company initially. Otherwise, how will you know what adjustments are required?

A thorough audit of your current brand perception, both through the eyes of your employees and your external audiences, lets you understand if your current messaging and reputation is projecting the values and attractiveness you are aiming for. Especially in organisations with teams spread across the globe, it is easy for your values to be mistranslated, or be in needing refinement to connect with local audiences.

There are a host of places you should be examining, including:

• Employment review sites – most candidates will be researching these in detail before making a decision on their next employer. What are people saying about your company’s processes and culture? Do you get rated five stars? Do you come across as an attractive brand? Are there negative reviews? If so, have you addressed them effectively?
• Social media – investing in social listening tools can help you track mentions of your organisation over social media, so you gain a deeper insight into how people view your brand.
• Employee feedback – conducting internal surveys or having open meetings with your teams helps you identify problems that might be affecting your ability to attract and retain talent, so they can be rectified as part of your unified employer brand strategy.

• Google alerts – like on social media, it is important to closely monitor the reputation your brand is presenting on Google and other search engines, and determine if this is in line with your objectives.
  
  

2. Build your employee persona

Who is your ideal candidate? Without a clear answer to this question, you are in no position to effectively develop an employer branding strategy that targets a person with the personality, aspirations and skills to seamlessly join your teams.

Dedicate time to breaking down the qualities your target audience possesses:

• What are their main personality traits?
• What causes do they care about?
• What motivates them day-to-day?
• Where do they research for information?
• What roles and responsibilities do they want?
• Who influences their decisions?

This is just a sample of the line of questioning you should be asking about what constitutes the right employee for your brand. Of course, these qualities will differ according to the specific staff role and location you are marketing to, but at a fundamental level there must be a template that helps you craft branding that appeals to the right candidate.

Furthermore, by clarifying your ideal candidate, it is more likely that their transition into joining your team and growing within your organisation will be more satisfying and fulfilling.

3. Establish your company’s differentiators

Knowing what makes your company unique goes a long way to crafting your brand story.

It’s your organisation’s mission statement. Its values. Its social responsibilities. Its culture.

This feeds into your employer branding strategy by determining why someone would choose to join or stay with your company over X competitor. To effectively establish your differentiators or USPs therefore, it is important to reassess your own values and compare these with potential alternatives for recruits.

What issues do you stand for that others don’t? What aspects of your work culture can you promote that others aren’t? Where does your brand excel and stand out against what your competitors can produce? The answers to these questions will define the unique characteristics your company has to boost your attractiveness to recruits.

86% of HR professionals believe recruitment is now on an equal footing with ‘marketing’. In the same way your marketing efforts are geared to set your products and services apart from the crowd, your employer brand strategy needs to working just as hard to keep you in the minds of candidates and improve your current teams’ sense of belonging.

4. Determine and utilise your primary marketing channels

How are you going to reach your prospective recruits, or best engage with your existing employees worldwide?

As part of establishing your audience persona, you should have a clearer understanding of what channels are going to connect with the candidates you’re seeking. But it is vital to have these defined as part of your employer branding initiatives, and that consistency is maintained across all platforms you choose to utilise.

By choosing the most effective channels, be it through a careers page on your website, paid media campaigns, or taking your employer branding to social media, you are in a position to tailor and target your audiences far more successfully. Ask employees how they first encountered your brand. Research the most popular platforms and forums for people working in your industry.

Once you’ve identified where you will engage with, use these platforms to frequently translate the inclusivity, vision and development of your brand and your employees. These images, blogs, testimonials and more across the most popular channels for your audience will drive a clear connection with what your brand stands for.

However, it is essential that your collateral feels in no way forced or fabricated. Authenticity is essential in truly appealing to your target audience. Without this genuine aspect, people will see through your attempts and will likely distrust you going forward.

5. Create your Employer Value Proposition

Your Employer Value Proposition (EVP) is your promise to current and future employees. It’s what you offer that will make them passionate about being part of your team, and as such is a lynchpin of your employer branding strategy.

At the centre of your EVP should be your employee – their motivations, their interests, their goals. Ideally your proposition will cover everything they are looking for to connect them to your company in a positive, fulfilling way. To this end, you should consider what matters to staff:

• Professional development?
• Holiday allowance?
• A thriving workplace culture?
• Healthcare benefits?
• Flexible working opportunities?
• A strong work-life balance?
• Bonuses?
• A comfortable environment?
• Unique perks like gym memberships and social outings?
• Charity work and corporate responsibility initiatives?

Most employer branding strategies should contain an assortment of these. But on top of these perks, you also need to consider the core values of your business. How highly your employees are valued. How committed you are to being the best in your industry. How much you care about supporting your customers.

Your Employee Value Proposition is central to how attractive your brand is to recruits, and how effectively you can retain the staff you already have on board. It should be kept transparent and in easy reach of any member of your organisation at all times to reinforce these messages, which is why our brand management solution’s capacity to ‘educate’ employees allows our clients to house core brand documents that can be accessed at any opportunity.

Develop your brand guidelines and assets or review your existing ones 

Your company already likely has overarching brand guidelines, assets and logos – but what about your employer brand? Has this been properly defined?

In order to effectively implement your employer brand strategy, you need to have assets in place that sets your employer brand apart and the resources available to create and complement your campaigns.

This includes anything from country-specific guidelines, culturally appropriate imagery, colour palettes, logo variations, audience breakdowns by country, dos and don’ts for different territories and anything in between.

7. Invest in your current team’s development

One of the core reasons behind bad employee retention is a lack of career development and learning opportunities. Without a feeling of progression or investment in their growth, it is likely a member of your team will seek greener pastures to achieve their aims.

Remember, employees who feel they’re progressing are 20% more likely to still be at their companies in a year’s time. By presenting these training and development opportunities to your team, you’re demonstrating you’re committed to helping them realise their ambitions as part of your brand. This not only provides you with a more highly-skilled and motivated workforce, but a workforce that is engaged and appreciative to your organisation.

On top of this reduction in workplace boredom and increase in motivation, staff that feel more in-tune and connected to a brand are much more likely to become brand advocates. They will share your marketing materials on social media. Tell friends and family about how positive your environment is. Actively encourage people to join when vacancies become available.

With that, you are in a position to harness powerful employee branding that increases your trustworthiness and attractiveness to both potential recruits and customers.

8. Internal review and alignment

Anything you plan to implement in terms of strategy, particularly initially, should have buy-in from all appropriate stakeholders. This may include HR professionals in the business, internal recruiters, management and more. You may also want to get opinions from existing or new employees to make sure what you have developed fits in with internal perceptions.

Likewise, you may pick up on an insight internally that you may not have had access to without holding these conversations. Once everyone is happy on the direction you are taking for the employer brand strategy, you can begin developing the tools and resources to educate the wider teams and make sure everyone is on the same page moving forward.

9. Assess your strategy’s success

Finally, once you have your employer branding strategy in place, it is important that you are regularly assessing, fine-tuning and adapting it as your business and your industry landscape evolves. It is rare anything this important is nailed first time around, so it is critical that you over time analyse the results of your efforts and see where improvements can be made.

Examine the success of your employer branding initiatives against your pre-defined KPIs, which may include:

• Time-to-hire
• Cost-per-hire
• Number of applicants to each vacancy
• Improved brand reputation
• Frequency of employer brand marketing

If any of these are falling short of your aspirations, it is time to reassess, correct the course and tweak your approach until you see the results you’re looking for. Your employer branding strategy should never feel set in stone – as your overall business strategy changes to reflect new trends, patterns or requirements, your employer brand strategy should follow suit.

10. Talk to employees regularly

An employer brand strategy is never completely finished. This is because not only does the internal workforce demands evolve so rapidly, but as a brand grows so does what it’s trying to portray.

By having regular meetings or focus groups with a select few people you can ensure you don’t become subjective and stay rooted in what really matters to employees. Particularly if you are responsible for campaigns overseas, don’t rely on conversations with employees in your own location.

Ideally, teams would be looking after their own materials in their own country, but this isn’t always possible, so ensuring you get relevant, on-the-ground insight will be critical to your success.

11. Invest in video

Whether it’s for organic or paid for advertising, video is a powerful medium to get across your company’s true values. Potential candidates can read handbooks and website pages until their hearts are content but the truth is only video or a face-to-face visit can truly convey the experience of working somewhere.

This is particularly important for larger businesses, whose success has seen them become so vast that potential candidates may perceive them as a faceless corporation. Hearing from real people with real stories helps to humanise your brand in ways that written content can’t always achieve.

12. Create advocacy internally

If your existing employees don’t believe in your employer brand strategy, how can you expect prospective candidates to feel anything? Having members of the workforce on board is one thing, but having them actively promote your brand and company as a positive place to work can be more powerful than many other methods.

There’s an element of authenticity that candidates connect with. As long as your content isn’t forced or dishonest, the genuine passion should shine through. And if it does, you could be on to a winner.

13. Work out the logistics of your localisation

Working across multiple territories can be a nightmare to navigate. Having processes in place to ensure that any culturally sensitive content or translations are up to scratch is important for maintaining consistency and retaining a decent reputation, both internally and externally.

Anything deemed insensitive would not only ruin your chances of a successful recruitment campaign but also demoralise employees working in that region. It’s important that no matter in the world where they are, they feel connected and represented as part of the brand.

6 companies that have nailed their employer branding strategy

We’ve discussed the key steps to building an employer branding strategy, but what do these mean in practice? Below we discuss several companies across the globe that are maximising their potential to attract, recruit and retain the best talent available through their messaging, and what lessons you can pick up from them.

Vodafone

Vodafone is a prime example of a brand that felt it was doing everything right, but after careful analysis determined they were lacking in some areas. They quickly rectified this by conducting a thorough survey across 40,000 people to find out how people felt about the Vodafone brand.

This feedback became the heart of a new employer value proposition, which has proven far more effective in appealing to new and existing talent. At the core of this is something called the “two-way deal”, which promises team members that they will get as much out of their career at Vodafone as they’re willing to put in.

We’re proud of the role that our brand management solutions have played in supporting Vodafone’s employer branding strategy, helping them deliver greater campaign materials on a global scale.

Unilever

Another of our clients, Unilever, has built the strength and success of their employer brand through their status as a leader in their industry. By focusing on materials that emphasise their notable reputation in their employment brand strategy, they present an aspirational image to potential recruits, as well as improve the motivation of their existing employees.

Plus, Unilever in recent years adopted an approach of responding to every testimonial left for their company on Glassdoor, positive or negative. This willingness to respond to employee concerns and use their reviews to improve conditions has consistently kept the company among the “Best Place to Work in the UK” rankings.

L’Oréal

L’Oréal back in 2013 demonstrated the value of placing your employees at the centre of your employer branding strategy. After passing 300,000 followers on LinkedIn, they used this as an opportunity to highlight the stories and skills of their team members across the globe, emphasising the opportunities available at their business to potential jobseekers.

As it’s well-established that people trust other people over brands, L’Oréal’s approach was an effective way to build confidence in their brand through the voices of their own employees.

Zappos

While many fashion brands utilise their social media accounts for their products, Zappos pairs this with content demonstrating the benefits of joining their team. On Instagram in particular they share a substantial amount of CSR work, employee stories and company-wide events to help their brand feel more appealing to both jobseekers and the wider public.

Furthermore, their Insider Program has been a great innovation for their employer branding strategy. This allows anyone interested in joining their team one day access to information relevant to the company, allowing Zappos to source from the best available talent.

Hubspot

When Hubspot came under increased scrutiny after being named one of the Best Places to Work in 2018, this investigation simply shone a bigger spotlight on their commitment to listen to their employees and take their feedback and suggestions on board.

This extends to Hubspot’s social media presence, where they have regularly encouraged followers to leave comments that can act as jumping points for future content. It also champions its dedication to a fun company culture, with flexible work hours and tuition reimbursement.

Heineken

Pushing a strong visual element to their employer branding strategies, Heineken in early 2019 launched their “Going Places” campaign, focusing on celebrating the stories and development of 33 of their employees across the globe.

After conducting research into the values their brand represent, the company honed in on three pillars: authenticity, transcendence and longer-term brand management. These were combined into the campaign, inspiring their existing workforce and encouraging prospective employees about the potential they can unlock at Heineken.

The future of your employer branding strategy

We hope that this insight into the best practices of employer branding strategies will help guide your way to presenting a more attractive, comprehensive proposition to prospective candidates, as well as keep your current team members engaged with your brand.

The importance of employer branding can never go understated in how it drives the future of your organisation, and establishes a workforce that is motivated, committed and inspired to be part of your company. Achieving this on a global scale is far from straightforward, but through our market-leading brand management software, your team is able to efficiently execute your employer brand strategy.

Start empowering your team with an all-in-one brand management platform today.

The graduates of today are the future leaders of tomorrow. So getting your company noticed at a pivotal time in the careers of these bright young prospects is crucial.

Gen Z and beyond have experienced turbulence much like any other generation. But when it comes to the outlook on careers, the environment and the future, they have been exposed to a much thicker wall of negativity, which employers will have a partial responsibility in helping them break through.

Employers need to not only work hard to bring their employer brand to this new wave of prospects – they need to inspire this generation into believing anything is possible once again. It’s a big challenge, but it’s a vital one to ensure that the right talent is nurtured, retained and driven in the right direction. 

Overcoming challenges with graduates

There are typically two main scenarios employers are finding themselves in with graduates.

• They are inundated with applications for certain roles
• For more specialised roles, there is a smaller pool of talent and competition is high

First let’s look at the most common situation: receiving too many applications.

This can be a problem for a number of reasons that will affect your ability to recruit quality graduates…

Problem…Too many people with similar skill sets are applying and it’s difficult to distinguish who might be most suitable based on their application alone, suggesting there’s a flaw in the application process.

Solution…If you are using an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), there should be options available to introduce more detailed screening questions. These answers should give you insight into an applicant’s personality, communication skills and general motivations for the role before considering their skill sets. 

Your team should also set some common rules for what a good applicant looks like. For example: they must include a cover letter, they must have tailored their cover letter to your company, they must have a nicely presented CV – those kinds of things. This sets parameters that can help you weed out those who haven’t made the effort. 

Additionally, ensure your employer brand’s mission and purpose are coming through enough on your job creatives – give candidates an accurate feeling of what it’s like to work for your brand, and they will likely deselect themselves if they don’t feel they are a good fit.

Problem…Too many applicants are under-qualified for the role they’re applying for – this may mean the application process is too easy or the information provided is misleading.

Solution…If you’ve been a victim of the ‘Indeed effect’, where applicants are just clicking apply to your role even if it’s not aligned to their skills, you can consider the following ways to reduce the amount of unsuitable applications you are receiving:

• Consider promoting your roles on more specialist jobs boards, as this will prevent the vacancy from being accessible to anyone and everyone 
• Review your advertising creatives – are they giving out the wrong message about the roles? Is the company’s expertise shining through? 
• Make sure the essential skills, experience and qualifications are clearly defined in the job description or landing page 

Problem…There’s no time to view the volume of applications coming through with any kind of detail – leaving you missing out on talent and those who don’t hear back feeling disconnected to your employer brand.

Solution…Again, this is where putting in some key filter questions can come in handy. You can use the answers to help determine the quality of the application before committing to reading the CV cover to cover.

For more high-level roles, you may ask the candidate to include a portfolio or include a short task as a first or second stage of application. Make sure this is clear in your job description, as plenty of people who don’t have the skills you need won’t want to proceed based on that request alone.

Lastly, ensure your ATS is set up to give automated responses to applicants. Make it clear that if they are unsuccessful they will not be contacted (providing that there’s no time to respond to each individual), but be sure to encourage them to apply for future roles again after 6 months, a year, or whatever time frame you choose. 

Next, let’s explore scenario two: small or hard-to-reach talent pools for specialist roles. 

This can also create an equally overwhelming amount of problems for your team.

Problem…Your specialist roles aren’t being filled because your offering isn’t strong enough. 

Solution…Graduates in niche industry areas are likely looking for the role that’s going to benefit them and their careers the most.

When looking at your employer brand, think beyond just the salary and benefits. What are the candidates actually going to benefit from by being your employee as opposed to another brand? 

Candidates need to feel excited about the future, not just the initial role they’re taking. Financial security and a decent roster of benefits are an expectation for many and alone are often not enough to inspire a big career move. 

Problem…You may be losing talent to competitors. 

Solution…When an applicant turns down your job offer for another opportunity elsewhere, it’s important to keep the window of opportunity open.

Ask them politely what your company can learn from their experience and what they could be doing differently, and add them to future candidate pools. Teams can then follow up in 6 months or a year via LinkedIn to make them aware of any new roles available. 

Problem…You are not receiving a decent quantity of applicants.

Solution…Reviewing the media placements of your employer brand advertising should be your number one priority. Are your teams promoting the roles in the right places? Are they targeting aspiring developers with ads on Facebook instead of Reddit? Or hiring for a remote role in very specific locations?

Consider putting out an incentivised survey on LinkedIn or appropriate channels to gather first-hand insight into where someone might look for a specific role. 

Problem…You are struggling to find the exact skills needed for your specialist roles.

Solution…Graduates aren’t going to come with the exact skills needed to join your organisation and hit the ground running from day one. In the longer term, it’s worth really thinking about how important these skill sets are to the business. Do they warrant creating a company-sponsored degree? Or an in-house training programme? 

These kinds of opportunities help to mould prospects into the kind of employee your brand needs, and give them on-the-job training and experience. It’s a very time-consuming commitment, so you need to be sure that the investment is worth the outlay and disruption. 

What are the priorities for graduates?

Depending on the industry and the individual, priorities for graduates will vary from person to person. A recent study by Bright Network did help to shine a light on what graduates as a whole are prioritising, some of which we’ll explore here…

They want to be upskilled

95% of members want to be upskilled directly by employers. Having a clear path of progression and training allowance can help graduates understand how your company can take their career to the next level.

They want a genuine commitment to inclusivity and diversity

Many employers preach about inclusivity but fail to live up to the reality. Having HR provide training on important subjects such as unconscious bias, celebrating a wide range of holidays, a commitment to fair pay and having dedicated strategic training programmes are all small steps every company can take towards becoming more inclusive and diverse. But a few gestures aren’t enough – the commitment must be ingrained in your employer brand.

They want to know that employee mental wellbeing is a priority

53% of Millennials were already burned out from work pre-pandemic, up to 59% today. Gen-Z is a close second, with 58% reporting burnout post-pandemic, up from 47% in 2020. While working from home orders and more flexible working have been introduced because of the pandemic, it doesn’t mean the workload has reduced in any way. Having a company show they put people before profit and prioritise mental health will be a key driver for many graduates.

They want to work for a company that’s actively reducing their environmental impact

If graduates are painstakingly separating their recycling each week, using metal straws and reducing their carbon footprint, they want to know that the company they work for is doing their bit, too. It’ll take more than an annual beach clean to impress candidates too – the products, services and practices your brand undertakes need to work hard to reduce short and long-term impact. This is increasingly becoming a dealbreaker for candidates. 

Does your employer brand need to work harder to accommodate graduates?

With only 42% of students saying they feel prepared to enter the world of work, being there for them at this confusing time can help them build a stronger connection to your employer brand.

Make sure the application process is clear and uncomplicated. Don’t avoid questions about salary and progression. Have your company’s mission dominate your employer brand. They are the talent of the future, and in many cases the talent of right now too. 

How you communicate your employer brand is vast – social media, emails, videos, adverts and more. Staying on top of your messaging and adapting your creatives with a constantly moving market can be a challenge – but BAM by Papirfly™ can help you digitise your employer brand, simplify your processes and help teams create infinite promotional materials every month. 

Find out more or book your demo today.

The world of work has been turned on its head several times over in the last few years. The roles of HR, recruitment and talent acquisition teams have been especially challenging as they’ve worked to navigate the complex nature of the pandemic and other changes taking place across the globe.
While the basic principles of your EVP won’t have shifted miles from where it was, there will be new considerations and an element of realignment that needs to take place as part of your employer brand management.

Whether you are continuing in a similar vein to pre-pandemic strategies and trying to realign your team, or have completely transformed the way you work over the last couple of years, revisiting your EVP is an important step.

Why is an EVP 2.0 so integral?

The purpose of your employee value proposition is to align the company’s offering to your employees’ needs, wants and expectations. Employees and companies have seen some unprecedented events take place, but many have thankfully made it out of the other side. This leaves your recruitment colleagues and employer branding team with the following challenges:

• Understanding the mindset and priorities of existing employees
• Discovering what’s motivating top talent 
• Differentiating your EVP from others in your industry

Your EVP 2.0 essentials

Take your purpose even further

It’s one thing joining a company because of its values, it’s another taking action to support those values. As people become more personally purpose-driven, it’s important that the brand they work for matches this.

For example, if your brand is known for its green credentials and helping the world become more sustainable, there should be an internal scheme that rewards ‘green’ behaviour – it’s all about building a great place to work. This could be vouchers towards owning a bike to encourage people not to drive to work, an internal recycling scheme, or special funding for sustainability projects (with additional holiday allowance to accommodate this).

Whatever your purpose, ensure you create a good workplace culture that is reflected in everyday working life as well as your initial promises – this includes ensuring that your internal communications are on-brand to show you’re committed to delivering them. 

Benefits that go beyond just the individual

Family and personal goals are a key career driver, but often employees spend so much time at work that these goals can be hard to fulfil. Explore benefits that will build a greater emotional bond with your employees to foster a positive and supportive  work environment.

This could be providing private health insurance for immediate family members or a training allowance to help the employee achieve new skills.

Get more flexible than ever before

If working from home mandates proved anything, it’s that employees can be trusted to work when and where they want or need to. Many companies are taking this one step further, and we’ve seen a range of working options and employee benefits including:

• Working from home permanently
• Hybrid working
• Flexible start and finish times
• Early closures in the summertime 
• Unlimited holidays (providing that work is completed)
• Extended maternity/paternity leave
• Paid sabbaticals after a specified amount of years

Prioritise mental health support

A supportive company culture will help instil positive mental attitudes, but that alone isn’t enough to ensure your employees remain happy.

Create a forum that encourages open conversations – this could be through the acquisition of a digital mental health platform that employees can engage with as and when needed, regular mental health workshops, the introduction of wellbeing champions, and training for existing managers to effectively support someone who is struggling. There are lots of mental health awareness courses that can be taken, including mental health first-aid.

EVP 2.0: Company culture checklist

Ensuring all bases are covered

Our hierarchy of needs as humans is different in employment than it is in everyday life. Your EVP will be unique to your brand – hopefully including many of the initiatives mentioned already – but there are four basic boxes that your EVP 2.0 needs to tick. If lacking in one of any four areas, you could see your brand lose good talent to competitors and increase your employee turnover. To become an employer of choice, consider the following:

Physical needs

• Health incentives such as gym memberships or on-site classes 
• Partner with apps that can support sleep and wellbeing, such as Calm or Headspace
• Provide access to private healthcare or nutrition services

Emotional needs

• A supportive and open work environment
• Access to therapy tools if needed
• Offer coaching for high-stress positions
• Conduct employee surveys to understand how people are feeling and what improvements could be made
  

Social needs

• Regular meet-ups virtually or in-person to ensure teams feel connected
• Embrace diversity
• Encourage cross-department collaboration
• Encourage giving back and volunteering days in line with your brand purpose

Financial needs

• Offer employees access to financial advisors where possible
• Provide interest-free loans for medium-sized purchases such as annual travel tickets, holidays or cars
• Ensure peace of mind for employees’ families with life assurance
• Conduct regular pay reviews

Communicating your EVP with Papirfly

A creative brand management solution can help to support the good workplace culture you are aiming to build. The platform we offer at Papirfly is used by some of the world’s most notable employer brand teams including Unilever, Vodafone and more. Teams are able to own and control their EVP in every aspect of marketing.

This gives your employer brand team the freedom to:

• Create an infinite amount of on-brand digital, print, social, video and email assets in a matter of minutes – no design skills are needed. These documents are stored in a centralised system and you can manage all campaign
• Store, edit, find and share every asset created in a centralised DAM system
• Access all educational brand and employer brand documents 
• Manage all campaign timelines, briefs and assets from a single portal. On the go. Anywhere in the world. 

So if you need agile talent acquisition, a brand management platform can help you keep consistency throughout your campaigns.

Discover our brand management platform for employer brand teams, check out our customer brand stories or book your demo today.

If you have an account on LinkedIn, you are likely exposed to thousands of ‘personal’ brands each day. From what you post on social media to how you sign off an email, a personal brand can be a powerful thing that shapes how the people of the world see your professional self.

When companies invest time and resources into helping their employees propel and magnify their personal brands, it can be highly beneficial for the person and the brand they represent.

Anyone can use the corporate brand’s narrative to help carve their own. Let’s take a look at which roles in particular should be actively encouraged to propel their personal brand.

Sales Professionals

Those sending out emails, inMails or hosting sessions with prospects are not only representing the company, but in most cases are the first point of contact for individuals. They are responsible for building trust in the brand and establishing a positive relationship with business decision-makers across the world.

It’s vital that sales professionals have the basic sales tools and documentation they need to do their job, but above this, they need support to create an impressive online presence. If a prospect is being reached out to by a sales professional, more often than not, they will check them out on Google. If the prospect is met with a poor online presence, it may tarnish the respect they have for the brand. If the individual is a thought leader or active poster online, they could be more likely to engage.

Sales Professional:

• Needs access to videos, social assets and email templates
• Nees access to tone of voice guidelines
• Should understand brand values

Customer Service Professionals

Much like Sales Professionals, those in customer service play a crucial role in how they portray the brand to new and existing customers. They too need access to documentation that can assist them with queries and company information, but if they actively made being helpful and knowledgeable part of their personal brand, there could be an exponentially positive ripple effect on the company’s reputation.

Customer Service Professional

• Needs detailed documentation
• Needs access to tone of voice guidelines
• Should understand brand values

Managers and Director-Level Professionals

Your brand’s content strategy may not extend to the experts in your business, but it most definitely should. Not just from a corporate perspective, but from an employer brand view.

People want to know the company they’re investing in, whether as a customer or a potential candidate, is as expert as it claims. If each head of department is creating their own content (or assisted in creating it), those in each respective team can share, comment and engage – further casting the net for your brand to get noticed.

Managers and Director-Level Profession

• Needs access to professional resources such as copywriters and videographers
• Shoukd pioneer brand values
• Needs specific area of expertise to become thought leader on

HR and Employer Brand Teams

Showing the world that you lead by example is a great way to attract recruits. Those that are responsible for attracting and retaining employees should shout about what a great place it is to work, and keep everyone updated with any new or impressive policies.

HR and Employer Brand Teams

• Helps brand to practice what it preaches
• Understands employee brand inside out
• Needs access to pool of assets

What will motivate employees to build their personal brand? 

Employees that do not have a strong personal connection to your brand are unlikely to be willing to build their personal brand in conjunction with your corporate story. Your employer brand must be strong in the first place and rooted in a positive culture in order for personal brand building to be effective and beneficial.  
Here are some key ways to help motivate employees:

• When setting guidelines on what they can and can’t do, make them easy to read, understand and implement. 
• Provide easily accessible resources and assets that can be edited or shared directly. 
• Don’t expect this personal brand building to take place outside of work hours – it’s a big ask. Allocate some work time to personal development and brand building – once they’ve reached a certain level, employees are more likely to invest their own time.
• Don’t leave them hanging. If they want to be involved but are unsure of how to get started, put them in touch with whoever can help, such as your agency, marketing consultants, designers or copywriters. You could even do in-house sessions that help individuals in certain aspects of personal brand building.
• Don’t be too militant about which websites they can access on the company network. Restricting access to social media, for example, will discourage employees from building any form of personal brand. 
• It’s important to remember that not everyone will want to partake in representing the company on their personal channels. It’s a big step for many, so think about rewarding those that do contribute – this can help incentivise others.
• Know your brand mission and identity – if your brand is misaligned internally there’s little point in getting employees to shout about it.

Building a personal brand: what they need checklist

Now we’ve covered the who and the how, let’s get into the what. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it is the bare minimum your team should expect to implement should you wish to recruit more employees into building their personal brand:

Professional photography

Without a professional photo, an employee has little chance of making a good impression. If a photographer isn’t available then someone should be available internally to help shoot them professionally.

LinkedIn (or equivalent) training

If social media isn’t part of their job, it’s a huge ask to expect employees to get involved. A crash course or ongoing support to help them progress and answer any questions will be critical.

Access to a company laptop or phone outside of work hours

If you want your employees to represent your brand at all times, they need access to the technology that can help them facilitate it, even if they don’t engage outside of work hours.

A copy of the company mission and values

Employees need to be aligned to their corporate mission and brand values, otherwise it’s a wasted effort trying to build their personal brand. Someone that doesn’t share your vision will be instantly obvious on any social media feed.

Brand and tone of voice guidelines

This may be a smaller, more focused version of your wider guideline document. It could contain all the key brand terminology, dos and don’ts, and some key information about their industry or area of expertise.

A digital resource for assets and files 

Appearing professional starts with looking professional. This may begin with a nicely shot photo, but the content that appears on social feeds must look and feel like it’s part of the brand. Having a central, digital repository that teams can dip in and out of when needed will break down any barriers to engagement they have and actively encourage them to get involved.

A simple approvals process

If you’re using a Brand Activation Management (BAM) system, you should have a built-in DAM and approvals process for any new assets created. If your asset creation and sign-off process isn’t digitised, then try to make sure employees only have one hoop to jump through to get their content signed off – any more than this and they are likely to disengage.

Idea and topic generation sessions

Whether it’s in the form of a company meeting or a Friday whiteboard session, it shouldn’t be down to just the individual to come up with every topic they write about. While most content will be focused on their area of expertise, wider company updates and discussions are paramount, otherwise things can become quickly misaligned.

Assistance from other employees or an agency

If your employees are from a technical background or aren’t used to writing about themselves publicly, offer them access to resources inside or outside of your organisation that might be able to assist.

Empower your employees to build their personal brand with BAM by Papirfly™

One of the biggest barriers for brands is being able to produce high-quality, varied content on demand. Add brand advocates in the form of employees into the mix and that’s an entire content stream that needs to be accounted for. What BAM does is provide a central place for marketing teams and employees to create, edit, share and manage campaign materials.

Videos, social media assets, emails and more. Every digital and print asset team could need, produced in-house, by anyone, an infinite amount of times. The best part is that there’s a digital audit trail and an in-built sign-off process, so you can guarantee that only approved content makes its way onto the internet. 

Find out more about BAM today or book your demo.