In today’s highly competitive landscape, the best talent doesn’t just arrive at your website ready to apply. To truly succeed, you need to tell candidates why they should consider you for their next career move.

In the same way a customer must be nurtured along their journey to buy, modern candidates must be guided along the path to apply, led by content that places your employer brand at the centre of every conversation.

From social media posts that highlight your core values to prospects, or onboarding documents that emphasise your company’s values to your latest recruits, a constant flow of compelling content keeps applicants on the hook. 

But how do you maintain the quality and brand consistency today’s job seekers expect across every touchpoint, within increasingly tighter schedules and budgets? How can you efficiently and practically scale your employer brand content with your changing talent acquisition requirements?

The answer: investing in custom design templates. Below, we explain what they are, how they can revolutionise your recruitment strategy, and the key signs of great template creation software.

What are custom design templates?

Think of custom design templates as a constant head start for any kind of on-brand asset creation. A framework based on your brand guidelines, enabling your designers, recruiters and wider employer brand team to produce high-quality content with speed, precision and assurance.

To achieve this, effective design templates include locked-down elements, such as asset dimensions, logo positions and design layouts. These cannot be moved or changed, so users stick within the fixed parameters of your guidelines.

From here, they can then switch out customisable elements, such as calls-to-action (CTAs), colour schemes, imagery, copy and more with creative freedom, knowing that they cannot steer far from your brand identity.

As you can imagine, having access to these branded templates can massively ramp up the production of recruitment ads, job listings, corporate communications and much, much more. The right templating tool is a real game-changer – giving your hiring teams the confidence and skills they need to break away from costly third-party agencies, time-consuming approval processes and design limitations.

How can custom templates help with your recruitment efforts?

When you consider that 71% of recruitment-focused teams face challenges creating the content they need, custom templates can be a powerful tool to create the variety of collateral required to properly promote your employer brand. 

This is because design templates can:

Expedite the creation of personalised social content

In our increasingly digital world, it’s no surprise that 79% of applicants turn to social media platforms to conduct their job searches. But the breadth of these channels, with distinct optimal posting frequencies, can make it a challenge to generate the content required to stay top of candidates’ minds.

To tap into this marketplace of millions, customisable templates empower your teams to produce on-brand, studio-quality assets in minutes. 

With elements like CTAs, colour schemes and imagery able to be instantly swapped out to suit the nuances of a particular region, platform or branch of the business, intelligent templates make it possible to produce well-optimised social media posts in a truly scalable way, without sacrificing consistency or impact. 

Empower employees to become brand advocates

While a strong employer brand instils confidence in your potential candidates, it’s hard to ignore that 76% of individuals are more likely to trust content shared by a brand’s employees over assets from a brand itself.

To allow your most passionate employees to champion your culture, values and company mission through compelling, highly engaging material, custom templates give your strongest advocates an avenue to express their views and build trust, without compromising your brand’s identity.

By allowing employees to follow a helpful framework, even those with zero design skills can be empowered to develop exceptional assets for their personal profiles. This means your employer brand can reach a wider audience in a more targeted, organic way than simply through your company pages.

Create a full suite of onboarding content

If you’re at the stage where your job openings are filled and your new hires are well on their way to becoming full-fledged team members, it can be easy to direct your employer branding technology toward the next campaign. 

But in recent years, so many organisations have lost potential hires at the final hurdle due to a negative or frustrating candidate experience. To ensure your employer brand is just as strong inside as out, customisable templates allow for the quick, easy and scalable creation of company manuals, brand guidelines and other essential internal communications.

With these templates, you can guarantee that your new hires have the information they need to start work swiftly and confidently. And, to give them a real sense of belonging from the outset, these can also allow you to easily personalise standard guidebooks and manuals for each recruit.

Streamline video production

Over 65% of businesses use video in their recruitment efforts. You can see why when 43% of candidates say they’re more likely to apply for a job promoted through video content.

Able to turn this traditionally long, costly and intensive process into something effortless, custom templates are a lifeline for any forward-thinking recruitment team eager to stake their claim in the video-centric future of search.

The right custom template software will include tools to make dynamic, on-brand edits in a standardised format, so you can produce this eye-grabbing content with greater ease.

5 benefits of using custom templates for recruitment

1. Speed up time-to-market

Filling an open position takes an average of 44 days. When you factor in the weeks, months or even years it can take for a new hire to settle in, skill up, and reach the desired level of competency, talent acquisition is a lengthy and disruptive process for any organisation.

Quicker and more scalable asset creation with design templates enables your team to produce videos, job adverts, office posters, employee testimonials and other collateral as quickly as possible – especially important if you’re running a high-volume recruitment campaign.

2. Achieve complete consistency 

In a world with more opportunities for candidates than ever, first impressions matter. Inconsistent visuals, incoherent Employer Value Propositions (EVPs), fluctuating tones of voice – they simply don’t cut it with today’s savvy job seekers. 

Inspire the right kind of relationship with your ideal candidates from the very beginning. Intelligent templating allows you to align every piece of collateral with your unique brand guidelines. This helps you secure complete coherence in any design, across any platform, at any time.

But how do you ensure that the employee experience meets expectations? While there’s much to consider, custom templating tools are unquestionably important, unlocking the creation of studio-quality onboarding documents that prioritise what matters to your candidates – be it DEIB and employer branding, work-life balance or monetary perks.

Plus, with the effort behind the creation of employer brand collateral reduced and shared among your entire workforce, your employer brand specialists and senior leadership team can concentrate on establishing initiatives that propel your company culture forward.

What to look for in the right template creation software

Now you know what customisable templates are, how they can be applied to your talent acquisition efforts, and the plethora of advantages they offer, there’s just one final topic we want to discuss – the key signs to look out for in template creation software.

Although any templating tool can improve the quality, consistency, cost and time of your asset creation, not all software is created equal. If you’re keen to truly revolutionise your recruitment efforts, here are our 7 must-have features to prioritise in your search:

1. Limitless on-brand asset creation

The last thing your team members need is software that stifles your output and limits creativity. When looking for templating tools that can help you find, engage and attract the best talent, it’s essential you find a solution that allows you to create on-brand assets without restriction. No limits, no monthly credits – just the means to produce any volume of assets whenever required.

2. Multichannel compatibility

To reach your target audience wherever they are, it’s also important to have template creation software that can accommodate asset creation for any medium. Be it graphics for LinkedIn, videos for career pages, banners for job fairs, or posters for internal communication – ensure the solution you invest in enables you to create templates for any purpose.

3. Straightforward functionality

Creating and executing professional, persuasive recruitment campaigns demands an intuitive templating system. One your recruiters and advocates can easily pick up and use whenever they need to produce effective, on-brand content at pace.

Accessibility and functionality should therefore be top priorities in your template search, so anyone in your team can be elevated to create without a steep learning curve.

4. Approval measures

For complete confidence that everything your recruitment teams or employee advocates produce is in service of your long-term business goals, acquiring a platform with approval measures can be incredibly advantageous.

With these extra security measures in place informing users of what’s off limits, and a seamless way to send assets through for final sign-off, your recruitment campaigns reach audiences far sooner.

5. Streamlined localisation

Responding to recruitment needs in any region is a must for any global brand – and something only possible when you opt for a platform with dedicated, time-saving localisation tools. Look for a platform that instantly enables you to switch up languages and cultural imagery, so you can meet the demands and sensibilities of your local markets.

6. Cloud-based accessibility

Whether you’re a local business of dozens, or a conglomerate of thousands, manually installing software to employee machines one by one is a long and tedious task. Avoid this logistical headache by choosing a recruitment template creation tool backed by cloud software, meaning your worldwide teams can access it with minimal fuss.

7. Wider brand management features

Finally, while consistent, high-quality content is an important pillar of your recruitment campaigns, it’s far from the only part you have to consider when it comes to building, administering and evolving your employer brand. 

By broadening your search to an all-in-one brand management platform featuring customisable design templates, you can also effectively educate your users on the foundations of your employer brand, store all collateral in a dedicated DAM system, and gain a bird’s-eye view over the execution and performance of your campaigns.

Launch a new era of success and scalability for your recruitment campaigns

When it comes to recruitment, content is crucial. It’s how your employer branding stands out, captures the attention of top talent, and ultimately fills your open roles. But not any content will do. In today’s competitive landscape, potential employees have become increasingly selective about who they work for. 

Customisable templates give your recruitment teams and wider employees the keys to create captivating, consistent content on an otherwise unachievable scale. Look into the options available to understand how they can drastically reduce the costs, time and resources involved in building professional recruitment collateral, and make meeting your ever-growing recruitment demands a seamless formality.

In the relentless pursuit of top talent, few things capture the imagination of modern candidates and employees more than a diverse, inclusive workplace.

Especially among the latest generation of recruits, a culture of belonging and tolerance plays a huge part in where they choose to work. According to research by Glassdoor, approximately two-thirds of job candidates seek out employers with distinctly diverse workforces.

This intent has given rise to an increasingly adopted term: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB). For today’s company executives and employer brand managers, this is an acronym you must become fully familiar with to maximise your recruitment and retention efforts.

In this helpful guide, we outline what DEIB means, highlight its importance to the attractiveness of your employer brand, and share our top DEIB trends for 2024 to make diversity and inclusion centrepieces of your talent attraction strategies.

Defining DEIB: What is Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging?

DEIB stands for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, four concepts at the heart of a fair, equitable and all-embracing organisation. To properly define DEIB, it’s best to examine each component separately:

Diversity

Diversity is all about ensuring everyone is represented in your workplace. Age, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability status, economic background – a truly diverse workforce contains a healthy mix of these and other factors.

Diversity is incredibly valuable to encourage different viewpoints and gain unique perspectives within a company. It’s also beneficial for expanding your talent pool, building team camaraderie and developing a better understanding across your diverse customer base.

Equity

Equity means affording the same opportunities for career progression to all employees, regardless of their backgrounds. If an employee has the requisite skills, works hard and develops over time, there should be no barrier to success.

Equity also means that each team member should have access to the right resources to do their jobs to the best of their ability. Fundamentally, a focus on equity ensures a fair, impartial work environment.

Inclusion

Inclusion ensures that every employee or candidate feels welcome, accepted and valued by the people around them and their company as a whole. Do co-workers uplift each other? Is feedback provided constructively? Do people feel involved in their work environment?

Examples of inclusivity in the workplace include gender-neutral restrooms, flexible and remote work inclusion, and celebrations for cultural holidays and traditions. These and further inclusivity-driven measures often inspire higher productivity, stronger performance and greater employee retention.

Belonging

Belonging centres around the individual employee experience. If a workplace is truly inclusive, fair and diverse, an employee should feel as though they belong. They should feel valued, that they contribute to the company, and are respected by their colleagues.

When your employees feel welcomed, they come to work excited, engaged and enthusiastic, with a better opinion of your company and a desire to reach their full potential.

DEI vs DEIB: What’s the difference?

DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) is a well-established term in the global employment landscape, and is the base that DEIB has evolved from. So are they essentially the same, or does the ‘B’ make a big difference?

It’s a little more than that. DEIB is the acknowledgement that belonging is the end goal of effective diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Belonging is the feeling an employee should have if a company is truly inclusive.

Extending conventional DEI practices into the modern DEIB framework places the individual employee experience firmly in focus. It ensures that every initiative is underscored to make the workplace safer, kinder and more comfortable for everyone, so that each employee feels at home in the organisation.

The importance of DEIB in attracting, recruiting and retaining today’s top candidates

We’ve touched on this already, but the importance of DEIB for today’s generation of employees cannot be overstated. 

Truly committing to DEIB strategies and dedicating the time to establishing an inclusive workplace culture has ripple effects that unlock numerous benefits for your organisation. Here are just some of the ways it makes a huge difference:

Engages Millennial and Gen Z candidates

As noted earlier, DEIB is a major incentive for the latest generations of job candidates. 73% of Gen Z employees and 68% of Millennial employees say they prioritise DEI programs when choosing a company to work for.

Communicating and demonstrating your dedication to this cause – be it through specific DEIB training programs or as part of your wider company culture – will put you in a stronger position to hire than your less progressive competitors.

Increases brand reputation

Your brand’s reputation says a lot to prospective candidates. When polled, approximately 70% of recruits said they would reject job offers from companies with negative reputations, even if they were unemployed. To ensure your company’s reputation is on the trajectory for success, it’s important that DEIB plays a big role in your day-to-day operations.

If reviews on your Glassdoor profiles are littered with accusations of biases, favouritism, unfair pay or discrimination, the best candidates will look elsewhere.

Raises employee retention

According to Equalture, workplace and recruitment diversity can significantly reduce employee turnover and improve retention by over 68%.

When your staff feel included, accepted and comfortable in their environment, they’re far less likely to seek other opportunities. Focusing on diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging cultivates these feelings, so you can hold onto your top-performing talent for longer.

Boosts productivity and employee engagement

Creating an environment that naturally fosters a sense of belonging helps people work their best. When people feel happy, motivated and welcomed in their jobs, productivity rises and performance improves, leading to better business outcomes.

For instance, inclusive teams are estimated to be 35% more productive than those lacking this essential element. Furthermore, Millennials are 83% more likely to be engaged at work at inclusive companies.

Inspires creativity and innovation

With a diverse, multifaceted workforce, you have a melting pot of ideas and experiences that you can harness to drive your brand forward. 

Without this variety of perspectives, you get homogenous ideas and a stale work environment. Company growth stagnates and your staff feel stuck in place. With this in mind, it’s not surprising to learn that inclusive companies are nearly twice as likely to be innovators in their space.

Enhances decision-making

Greater communication and sharing of unique ideas leads to better decision-making. By exploring a problem from multiple angles with different viewpoints, you can reach a more considered, strategic solution.

As they say, two heads are better than one. And the stats back this up – diverse teams are 87% better at making decisions than non-diverse teams.

Improves financial performance

What about the bottom line? Focusing on DEIB has unlocked significant financial benefits for organisations across the globe. Inclusive companies generate over twice the cash flow per employee, while diverse, inclusive leadership generates 19% higher revenue.

Beyond this, three distinct McKinsey studies determined that ethnically diverse companies deliver up to 36% more profitability, while greater gender diversity led to a 25% increase in financial performance.

6 DEIB trends to enhance the power of your employer brand

As DEIB becomes increasingly important to the career ambitions of modern employees, it is also a pivotal element in a robust, high-performing employer brand strategy.

Based on the latest trends and techniques we hear from employer brand and HR professionals worldwide, here are 6 ways to make DEIB a core focus in your organisation and talent attraction methods.

1. Adopt AI to sense-check your DEIB communications

Today’s candidates are hyper-vigilant when it comes to the language you employ in your various employer brand communications, from job descriptions to recruitment adverts. With the evolution of AI algorithms, you can use these to review the copy of any content, to ensure nothing you publish unintentionally discriminates against potential candidates.

AI can also enable your hiring managers to review resumes impartially, analysing the relevant details without any consideration of gender, ethnic origin or similar factors. You may also use it to assess any salary discrepancies, so your company can make progress toward a more equitable work environment.

2. Establish diversity & inclusivity champions and ERGs

While the right policies are important, a diverse, inclusive environment must be nurtured over time. Hiring DEIB specialists, or promoting people from within your teams to act as diversity champions, helps ensure these issues are addressed from the ground-up.

Your representatives must have passion for the causes they represent, and be equipped with the relevant training materials, resources and freedom to fulfil their role. Setting up Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can further support these individuals by creating voluntary, employee-led groups based on shared characteristics and experiences.

This organisational structure can help ensure your workforce’s unique wants and concerns are addressed directly, by people who understand them on a deeper level. It helps confirm DEIB policies are upheld and all employees are educated about these fundamental issues.

Plus, giving these groups the power to create content supporting your diversity and inclusivity initiatives can enhance your DEIB efforts internally and externally, especially through your staff’s social media profiles. Always keep in mind that candidates are more prone to trust a company’s employees over the company itself.

3. Integrate intersectionality into your DEIB strategies

A term coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality is a growing concept that notes how differences in people’s backgrounds, whether it’s their age, gender, race or abilities, shape their experiences in the world.

Creating policies and programs around intersectionality will help your various employees better understand the challenges and discrimination their co-workers face, leading to a more empathetic work environment. This could take the form of monthly meetings or presentations from team members expressing their experiences.

Steps like this reinforce that your DEIB efforts are more than a token gesture. It shows you care about your people’s backgrounds, want to open dialogues and break down systemic barriers to create fair opportunities for everyone.

4. Create a culture of greater transparency

Transparency has become increasingly vital in building trust between employers and employees, particularly in the issues of diversity, equity and inclusivity:

Building a culture of transparency over pay, hiring practices, career development and more can help your staff feel significantly more acknowledged and respected. It demonstrates that you value a fair, equitable environment and have no hidden barriers hindering their progress.

To foster a more transparent work environment, you should aim to:

• Introduce pay transparency commitment guidelines
• Disclose your diversity metrics publicly
• Illustrate clear pathways for promotions and career advancement
• Publish details about the diversity of your suppliers and contractors
• Share your company’s DEIB goals and targets across your organisation

5. Set up inclusive recruitment processes

Are your hiring practices aligned with your DEIB commitments? Every layer of a candidate’s recruitment journey should be structured around this if you want to meet your diversity and inclusivity targets, ensure that no candidate feels alienated, and further boost the likelihood of long-term retention.

To evolve your recruitment strategies with DEIB at their core, consider the following:

• Implement a “blind” resume review to eliminate any biases over a candidate’s name
• Audit your job benefits to check they align with your preferred candidates’ wants
• Offer dedicated DEIB training to your hiring managers and recruiters
• Use inclusive language in your job adverts, correspondence and onboarding materials
• Post on niche job boards that focus on promoting diverse candidates

6. Upscale your DEIB communications with brand management technology

As today’s recruitment teams are expected to deliver more with less, engaging and attracting diverse talent becomes that much harder. 57% of talent leaders say hiring a more diverse workforce is a top priority, but 43% feel sourcing candidates is a serious challenge.

You want to advertise everywhere, with tailored content that reflects the diversity and inclusivity of your organisation, so you can truly connect with a wider talent pool, but time and design expertise are finite.

High-quality employer branding tools can unlock the full potential of your DEIB recruitment, enabling you to create, structure and unleash your brand like never before. By investing in the right software, you can:

• Establish a digital brand hub for your employer brand guidelines, DEIB framework and more, so that your entire team is educated on your values and mission
• Scale your content production with smart design templates, enabling anyone in your organisation to create high-quality content consistent with your brand identity
• Rapidly tailor assets with the right language, imagery and styling to attract a diverse pool of candidates
• Store any DEIB-focused images, assets, videos and more in a dedicated Digital Asset Management system, making it easy for your recruitment teams to locate and share these in your campaigns

With a strong, reliable brand management platform in your corner, you gain the power to present a consistent, far-reaching employer brand, one that illustrates your commitment to diversity, equity, inclusivity and belonging to the fullest.

Building your up-to-date employer brand around DEIB

DEIB is here to stay. With the latest generations placing a premium on an employer’s diversity, inclusivity and fairness, you must put these four letters at the heart of your employer brand to keep your recruitment efforts on the right trajectory.

We hope that these recommendations and top trends enable you to activate DEIB in your branding and build a truly inclusive work environment. 

But remember – authenticity is everything. This can’t just be a token gesture during Pride Month – prioritise DEIB within your existing workforce and ask your current employees how you can improve. 

Once you have these matters settled at home, you can make real strides to engage perceptive, progressive talent across the globe.

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.

Whether we like it or not, social media is a fixture in our daily lives – and a space marketers can’t afford to ignore.

Here’s why: more than 5 billion people worldwide use social media channels at least once a month – and that number is expected to touch 6 billion by 2027. It means social platforms have become one of the most powerful ways for brands to communicate directly with their audiences, tell their story, and build long-term trust.

A strong, consistent brand presence on social media is no longer optional – it’s essential. When your audience can clearly recognize who you are and what you stand for, they’re more likely to trust, follow, and engage with you. But when that consistency breaks down, your brand reputation can suffer real damage.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to keep your social branding consistent across platforms, and offer you practical tips for building a long-term social media strategy that strengthens every interaction.

What is social media branding?

Social media branding is how your brand shows up across your social platforms, and about how you use them to promote, evolve, and bring your brand identity to life.

Because social media is often the first touchpoint between a brand and a consumer, it’s critical that your content reflects your values and voice just as clearly as your website or ad campaigns do.

What are the key elements of social media branding?

To build an effective social media brand, there are several key elements you need to get right.

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 organization’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 key for any stable, trustworthy relationship. The relationship between you and your social media followers is no different.

People want to connect with brands that reflect their own values. They’re looking for authenticity, shared priorities, and a sense of familiarity. Social media, with its more personal tone and real-time nature, amplifies these expectations. It’s where your audience gets to know your brand – not just what you sell.

If your content sends mixed messages or feels disconnected from previous posts, it creates confusion. And confusion leads to doubt, which ultimately damages your brand reputation.

An inconsistent presence can also make your brand look disorganized. Jarring shifts in color palette, typography, or format signal a lack of alignment behind the scenes. And for potential customers, that can be a red flag.

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

• Reduced brand recall when customers are ready to purchase
• Lower engagement and interaction with organic posts
• Less effective performance of paid social campaigns
• Erosion of your overall brand equity

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

Brand consistency isn’t just about content – it’s also about timing. Your audience is more likely to engage with your posts if they follow a predictable rhythm.

Think of your posts like a favorite TV show. If new episodes drop at random times, audiences lose interest. But when they know what to expect and when, they’ll come back for more.

That said, every social channel is different. Algorithms, demographics, and engagement patterns vary across platforms. Here’s a quick breakdown of best-practice posting frequencies to help guide your approach:

Whatever content creation schedule you adopt, make it intentional and stick to it. A consistent calendar helps your team stay organized and ensures your audience has a reliable brand experience.

8 tips for building a consistent social media branding strategy

1. Lock down your brand identity and goals

Before posting anything, make sure everyone is aligned on your mission, values, and visual identity – and on what social media is meant to achieve for your brand. It could be for raising awareness, generating leads, or managing customer service. The important thing is that your global teams, local marketers, and community managers all understand this.

A centralized brand hub makes this easier. Give your teams access to up-to-date brand guidelines, digital assets, and style templates so every piece of content stays aligned.

2. Establish your target audience

Your brand can’t speak to everyone in the same way. Get clear on who you’re talking to, and how they behave on each platform.

Ask:

• What age groups are we targeting?
• Which platforms do they spend time on?
• What problems are they trying to solve?

Different channels appeal to different demographics, so create specific personas for each platform to keep your messaging relevant and on-brand.

3. Define your social media channels

Not all platforms will be right for your goals – or your audience. Based on your personas, you need to select the channels where your efforts will deliver the greatest return.

For example, B2B brands often find strong engagement on LinkedIn, while younger audiences may be more active on Instagram or TikTok.

Focusing your efforts allows your team to go deeper, understanding platform nuances, content performance trends, and optimal posting times.

4. Create a social content calendar

When it comes to creative content marketing, timing matters. Here are some best practices that can help you get it right:

• Keep feeds engaging by switching between a variety of content themes
• Research each platform to identify optimal posting times
• Follow the 80/20 rule – 80% of content should be about providing value, 20% promoting goods or services
• Include space for user-generated content, special announcements, and more
• Align content with holidays, events, and special dates

5. Build social post templates

For consistent digital content creation, you need dependable templates. By using pre-approved templates that align with your visual identity, you reduce the risk of off-brand content slipping through.

As well as locking down the position of your logo, brand colours, design elements and more, branded design templates enable you to create marketing materials for multiple channels and locations. Your templates can match the optimal size and layout of each platform and allow 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 isn’t just for posts – it’s also key to conversations. When followers interact with your brand, they expect a consistent tone and level of service.

Establish guidelines that cover:

• Tone of voice for replies and DMs
• How to respond to complaints or negative feedback
• What kind of UGC can be reshared
• Escalation processes for sensitive issues

By standardizing your engagement practices, you ensure every interaction strengthens your brand experience and brand equity.

7. Centralize your digital assets

Consistency can be a real challenge when teams are spread worldwide. It only takes one rogue post to disrupt your communications and damage your brand reputation. That’s why it pays to have everyone in your organization working from the same bank of digital assets.

The easiest way to achieve this is through a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution. Your DAM enables you to store, share, and manage all approved social assets in one place, ensuring every team is using the right version, every time. It should also allow you to tag and categorize brand 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. Regularly monitor your social media channels

However carefully you’ve followed the previous steps, inconsistencies and errors can still slip through. That’s why frequent monitoring is so important. It allows you to react quickly to any problems before they cause any harm to your brand reputation.

Monitoring best practice says you should:

• Monitor and track your social media channels multiple times a day
• Give every post one final sense-check before it’s published
• Respond quickly to any negative comments or feedback, so your audience can see you listen to feedback and don’t sweep poor reviews under the rug

Maintain a consistent social media presence on all platforms with Papirfly

Building a strong brand on social media isn’t about going viral. It’s about showing up consistently, with content that reflects who you are, what you value, and how you connect with people.

With Papirfly’s Digital Asset Management and templated content creation suite, you can empower every team to produce on-brand creative content marketing, so your social media becomes a space where your brand not only shows up but also stands out.