What Is an Employer Branding Specialist, and Do You Need One?

Employer branding refers to how you market your company to new hires and current employees. Your workers’ perceptions of you as an employer are essential to this type of branding.

Due to this, many brands have recently started putting more thought and attention into creating the perfect way to market themselves as employers, so much so that a whole new position has been designed for it.

Employers have reputations whether they put effort into it or not – so it’s good to take control of it and make yours a good one. Keep reading to find out how.

Why should you care about employer branding? 

The importance of employer branding cannot be overstated. Recent studies found that your costs-per-hire can be lowered with a good employer brand, and you can even reduce employee turnover by 28%.

In addition, companies that actively manage their employer brand are more likely to attract active job seekers. Recruiting top talent is easier when your employer brand is strong, and these workers will also likely stay with you for longer if your employer brand is positive.

Do you need an employer branding specialist?

Nobody knows your company as well as you do. Therefore, you can do this job yourself or add it as a responsibility under the existing marketing department; alternatively, you can hire a specialist or reach out to third parties such as agencies or freelancers. 

But do you even need a specialist? That depends on whether or not you are hiring actively.

At its core, employer branding’s focus should be getting good people to work for you. While using these strategies to strengthen existing workers’ perceptions of you is always helpful, hiring a specialist is only necessary if you plan to interview and employ new workers monthly. 

Employer branding specialists are helpful because they will take on a few responsibilities.

They will develop and implement marketing strategies that suit a company’s brand identity. Brand identities help companies communicate their values with current and future employees by creating a positive reputation.

Moreover, specialists know how to present a company’s image to the public. Businesses use marketing strategies to communicate their brand to their target audiences, which can help them gain and retain both customers and workers. In addition to improving marketing, effective employer branding can also enable enterprises to increase profits.

However, it is critical never to do it for branding reasons only. A performative display of valuing people without caring for employees is unethical and will ultimately fail all its purposes. Pretending to have workers’ best interests at heart without following through on your promises will generate a bad reputation that is hard to wipe away, even with the best marketing. 

What are some ways to improve your employer branding?

Everything you do for your employees will improve your employer branding. However, this is a concise summary of how you can get started:

1. Define your company’s perks. This can include:

• Company values
• Compensation
• Benefits
• Management style
• Career paths
• Accessibility
• Work-life balance
• On-site perks
• and more.

2. Satisfy current employees

As previously mentioned, keeping your current workers happy will do a tremendous job crafting a good organic employer brand. You want your workers to spread the word about how great it is to work for you.

For that, make sure your employees will be happy in your company from day one by making them feel properly welcomed, providing them with a welcome kit, introducing them to their coworkers, and including them in your discussions, and emphasizing that employee awards and recognition are important to foster a sense of achievement and belonging.

Additionally, you will get talent that sticks around longer by delivering on your promises when interviewing candidates. If your promised salary corresponds to their pay stub at the end of the month and you provide them with all the benefits you discussed they are more likely to stay with you.

3. Write attractive job descriptions

A good job description should mention all the points from step 1 and offer concrete examples, such as employee testimonials, pictures from the office, and helpful information regarding compensation and benefits. These are all essential for attracting candidates. To make it easier, you can create a dedicated landing page on your website that focuses on selling your company as the dream workplace.

It’s that simple

In conclusion, it is easy to start crafting your employer branding yourself, even today.

However, that does not mean that a specialist is not needed. If you are ready to offer this position to someone, they will be able to gather all the necessary information to carefully market your company as the perfect workplace and target the exact people you want to hire.