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Employer Brand & Recruitment

Attract those you want to reach. Excite potential and existing employees with a winning Employer Brand.

Then, choose the best recruitment techniques that reflect your EVP, values, skills and strengths; ensure you recruit the right people giving you the best chance of retaining top talent longer-term.

Question.
Why should I review my Employer Brand?

Answer.

You might be struggling to appeal to top candidates in key market segments.

You might not be able to articulate what’s great about your organisation clearly and consistently.

You may be unsure how best to communicate with potential and existing employees.

Some candidates tell you they stumbled across you and found it hard to understand what differentiates you as an employer.

You are missing out on diverse talent that could make a difference to your business.

A well-defined and differentiated Employer Brand will help you attract the best talent for your business, so it’s vital to get it right.

Don’t forget. Employer Brand is often confused with Employee Value Proposition (EVP). They are connected but not the same. Your EVP is the whole of your employment proposition and must be well defined first. Your Employer Brand is the ‘wrapper’ or the badging of the EVP.

talentsmoothie employer brand concept

Employer Brand Strategy

Who do you want to attract or need to retain? We help you understand the values, behaviours, and promises that are the basis of your EVP and their value to particular talent segments. Then we shape the creative design of your Employer Brand, and work on how we communicate your message to your target employees. This targeting strategy includes: the relationships and networks that you need to build; how to use your best advocates to sell your brand; and the suggested offline and online tools that are just right for you and your objectives. Finally, we measure and adjust to ensure you get the results you need.

Recruitment and selection

With the right recruitment and selection process you will improve your hiring, retention and business performance. You may be looking to move to a direct sourcing model, require a communications strategy to take your Employer Brand messages externally, or need help navigating the complex digital media landscape. You may need to improve the outcomes of your selection processes to recruit the sorts of people that will thrive in your environment and believe in your approach, your values and how you do business. Our approach is tailored for you, building on what’s working well and focusing on what will improve your people strategy and overall business performance.

Emerging talent strategy

Emerging talent strategy includes recruitment and development, induction, internships, and placements and apprenticeships. We help you navigate the increasingly complex early talent market. It is just as important as ever to ensure you attract, develop and retain the right school leavers, apprentices and graduates for your business. But with more routes available to this talent, and generational differences in how they view their future careers, an understanding of your organisation’s unique offering is essential. Our approach leads to a clearly defined target audience, a clearly defined attraction and assessment plan and supports the retention of this key workforce.

Diversity attraction strategy

Having a diverse workforce that reflects the community and customers that you serve has been shown to lead to greater business success. It also carries additional benefits like enhanced retention rates and more satisfied employees. We know that attracting talent from a range of backgrounds can be challenging for organisations for a wide variety of reasons. Whether you are looking to attract more females or more ethnic minorities, or to embrace the benefits of supporting social mobility, our approach will identify what the barriers to attraction and recruitment may be, and support you in developing a unique, targeted messaging, attraction and retention plan.

Employer Brand FAQ

What is an Employer Brand?

Your Employer Brand is the ‘wrapper’ or the badging of your Employee Value Proposition. It is essentially your reputation as an employer, as perceived by current and potential employees. Every organisation has an Employer Brand, whether one has been knowingly developed or not.

It’s about taking the employment proposition (your EVP) and communicating it in a way that (1) reminds current employees why they love working for you, and (2) reaches and engages with the new potential employees you’d love to recruit. It’s about being authentic and honest about what you can deliver for employees now, and what you are working to deliver in the future. It should encompass the values, behaviours, policies and processes that define your two-way EVP and the kind of organisation you are.

What are the benefits of an Employer Brand?

A brilliant Employer Brand can help you to attract and retain talent, increase Employee Engagement and build brand loyalty. It can:

  • Allow you to stand out in a crowded market
  • Help potential employees understand why you are different and why they should join you
  • Remind current employees why they chose you
  • Increase your success rate in competitive talent markets
  • Improve the number of successful employee referrals
  • Enable you to build a direct-hire talent pool
  • Give you a vehicle to reach passive candidates – those that are really good at what they do, but wouldn’t have thought of you otherwise
What makes a good Employer Brand?

There are three key things great employer brands do:

  1. Support your Corporate Brand: Your Employer Brand must be in sync and support your Corporate Brand. Your Corporate Brand is more about ‘who’ and ‘what’ you stand for as an organisation, your Employer Brand is more focused on ‘how’ you do what you do. Aligning them is essential.
  2. Keep it real: A great Employer Brand honestly reflects what’s real about an organisation. Be transparent and clear about what you can offer and what you can’t offer. If you are working towards implementing something you know candidates will find attractive, but it’s not ready yet, tell them that. In our experience 9 times out of 10 the candidate will find it exciting to be part of that journey. Your culture should be felt the minute a candidate walks through the door, because it is being lived and breathed every day.
  3. Have touch points across the organisation: Your Employer Brand experience should start the moment a candidate begins to interact with your company, and it should continue through the recruitment process, on-boarding and their entire employment experience including exit and alumni.
How do you develop an Employer Brand?
  1. Start with clear objectives. Understand what you need your Employer Brand to do for you. For example, what are the main challenges you have right now? Who do you want to attract? Who do you need to retain? What does success look like to you? Be clear about who should be involved internally and involve them from the outset.
  2. Deconstruct your EVP. Understand the values, behaviours, and promises at the heart of your EVP that will inform your Employer Brand messages. Identify which might be more important to particular talent segments. The amount of research required at this stage depends on what data is available. If you’ve got little existing insight then undertake an EVP diagnostic to ensure your EVP is the best it can be.
  3. Define your ‘Messages’ and ‘Look and Feel’. Develop a number of design options and test internally and externally.
  4. Communicate your Employer Brand. Once you’ve agreed the creative design of your Employer Brand, decide how to communicate your message to your target employees. This targeting strategy can include the relationships and networks — both academic and industry led — that you need to build. It will include how to use your best advocates — your current employees — to sell your brand, and, it will detail the suggested offline and online tools that are just right for you and your objectives.
  5. Measure and adjust. Agree your measurement criteria at the start of the project and put the tools in place to start tracking the effectiveness of your strategy from day one. It’s an ongoing process with the goal of continuous improvement. Adjustments will be necessary, because what you need will change over time and you will want to continually improve what you do.
How to create a compelling Employer Brand, a talentsmoothie diagram
talentsmoothie, how to create a compelling Employer Brand
Do you have any free Employer Brand resources?

You can download our free Employer Brand Factsheet on our Insights page.

Can you give Employer Brand examples?

You can find all our case studies on our Results page or below. In particular, one of the key outputs of our global Employee Value Proposition project at AstraZeneca was the Employer Brand.

“talentsmoothie… ability to integrate EVP and brand”

Talentsmoothie were our lead external partners in helping us to create our first Employee Value Proposition in AstraZeneca at both a global and a local level. Through their rigorous approach, and ability to integrate other core elements such as our business strategy and corporate brand, they helped to ensure that our EVP will be sustainable for us in the medium to long term.
Stephen Lochhead — former Director, Global Talent Attraction, AstraZeneca
Read the full AstraZeneca Case Study or find all the talentsmoothie client case studies below.

Whatever stage you’re at with your Employer Brand & Recruitment, we’d love to help.

hey@talentsmoothie.com