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Making Room for Employment Branding
Does your company have an employment branding program? How about even one employee dedicated to employment branding? In a recent BLR® survey, we found that 73.4% of survey takers say their company does not have an employment branding program.
Of the 26.6% of those who do have an employment branding program, only 17.1% have an individual employee dedicated to employment branding. It’s absolutely imperative that your company has at least someone focusing on your company’s brand, and here is why.
If your company is being defamed, your employment branding professional will know about it and will be able to get in front of it. Likewise, when your company does something worth bragging about, it’s that same individual who gets the word out.
Employment branding is the face of any company. Learn what your competitors may be up to with our new research report, Employment Branding Today: Putting the Company’s Best Face Forward. Learn More
Keeping It Transparent
Let’s face it. Sometimes companies say that they are a great company for such and such reasons when any worker will tell you that, in practice, those reasons are not true. That strategy may have worked once but, with contemporary transparency thanks to things like social media and media outlets that can be accessed by anyone with a computer or phone and an Internet connection, this no longer works. These things combined with the advent of sites like Glassdoor® mean that your company’s practices are transparent whether you know it or not and whether you want them to be or not. If your company is misrepresenting itself, potential hires will know about it.
If your company is going to be transparent, you might as well take advantage of it. Here are some basic ideas to help you use transparency to your advantage:
- Stories. Create a collection of stories from employees about what they do and what they like about their jobs, and make them publicly available. This lets you give an honest account of what it’s like to work at your company.
- Social media. Make use of social media—not just of Twitter and Facebook, but of Instagram, too. Share images, videos, and accounts of your employees and their work environments. Studies show that applicants respond well to pictures and videos from a company and use them to develop an opinion about that company.
- Confront negative press head-on. If poor practices or conditions at your company have recently made it to news sites, you need to get ahead of it. Follow up on camera with current practices and ensure that if there were any problems, they are being addressed.
- Don’t go Big Brother. Trying to limit what your employees can say about your company is a mistake. The fact that you are trying to cover up something becomes the topic that gets out there. It also puts your employees on guard.
- Embrace what you have, not what you want. It’s important to highlight what people love about your company instead of what you love about your company. The reasons might be different and, in the end, accenting the perceived value of your company is much more valuable than talking about something you are proud of but that maybe no one really cares about.
Six times a year, the HR Daily Advisor Research Team conducts detailed research into contemporary HR challenges to highlight best practices and common policies and procedures. For our latest report, we examined how employment branding is being used in the real world of HR.
How important is developing a distinct employment brand to your company? How difficult is it? What makes people want to work at a specific company? Our respondents shed some light on the state of contemporary employment branding. We polled 391 people across numerous industries and disparate parts of the country to find out. See the results of our national survey as well as demographic breakdowns for each question.
Available in both print and downloadable PDF versions.
How do HR departments take control of employment branding in a world rife with social media? It’s all in this report: Employment Branding Today: Putting the Company’s Best Face Forward. Click Here
Among the features of this new product:
- Full results of our national survey addressing employment branding
- Survey results broken down by key demographics such as HR department size and business type
- Executive summary and highlights
- And much more!
Thanks to the ever expanding field of social media and the general digitization of our lives, companies have never been so transparent. This is true whether they want to be or not, and even whether they realize it or not. As a result, there has never been such a focus on employment branding as there is today. With the information in this report, you will get insight into the many ways HR departments around the country make use of employment branding, perhaps even your competitors’ HR departments.
Download Now or Order the Print Version