Why you need a long-term approach to your employer branding strategy
If you are one of the thousands of organisations that are struggling to fill roles, you will know that being unable to recruit affects your productivity, expansion plans, and ability to deliver services. Being under-resourced also places significant stress on your current employees, leading to an increased resignation rate.
It's predicted these tough conditions won't ease for years.
So, what’s your HR team doing to adapt?
It’s hard to get your new puppy to behave perfectly in a week. You need to be patient, and consistent, and constantly reinforce your messaging. Likewise, an ‘ad hoc’ recruitment approach, where you push out an ad only when you have a role to fill immediately is a risky strategy.
As most employers who have done this recently know, the days of being swamped immediately with dozens of eager applicants are gone. Here are some of the reasons why:
- Candidates are slower and more cautious about making decisions
- Reduced numbers of international students and immigrants
- More people are retiring, shrinking the labor pool further
To recruit successfully into 2022 and beyond, you need a longer-term, more focused marketing approach to build enthusiasm amongst potential candidates into the future. Not just this minute.
Welcome to the power of a sustained focus on your ‘Employer Brand’.
Candidates are placing greater importance on an organisation’s values, employee benefits, and culture, so it’s critical that these are front and center of your advertising strategy.
Key factors for people moving jobs are alignment to company values, flexibility, work-from-home options, what work/life balance actually looks like, stability/security, and the leadership team’s direction and ethos.
Understanding what candidates want should define your advertising message and strategy. This strategy and messaging needs to flow through to every touchpoint in the recruitment experience, from your careers site, ad content, the application process, and candidate communication, right to the approach of everyone in the HR team and wider organisation.
This is quite a contrast to the ‘set and forget’ mentality of a job board where you post an advert and hope the right person sees it in a 2-3 week time frame.
Moving to a longer-term, brand, and values-based advertising strategy
Our recommendation is to build a target audience of potential employees, based on location, qualifications, job titles, interests, where they grew up, and even where they went to school, etc. The targeting could include people with a particular worldview, or whose values align with those of your organisation.
Once your campaign is live, your ads will start to appear in your target audience’s social media account feed. If they click on the ad, they’re immediately sent straight to your careers website, where they can view all job opportunities. This ‘low level’ constant campaign is then overlaid with individual campaigns for specific job vacancies on relevant media that are determined based on the role itself and the best place to reach potential candidates.
More than 60% of candidates will research a company before deciding to apply, so in summary, here’s our strategic approach to help you build a strong and positive reputation that attracts applicants when it counts.
- Consider a careers page or careers website, specifically designed to showcase yourself as an employer.
- Ensure you have a company page on sites like Indeed and LinkedIn and make sure these are updated.
- Build a story about your organisation across platforms that are proven to reach potential candidates including Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
- Integrate video into your recruitment advertising strategy to share stories of your people, culture, and values (people stories are up to 200% more engaging as they are seen to be more authentic).
- Get leaders talking about your culture.
For more tips on building a long-term, sustainable recruitment strategy, download our latest ebook or check out our other blogs. You can also request a customised proposal by contacting our team.