6 mistakes to avoid for the sake of your Employer Branding strategy
Employer Branding |

6 mistakes to avoid for the sake of your Employer Branding strategy

What does it mean to implement an Employer Branding strategy? And what mistakes to avoid to make it successful? Here are the 6 most common ones you absolutely must avoid.

Targeting Employer Branding to make your company attractive as a place to work has become almost a must for companies that want to select and hire the right people.

But in order to succeed in achieving the set goals, it is not enough just to publish content and find the right channels to do so; rather, a real Employer Branding strategy is needed. Strategy that allows not only to preside over the recruitment process in every part, but also to attract talent at the time when there is no active search or intercept the so-called passive candidates.

But not all strategies are designed in every aspect, which is why it is easy to run into mistakes both at the ideation stage and later when actions have already been taken.

So let’s see what the 6 most common mistakes in an Employer Branding strategy are and how to avoid them.

SUMMARY

Not having a clear strategy and losing sight of goals

Working strategically towards Employer Branding does not automatically mean having a clear strategy with defined goals. In fact, there are some brands that get it wrong right from the initial stage and this is because instead of defining goals to be achieved, they start directly with “doing things.”

The idea is “let’s start in the meantime, then we’ll see how it goes and adjust the focus.” And while it is true that you can always change what you have planned, it is also true that it is crucial to have a direction to pursue.

Indeed, it is important to view the Employer Branding strategy not as a project that begins and ends, but one that lasts over time.

The actions and tactics that are put in place can and do have a set duration, but the Employer Branding strategy must be continuous and constant. This is because the work being done on brand reputation cannot be paused, forgotten or overlooked-it would backfire like a boomerang.

Creating Employer Branding goals is equally critical. Where do you want to go from here? Do you simply want to increase the number of people responding to ads, or do you want to increase a certain type of candidate? Do you want to focus on a true Talent Acquisition strategy, or is it just finding candidates for that vacant position that matters? And again: do you want to increase traffic to la career page or do you want to increase the dwell time of those who click on it so that they understand what kind of positions you offer? Do you want to grow your corporate branding or just “copy” what others are doing?

These are just examples of goals: what matters is that they are clear and possibly divided between short-term ones, achievable within a handful of months, and long-term ones, achievable over a longer period of time.

Don’t share your EVP with employees and candidates

What is your Employee Value Proposition? Why should those who work with you continue to do so and especially why should a candidate choose your company over another? What is the way your company works and the values it believes in? These and other questions are answered by what is known as EVP-that value proposition that is of interest not so much to customers but to employees and candidates.

Yet it often happens-and it is a very serious strategic mistake-that people do not know what the company does “to meet the needs, expectations and even dreams of employees,” in the words of Helen Handflied Jones and Beth Axelrod, authors of the book “The War of Talent.”

The Employee Value Proposition needs to be conveyed, shared, and that the recipients are not passive spectators of it, but are possibly participants.

Not least because, let us remember, the EVP comes from the value that the organization offers, but also from what employees or future employees can do to help strengthen it.

When EVP is shared, it helps the Employer Branding strategy achieve its goals.

Ignoring feedback and reviews

Another very common mistake is ignoring feedback and reviews, whether positive or negative.

In the first case, avoiding replying to say thank you, not putting a like, not commenting trying to add value, means not taking into consideration the person who did it nor even giving due weight to the time they took to do it. This does not help make the company attractive; on the contrary, it generates in the person who gave the feedback the feeling that he or she is not important. And, even worse, it makes the company think that it preaches well-for example, by saying that it cares about people-but in fact it racifies badly. Which can then backfire on social recruiting as well.

An equally serious mistake is to ignore negative feedback also because no company is perfect and receiving it can indeed hurt, but it is still proof that you are trying to go in a specific direction, obviously making mistakes.

In fact, negative feedback is often about an unsuccessful selection process or an unsatisfactory candidate experience.
A candidate may have been disappointed because he/she did not hear the outcome of the interview, because he/she sent emails without receiving a response, or, even worse, because he/she was expecting, by a certain date, a communication that never arrived. Just as he may complain about not being able to upload his CV or whatever.

What matters most is how one handles such negative feedback. To pretend they are not there or even to delete them is to shoot oneself in the foot.

What you need to do instead is to analyze all the comments and try to respond to all of them as cordially and kindly as possible, acknowledging the state of mind of the reviewer and trying to resolve the problem if necessary.

You can then refer back to a possible page on the site, if more information can be found there, or to a blog article to make your point. Don’t forget: always thank them, even for the negative response!

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Employer Branding: meaning and strategies

Not knowing and analyzing your audience

Often in an Employer Branding strategy we tend to forget how much of a difference content can make. But beware, for this to be the case, it is important to do an analysis of one’s audience, the so-called candidate personas, to be addressed.

Indeed, not everyone is interested in the same kind of content.
A person who is looking for a job for the first time will probably want to understand how the onboarding phase works, whether there are mentorship programs, and get more information about contracts or what corporate welfare is (just to give a few examples).
Those with more experience, on the other hand, will want to understand how to grow and advance their careers, what international projects the company sends out, whether they attend events, and so on.
That is why we need to think in a way that meets the information needs of potential candidates but also of the employees themselves. And this also applies to job postings: they should be designed and written for the target audience.

In any case, it is always better to avoid producing so much content, but rather focus on making it qualitatively interesting.

You can also experiment: instead of thinking only of written texts, you can make podcasts, as well as infographics, reels (video format widely used on Instagram) that allow you to “hook” different audiences.

Underestimating online presence to generate interest

Related to the above, it often happens that companies underestimate or neglect their online presence. What does this mean? That they focus everything on creating ads, sharing them perhaps in multiposting, but then have a site that is stuck 3 years earlier, with products that are no longer current, and so on.

The site is the company’s home: it talks about its values, its team, as well as its products and services. That is why it is important to have content that is always up-to-date and to take care of its usability so that candidates, and users in general, have a positive browsing experience. And more.

Even today, many realities underestimate the power of the career page on both Employer Branding and the selection process itself. Sure, it is a showcase page-as we often tend to call it-but it is also a true “bridge” between candidates and the organizations that posted a job ad. As such, this is precisely where action must be taken to generate interest: a person who “lands” on the career page and is attracted to it, who feels involved in the story of the company’s reality and work environment, will not miss an opportunity to learn more about the company within the site.

Online presence is also made up of web searches: of published articles, landing pages, sponsored ads, press releases, etc. When the candidate does not find information on the site, the online search, then why neglect this aspect?

Neglecting social media

Connected to the above, equally important is not to neglect social media. Having a Facebook page and not updating it as well as an Instagram or LinkedIn account is an autogoal and risks undermining the Employer Branding strategy.

Attracting the right people means having a presence on all the channels a possible candidate can find online.

It is often the case that companies put links to social channels on their site without having them manned or existing anymore. This, too, is a mistake to avoid. Rather, it is better to use social-each for its own sake-to tell what the company does, the values it believes in, the initiatives it carries out, and why it is the “best place to work.”

Social then is the ideal place to showcase a new aspect of the company, a new location, or to photograph brainstorming moments: they represent an opportunity for those on the outside to understand what is going on inside.

Another way to use them strategically is to enhance internal people, which can be done in several ways. For example: you can create cards with the employee’s photo, passions, and role and “baste” a post on LinkedIn or Facebook, or share a piece of an interview that will then be visible on the website.

Just as a good strategy can be to share what employees write on their social channels about the projects they were leading or the milestones they achieved. Their being brand ambassadors will undoubtedly do the company good and help make Employer Branding walk hand in hand with Employer Advocacy.

Finally, one last piece of advice: a self-respecting Employer Branding strategy also involves choosing how best to conduct the recruitment process to avoid unhappy candidates.

ATS software such as Inrecruiting can help you do this: you can easily create your career page, better manage applications by providing feedback to all the people who have submitted CVs, organize interviews with the automatic scheduler by letting candidates choose when to do it, create and send out massive newsletters to flag new job openings, and create a talent pool that allows you to keep track of the most interesting candidates you meet at interviews.

This will allow you to give people the right attention and turn your company into the place everyone wants to work. Which is then what, no more and no less, an Employer Branding strategy does.

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