The Importance of Having a Strong Employer Brand

Improving Candidate Experience to Increase Employee Loyalty

Employer branding is all about portraying what you are, how you connect with people, and what makes your company a great place to work. As a recruiter, you are the first point of contact between your company and prospect hires; you are the spokesperson that makes the employer brand come to life.

Candidates form their opinion of your company based on how they experience its culture through the hiring process, so the way you prepare and organize for it says a lot about your company’s values and priorities.

For example, something as simple as sending follow-ups and rejection emails shows how much the company values human contact over saving time. Bottom line is, every little detail throughout the hiring process can and will influence how candidates perceive your company.

In other words, employer branding is what makes the candidate experience a positive interaction as it’s what speaks to the candidate’s needs and interests and makes them relate to the company.

Giving candidates a transparent view of the company’s identity and what it would be like to work with you is a great way to build trust. This will set the foundations for employee loyalty in prospective hires from day one.

Reinforcing Your Reputation Through Employer Branding

Candidates who have experienced a positive hiring process will most likely influence your reputation by spreading the word. They will act as brand ambassadors of your company’s culture, helping you attract more qualified candidates and expand your talent pool. On the other hand, a negative candidate experience might result in bad publicity with applicants speaking poorly about your organization and the way it treats people. What’s more, this bad publicity could even diminish your brand’s credibility and damage your reputation. All of this could be avoided with the use of a strong, positive, employer brand.

However, employer branding doesn't only have an influence on external audiences. In fact, more often than not, your employer brand starts internally with the way you communicate, interact, and connect with employees. After all, job seekers aren’t your only brand ambassadors; how your current employees and even former employees feel about working at your company matters as well. Whatever they have to say about your company, whether it is good or bad, is definitely going to find its way to all sorts of audiences out there. And nothing has more credibility than users’ reviews and their perspectives on your brand, especially if some of those users happen to be your own employees.

It All Comes Down to Business Growth

Employer branding is much like customer branding. The way people feel about your company and how it is perceived by the public eye heavily relies on the level of engagement you achieve with employees and candidates through interaction. Successfully addressing their needs and interests will stimulate their drive and motivation to deliver more effective results as employees or to help you attract more talent as brand ambassadors. The result will be engaged, motivated people willing to spread the word about what you do and why you are so great at it. Ultimately, this will influence your public image, reduce hiring process costs and effort, and enhance your company’s overall growth.