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 2024, so you can activate your employer brand with complete confidence.

18 employer branding tools to check out in 2024

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.

For better or worse, social media networks are an integral part of our lives – and channels that modern marketers must master.

Why? Because over 5 billion people worldwide use social media channels at least once per month – a figure that is expected to touch 6 billion by 2027. As a result, it’s one of the main avenues for brands to communicate directly with their consumers, tell stories and build trust with their audience.

That makes a strong, consistent social media brand incredibly valuable. Not only does it ensure your audiences can recognise your brand’s identity – they can also get to know your values. Any break in uniformity risks eroding these delicate relationships.

In this essential guide, we’ll outline how you can sustain a consistent brand voice across your social profiles, and share our top tips to enhance your long-term social media marketing strategy.

What is social media branding?

Social media branding is how you utilise your social networks to grow, promote and evolve your brand’s identity. Put simply, it’s how you choose to portray your brand on social media.

With how prevalent these platforms are in modern society, this is very likely where someone first encounters your brand. So, the content on your profiles must be crafted and curated to clearly share your values and personality, in the same way you would approach your website or general advertising.

What are the key elements of social media branding?

An effective social media brand must get several key aspects correct to successfully resonate with audiences.

Consistency: You must maintain a consistent tone, style, and visual identity across your social media posts to reinforce brand recognition and trust.

Content creation: You must develop and share relevant and compelling types of content, including imagery and video content, that connects with people and aligns with your branding.

Engagement: You must actively interact with followers, responding to comments, messages, and mentions to foster relationships and build long-term loyalty.

Brand voice: You must establish a distinct, authentic brand voice that reflects your organisation’s personality and values.

Community building: You must cultivate a community through user-generated content (UGC) and create opportunities for your followers to participate and support your brand.

While each element is important, brand consistency is the most essential piece of the puzzle – and often the most challenging to enforce.

The importance of social media brand consistency

Consistency is the base for any stable, trustworthy relationship. The relationship between you and your social media followers is no different. 

Today’s consumers want to trust the brands they buy from. They want to feel they share the same values, speak the same language, and have comparable priorities. Especially on social media, which has always been a more “personal” environment, many people use these platforms to understand brands rather than buy from them.

This is why brand consistency is so vital on these channels. If your followers get mixed messages from your content, or markedly different experiences when they communicate with your brand through social media, they start to question what your brand stands for.

Questioning breeds mistrust, and mistrust is a slippery slope to losing followers and brand recognition.

Beyond damaging the trust of your followers, an inconsistent social media presence can also make your organisation appear unprofessional. If your posts deviate from your primary brand colours, mix up typographies or constantly change formats, it reflects a lack of internal organisation. And nobody wants to buy from a brand that appears disjointed.

Further problems caused by inconsistency on your social media platforms include:

• Followers failing to recall your brand when in the market for your products and services
• Reduced engagement and interaction with your posts from your followers
• Less effective paid social campaigns alongside your organic content
• Weakening your overall brand equity

How often should I post on social media to maintain brand consistency?

Brand consistency doesn’t simply apply to the quality of your content or how you communicate with your audiences. You should also be consistent in how frequently you post on social media.

People are creatures of habit – if they enjoy your content, they will carve out the time to seek it out. But, if you take a scattergun approach to scheduling content, users won’t be able to track it accordingly. Think of it like your favourite TV show – if new episodes came out at a random date and time each week, would you be following it as closely?

With so many social media channels, each with different audiences and algorithms, how often you post must be adjusted accordingly. Here’s a quick guide based on best practices:

Of course, your understanding of your audience will dictate whether you post more or less frequently. Nevertheless, a set calendar for when and where your posts are published will help ensure a consistent experience for your followers.

8 tips for building a consistent social media branding strategy

1. Lock down your brand identity and goals

First, the key to consistency on social media is having your purpose, mission, values and identity nailed down before sharing your first post. Every relevant person on your team, from your dedicated social media brand manager, to marketers in your local outlets, should fully understand what your brand stands for.

Now, your social media brand may vary slightly from your other marketing channels depending on your goals for these platforms. Do you want to raise brand awareness? Do you intend to generate leads? Is it simply a means for your customers to message your brand?

Whatever your social media brand represents, centralise it in one all-encompassing brand hub. From here, your teams worldwide can access digital brand guidelines, style guides and more to ensure any marketing materials they produce align with your core branding and overarching goals.

2. Establish your target audience

Next, consider your target audience – who are your posts communicating with?

• How old are they?
• Where do they spend their time online and offline?
• Which platforms are they likely to use?
• What are their pain points?

This may not be straightforward to answer as different social channels attract different audiences. For instance, younger consumers lean towards platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, while Facebook has now cultivated an older user base.

Establishing personas for every social network you intend to use will help keep your messaging aligned with their specific wants and preferences, while remaining within your brand guidelines.

3. Define your social media channels

Based on what you know about your audiences, this should help you define what channels to devote your efforts to. It’s unlikely your ideal customers will be active on every social channel, so this will help you streamline your content and focus your attention on the areas where you stand to make the greatest gains.

For example, LinkedIn is a go-to platform for B2B businesses, but may hold less value for B2C organisations.

Being selective with your social media channels also empowers your teams to fully understand these platforms – their nuances, their best-performing types of content, their ideal posting times. This knowledge will allow you to optimise your content accordingly, so it reaches the right audiences at the right times, all while telling a compelling, consistent story.

4. Create a social content calendar

As we noted earlier, consistency applies just as much to the frequency of your posts as it does to the quality of your visual content. With this in mind, creating a social calendar helps ensure that your channels maintain the regularity your audiences expect.

Here are a few best practices when setting up your schedule:

• Develop a variety of content themes and pillars (educational, entertainment, promotional, etc.) and spread these out to keep your feeds engaging
• Research each platform you use to determine their most optimal posting times
• Follow the 80/20 rule when producing content, with 80% of your content providing value and 20% promoting your goods or services
• Leave capacity for user-generated content, special announcements and more
• Highlight noteworthy holidays, relevant events and awareness dates to tailor content for these occasions

5. Build social post templates

Creating consistent brand assets demands dependable templates. While easily accessible brand guidelines help keep everyone on the same page, intelligent templates make this second nature for your social media teams, ensuring they cannot deviate from your visual identity.

As well as locking down the position of your logo, brand colours, design elements and more, branded design templates enable you to create real-time marketing materials for your various channels and locations. Your templates can match the optimal size and layout of each platform, and enable users to switch up the language or imagery for different countries and cultures.

Fundamentally, templates empower your social media marketers to work faster, confidently and cost-effectively, all while preventing inconsistencies.

6. Produce communication guidelines

Consistency on social media goes beyond your day-to-day feeds – it’s how you communicate with followers one-to-one. Any difference in tone or experience when answering a user’s comment or replying to a private message can be just as damaging to their overall impression of your brand.

By developing communication guidelines for those responsible for engaging with your followers, you can keep these messages consistent with your values and tone of voice. This may include set responses for particular scenarios, such as how to respond to a complaint or negative comment, or what user posts it’s okay for your platform to share and comment on.

Responsive engagement is integral to the performance of your social media strategy – and an approach that will keep your tone aligned with your overarching goals and identity.

7. Set up a home for your digital assets

If your company has teams spread worldwide, consistency is a real challenge. It only takes one rogue post to disrupt your communications and damage your reputation with your followers. That’s why it’s useful to have everyone in your organisation working from the same bank of digital assets.

Intelligent templates and a central brand hub can help achieve this, but Digital Asset Management (DAM) provides an added layer of protection. These solutions provide a repository where users can store and access all approved social assets, and from here adapt them for local audiences.

With this “single source of truth” for your social media brand, you can publish on-brand collateral across any platform, and maintain a birds-eye view over the consistency of your assets. Plus, these digital libraries enable you to tag and categorise assets, so your teams can find what they need faster and easier:

By managing your digital assets effectively, you can lock down consistency across every social media channel and campaign, without proofing-related bottlenecks.

8. Monitor your social media channels

Finally, you should monitor and track your social media channels multiple times a day. Whenever a post is scheduled for release, you should check that it’s been published correctly and give it one final sense-check for consistent tone and appearance.

If you’ve taken all the previous steps, this should be a mere formality. However, inconsistencies can still slip through the cracks, and frequent monitoring allows you to react to any problems swiftly before they cause any harm to your brand reputation.

Plus, if your posts receive any negative comments or feedback, regular monitoring enables you to respond quickly with a well-crafted reply. This engagement shows your audience that you listen to feedback and don’t attempt to sweep negative reviews under the rug.

The future of social media branding

Even as the world becomes more critical of the role social media plays in shaping our minds and behaviours, its evolution is one that marketers will be keen to keep up with. 

While there’s no way of knowing exactly where social media marketing will be in as little as 10 months – as the number of users continues to grow and these platforms mature, the power of social media is only going to become more prolific. 

Of course, the number of brands entering the social media landscape will rise too. To stand out amidst an expanding sea of content, it’s going to take a remarkable strategy and team – one where intelligent, on-brand templating is at the centre.

Maintain a consistent social media presence on all platforms with Papirfly

Brand consistency is a core mark of trust and quality for consumers across the globe. Maintaining a coordinated presence on your social platforms keeps your reputation with followers strong, and ensures your organisation’s values, personality and visual identity are delivered to your audiences exactly as intended.

The challenges of multichannel marketing and the content demands of social networks can make consistency an ongoing problem. The techniques outlined in this guide will help you stay on top of your day-to-day posts, so nothing on your feeds drifts away from your core brand identity – even campaigns focused on local markets.

When supported by a reliable brand management platform, you’ll never need to question the consistency of your social media channels again – and empower your teams to produce assets cost-efficiently to satisfy your content-hungry followers.

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.

Want to know more? Find out how you can build an employer brand that maximises employee retention.

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.

For more on the growing potential of AI and other key trends to keep an eye on, check out our guide to make employer branding work for your business in 2024.

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.

Employer branding is more important than ever in 2024. Remote and hybrid working. A globalised recruitment landscape. Widespread skills shortages. A demanding talent pool and candidates’ market. 

Brands face stiff competition to secure the best people and to keep them. And employer brand professionals are the frontline in talent acquisition and employee engagement. 

You know that a strong employer value proposition is a candidate magnet. It helps your organisation attract and retain the talent it needs for success. But creating a consistent, compelling employer brand is a challenge in itself.

So many touchpoints. So many stakeholders. So little time. 

If you’re here looking for an answer – a way to ‘do more with less’ – then you’re in the right place. 

From working with employers of choice like Unilever and Vodafone, we know Digital Asset Management software can revolutionize employer branding efforts – helping create a strong brand presence on every platform and in every locality.

Here’s what you need to know.

Employer branding is crucial – but hard – in 2024 

In a landscape characterised by skills shortages and increasing choice, great candidates have the upper hand. You’re in a global competition for talent – both to attract it and retain it.

Businesses that win the war will secure in-demand skills and value-aligned individuals to drive their ambitions forward. Businesses that lose… not so much. 

But it isn’t just the (current) candidates’ market that’s making employer branding more important. It’s our shifting expectations of employers. From ‘the great renegotiation’ inspired by global lockdowns – to the influx of Gen Z into the workplace – we’re demanding more of employers than before.

Employee engagement is key. We want great benefits, work-life balance, and an inclusive company culture. But we want meaningful work, authenticity, corporate ethics, and societal impact too. And people aren’t stupid. Employers need to walk the walk… or their people will. 

In this challenging employer branding environment, businesses need to improve their employee value proposition, embed it, and communicate it consistently across every touchpoint.  

In the burgeoning digital landscape, there are so many places to communicate your brand. Managing that to maximize impact and consistency is getting harder. Your platforms and digital brand assets seem to multiply exponentially – but your budget and hours in the day don’t.

And that’s before we even think about localising employer branding campaigns to maximise their impact in different regions and cultures.

If this problem sounds familiar, Digital Asset Management (DAM) software is the answer.

An avalanche of assets is overwhelming employer brand teams

An avalanche of digital brand assets is overwhelming employer branding teams. Digital assets are the images, artwork, video, audio files, campaign materials, PDFs, guidelines etc that you use to market your business internally and externally.

[See What are digital assets and how do you manage them? for why you need to treat these files with the utmost care].

• There are the digital brand assets you use as building blocks to create campaigns – your photoshoots, your graphic design files etc. You need easy access to these to create brand content quickly and efficiently.
  
• Then there are the employer branding materials you create – your finished artwork, campaign materials, brand guidelines, templates, etc. You need to be able to distribute these easily to the people who’ll use them. 

There are so many of them because employer branding is increasingly digital. You need to create employer branding content for your company website, social media channels, third-party sites, campaigns, employee advocacy, and more.

That means you’re creating and managing more digital assets than ever. And that can get messy, real quick. And that’s a serious risk to your employer branding efforts.

You cannot manage brand assets at scale without an appropriate system. And that spells risk for your team and the wider business. 

Challenges managing employer branding assets

• Wasted time – Searching for assets that are hidden away in the wrong place or have file names like ‘IMG07624.jpg’ – not helpful.
• Wasted money – Recreating assets from scratch because you simply can’t find them and your stakeholder needs the content ‘yesterday’.
• More risk – Using outdated assets because you don’t know which is the most recent version – or using restricted assets because there’s no way to know.
• Inconsistency – Because people are frustrated with the current system and just start doing their own thing.

Problems distributing employer branding materials

• Distribution issues – Getting brand assets to the right people at the right time. You can have the best employer brand ever…but it’s useless if you can’t get it out there.
• Diluted brand – People simply not knowing how to apply your employer brand and putting out materials they think are right… but aren’t on-brand at all.
• Missed opportunities to localise – Issuing one-size-fits-all campaigns because you don’t have time to optimize materials for different markets.

You might be so used to the scenarios above that it feels normal. 

But it’s not. 

There is a better way.

7 reasons your employer brand needs DAM

To excel in the ever-more demanding future of work, you need to reclaim control now. Savvy businesses leverage Digital Asset Management for employer branding. They know a DAM platform makes brand content creation easier and brand asset distribution foolproof. 

Digital Asset Management (DAM) software provides a single space to store, access, and use your digital assets – like images, videos, brand collateral, and multimedia materials that support effective employer branding. 

DAM makes it easier for every team that touches your employer brand – HR, recruitment, marketing, regional managers, employee advocates – to stay on-brand. And it accelerates campaign activation. It’s a two-for-one win for ambitious employer brands. 

Here are seven things DAM can do for you – whether you work in employer branding, corporate branding, marketing operations, creative services, or any other team with digital-asset-heavy workflows.

1. Cut costs and maximise efficiency 

Using Digital Asset Management software for employer branding saves you time and money. A centralized digital asset library – for brand content creation, management and distribution – streamlines your processes. This efficiency translates into better resource utilization and cost savings. 

Team members can quickly locate and utilize the necessary materials, reducing the time spent on searching and requesting assets. Internal and external contributors can collaborate in the cloud, bypassing messy manual processes. And branding materials can be distributed instantly. 

2. Make more space for strategy

Your personal creativity and strategic approach are key differentiators for your brand – but they’re drained by the demands of the job – and your great ideas and good intentions get lost in admin.

Using DAM software reduces time spent on pointlessly ineffective processes – like fruitlessly searching for assets and manually emailing them to people – so you’ve got more time for stuff that actually adds value – like strategically shaping your employer value proposition and getting creative about how you communicate it.

3. …And localisation

You know you should be localising campaigns to increase their relevance to regional audiences. From changing photography to accurately reflect local demographics and cultural norms, to offering materials in multiple languages. But you simply don’t have time.

With efficiency gains from using a Digital Asset Management system, your team can dedicate more time to impactful campaigns for specific audiences – supporting recruitment and DEI goals. And, thanks to easy distribution via your brand portal, you can make sure each region only accesses materials meant for them.

4. Guarantee your brand consistency 

In employer branding, consistency is key. A strong, consistent and recognizable visual identity increases brand recognition and supports organizational objectives around talent acquisition, recruitment, and engagement.

A Digital Asset Management platform doubles as a brand asset management portal – an online space where stakeholders can access branding guidelines, employer branding materials, templates, approved image sets etc. 

This empowers your wider collaborative team – everyone from external design agencies to regional divisions to employee advocates – to find, use, and create on-brand materials for the organization. 

5. Enhance your agility 

How many times are opportunities passing you by? Like experimenting with a new platform or localizing assets for higher regional impact. Without efficient Digital Asset Management, your slow processes can limit your agility. 

Centralized DAM software lets you quickly locate, modify, and repurpose digital assets, accelerating content creation and increasing overall creative capacity. This lets you respond promptly to emerging opportunities, ensuring a dynamic and consistent brand experience. 

6. Reduce brand risk

The biggest risk to employer branding efforts is unfit-for-purpose processes. We’ve shown how a digital asset library can address this issue.

Beyond this, DAM software also mitigates risks associated with the misuse or unauthorized access of sensitive brand assets – thanks to robust access controls and permission levels. Plus, version control features reduce the risk of using outdated materials, preventing inconsistencies and potential damage to the brand image.

Imagine job descriptions using a retired logo, or a social post using a photo where the participant has since withdrawn their permission for use. Centralizing assets – and removing and archiving assets that should no longer be used – protects against this kind of risk.  

7. Empower employees to become brand ambassadors 

If you want to help your employees advocate for your employer brand, you need to give them on-brand tools and materials. A DAM used as a brand portal gives employees easy access to a curated collection of brand assets. 

They can share branded content on their social media platforms – such as job ads, announcements, and the popular ‘new position’ celebrations to LinkedIn – so your brand benefits from their authentic excitement about working for you. This builds trust with the audience, as it comes directly from the voices and experiences of employees.

Key features of DAM for employer branding

A single source of truth keeps assets secure but accessible

A DAM system provides a single secure repository for all your brand assets. Cloud-based DAM is accessible 24/7 online. No more assets lost and languishing on desktops, attached to emails, or in different departmental folders. 

Metadata puts files at your fingertips 

A DAM applies metadata to assets to make them findable in a few clicks. You don’t need to know file names anymore. Just search on keywords that describe the file you want – and see beautiful visual previews to identify the file you need.

Automatic version control keeps you up-to-date

No more time wasted wondering which file is the latest version. You’ll always see the most recent version in your DAM – but with a full audit trail and ability to revert to previous files if needed.

Integrations make design processes easier 

A DAM is designed to integrate. Integrate it with InDesign or your website CMS to give designers immediate access to all your brand assets without even leaving the window they’re working in.  

Online portals effortlessly deliver assets to end users 

A DAM doesn’t just make your content creation processes easier. Distribution is easy and instant, anywhere in the world. Upload finished employer branding materials and guidelines to your online brand portals for easy internal and external access.

Permissions protect embargoed assets 

Worried online access means a free-for-all? It isn’t. Permission controls mean people only see what you want them to. Protect embargoed assets and commercially sensitive content.  

Workflow automation accelerates creation 

A Digital Asset Management platform automates so many processes you perform manually at the minute – saving you tonnes of time. For example, bulk uploads, instant content sharing, and one-click, in-app editing (eg applying crops and ratios for different platforms). 

Employer branding teams to power up with Papirfly

You know the employer branding landscape is changing. Your systems need to evolve to cope. Digital Asset Management software is a game changer for busy, ambitious employer branding teams. Papirfly’s platform is a full suite of enterprise-grade brand management tools, including a portal for brand guidelines, Digital Asset Management, on-brand templating, campaign management, real-time data analytics, and more.  

Discover how global employers of choice strengthen their strong employer brand with Papirfly. 

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.

Where have we come from with employer branding?

The last year has seen huge development and investment in employer branding from large, global companies seeking to improve company culture and provide a positive and inspiring place to work. There are some key trends we have seen develop across the last year which employer branding teams need to consider moving into 2024.

Using AI solutions to enhance your employer brand

We can’t ignore the existence of AI and it’s now commonplace for companies to use ChatGPT to develop their content, for example. However, over the past year we have also seen corporates put in place policies to ensure that there is always a human input to their content: it needs a human touch to edit and sense-check, as well as to add the local element to the words and imagery. 

However, you can now use AI to edit videos, add subtitles, colour correct imagery and so on. The list is only going to grow, so in order to enhance your employer brand, it’s vital that comms and marketing teams stay on top of the trends.

How digital asset management can improve your employer branding. People buy from people, and now we are in a post-pandemic world, we need to get back into the field and show people working day-to-day for your company. Not only this, but also in-person video, instead of remotely-recorded video, is on the rise so it’s time to showcase your staff in an interactive way again. Company culture videos are proving popular as businesses become more aware of the value of employer branding.

Social media tactics for your employer brand

Social media continues to develop at pace and as communicators we need to stay on top of the trends, such as the rise of X and TikTok. For large corporates, LinkedIn posts from senior leaders are becoming incredibly popular and successful. This goes hand-in-hand with brand ambassadors – where employees promote the brand themselves on social – to build a strong voice for the brand. In fact, companies are 58% more likely to attract talent if they have a successful employer branding programme, which covers both universal themes and localised messages.

Key employer branding trends for 2024

Follow these top tips to ensure that your employer brand works for you this year.

Putting company culture first

Looking ahead to the coming year, we would expect to see a growing focus on health and wellbeing of staff. Gen Z in particular are very vocal on social media and will soon call out companies that are missing the mark in this field. Employees are increasingly looking for a good company culture and one that nurtures its staff as mental ill health is a growing problem in society; 77% of employees on Glassdoor said they would look at company culture before applying for a job. 

Improve your EVP

So companies need to look to the core and ensure that the work their staff are doing is not detrimental to their health and that they have good policies in place to protect them. Generous annual leave, sick pay, employee assistance programmes and so on are all bread and butter now. Going above and beyond, we see companies developing webinars to support perimenopause and menopause, wellness days, volunteering and yoga sessions. The whole package of support is increasingly important as burnout becomes so damaging to a career and also a business. 

Enhance your employer image

This coming year is also the time to develop the leadership narrative further. As we mentioned, leaders are becoming visible on platforms like LinkedIn and this is only going to be more necessary. And while they are venturing into the social world more, it’s important they remain authentic – so those crafting the messages need to pay attention to the tone of voice and audience. It’s important to come across as engaging and relevant, whilst maintaining the authoritative voice of a leader.

Develop your brand ambassadors

Frontline staff are also becoming more visible and rightly so. With AI, video and interactive content coming to the fore, it’s possible to get their voice heard and internal comms are focusing on those key workers. Events to celebrate them, such as awards are being used and global webinars and townhalls are making a comeback post-pandemic. In general, companies are keen to have deeper discussions and involve staff from all levels of the business, in a two-way communications process.

Focus on your employer branding strategy

Brand ambassadors also support the rise in recognition of your employer branding. Employees need to understand and engage with the business in order to promote it, and when they do it’s a win-win as they learn more about the company, whilst prospective candidates do too. This makes ensuring you have the most effective employer brand management solutions to articulate what your brand is about – both in values and overall identity – all the more essential. 

AI in employer branding

And as we began with AI, so we will conclude – it’s a necessary strategy to develop your AI usage throughout the business and employer branding is no exception. For 2024, the key thing will be to empower and hire staff to be able to use the tools to your advantage. We will always need the human touch, especially in employer branding, as there is a need to have an authentic voice. But AI can do the legwork.

Build positive brand perception from the inside out

There has never been a more important time to invest in your employer brand. No matter how successful it is, the attitudes of employees and prospective talent can switch at any time, and it’s important you have processes, tools and skills in place to respond. 

With a brand management platform, you have a centralised portal of all recruitment and brand assets, which teams can edit, share or even create from scratch. Digital, print, video, social, email. Everything you need to keep your employer brand front and centre. 

Make this quarter count, find out more about how Papirfly empowers employer branding teams in 2024. 

Curious to learn how multinational software corporation SAP, successfully activates localised employer branding across 70 countries and 110,000 employees worldwide? Join our exclusive webinar on Wednesday 31st January. Register here.

The powerful story you tell about why people should want to work for your brand is like any other captivating narrative – it will be strong in its beginning, middle and end. Hopefully, if you tell it right from the very beginning, the best talent will start to believe your company is the best place for them, want to be right in the middle of your exciting growth plans, and end only after a long and exciting career with you. Making the right choices today could see you soon retelling the story of how you mastered your employer brand strategy – to attract, recruit, and retain top talent.

In this article, we’re going to look at why employer branding is so important, how to achieve success with your strategy, and why not having these elements in place is a mistake. Previously we have explored the 13 steps to developing your employer branding strategy but here we are going to distil them into just three steps – Persona, Positioning, and Proof.

What would happen without an employer branding strategy?

With sites like Glassdoor and Indeed, potential employees now have a range of tools at their disposal to assess companies when job hunting, to see if the business and culture, among other things, are a good fit for them. 84% of jobseekers consider the reputation of a company important and 52% will look at social media channels to get a feel for the company culture.

Consider that without an employer branding strategy you will experience low talent retention and good staff are expensive and timely to replace if the competition looks more attractive to them. And following the pandemic, talent are considering hybrid roles and flexibility far more keenly – so companies who want to tap into this finite resource will need to be transparent, flexible and competitive with their offer. 

Persona

First and foremost, you need to audit how your audience perceives your brand. The best way to do this is by assessing social media, company review sites, Google alerts and internal employee feedback. Listening is a vital skill in any communications strategy, and you need to be aware of your reputation if you want to build brand equity.

From here, you want to assess the persona of your target audience and build a profile of your ideal candidate. What sort of personality do they have? What motivates them? Where do they look for their next role and who influences them? These are important considerations if you want to build up that persona to truly get inside the skin of your audience.

What you’re really aiming for is to clearly establish what makes your brand unique. When you truly understand who your audience is, you can then establish what it is about your brand that will tick their job-hunting boxes. It feeds into your employer brand strategy as it tells you why they would choose you above the competition. Is it that your values align with theirs, your company culture, or your social responsibilities? The more your goals resonate with your employees, the more engaged and motivated your workforce will be – which will always have a positive impact on the bottom line.

Positioning

So, what about positioning? Once you know exactly who you are talking to and what message you need to share, it’s time to consider how you will reach them – what marketing channels will work best for your strategy?You will know the type of social media channels which fit the demographic, which career sites they use and where to advertise. Video is worth considering as it is a powerful medium which can enable you to show familiar faces of the company. You need to post regularly and authentically, considering localised nuances if you are a global company.

Central to your positioning is your Employee Value Proposition or EVP. This tells you exactly how you align your values against those of your employee, with them at the heart. Include here what motivates them. Is it healthcare benefits, flexibility, or bonuses for example? It will be a mixture, and you need to ensure you communicate these messages throughout the recruitment and onboarding processes, and are always available to current staff. Your business will benefit when brand guidelines are all housed within one , – helping you to ensure you’re communicating a strong, consistent brand, which is as much about values as it is about logos.

Proof 

What happens if you don’t take these steps? Research shows that staff are 20% more likely to leave a workplace within a year if there is no investment in their future, which is why training and development is absolutely essential, and you have to mean what you say and demonstrate this clearly. It’s one thing to show that your values align, but to truly demonstrate this you need to offer opportunities for growth and in this way you will nurture brand advocates – they will tell their friends and promote your vacancies.

Throughout this process of developing your employer branding strategy, you need to evaluate success. Any successful communications strategy has an internal review at the heart. If you set a benchmark and continue to assess how well your strategy is performing, this can inform your future communications. This includes seeking buy-in across the board. HR professionals, board members, staff, and candidates, all need to be included. Then you can fine-tune against your KPIs and conduct focus groups, so the strategy is continually evolving.

Implementing your employer branding strategy means putting people at the heart of everything you do, as they can be your biggest asset and opportunity for growth, with the right approach. They will become your champions. With Papirfly’s brand management platform, empower your employer branding team to attract, recruit and retain the best people – and celebrate building and being part of a team of champions for your successful global brand. In fact, you can read all about how we helped Unilever deliver employer brand perfection with our platform.

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.