Member Article

How to develop your Employer Branding – 3 areas to make the difference

**How can a business present itself as an attractive employer of choice to attract the best people to work for them? **

Like most things in life, first impressions always count and for a business owner this could be your website, social media - or crucially - what staff say it’s like to work for you.

Spending time to develop employer branding is the way to position your company to a target group of potential candidates and is a key element of a successful recruitment strategy. It will attract and retain the people and the talent that you, as a business, need to succeed and grow.

**How To Develop Your Employer Branding – 3 Areas To Make The Difference **

How can businesses focus on future growth by developing an employer brand? To explain this, let’s separate this into 3 areas – culture, people and story….

Employer branding and company culture go hand in hand. Your employer brand describes people’s perceptions of you as an employer and what you stand for. It needs to be relevant and compelling. It’s the face your business shows the outside world or to use a well-known adage - ‘how we do things round here’.

So, what takes perceptions from bad or indifferent to good? An Employee Value Proposition or EVP defines the qualities you would most like to be associated with as a great employer – this can sometimes be referred to as a people promise. It’s the nice-to-have offers beyond an employee’s salary that may sway an employee to value one employer over the other and choose to work for you.

And who better to establish brand advocacy than your existing workforce? Word of mouth recommendations, testimonials on LinkedIn, Facebook and other social media platforms are all ways your existing workforce can become your best brand advocates.

An example of a well-honed employer brand is the Pets at Home careers website. The UK’s best-known petcare business leads the way in the industry sector and has values that are authentic, lived and underpins everything it does.

With Pets at Home’s instant connection with its customers, including ‘we put pets before profit’ and ‘we get better every day’, it has created an employer brand that says why people are proud and motivated to work there, using a number of touchpoints along the employee life cycle. With original photography and videos, Pets at Home invites its own staff to provide a visual picture of a diverse and multigenerational organisation.

Employer Branding – is it worth it?

Absolutely.

What’s your story? When thinking about a recruitment strategy, how have you created a great place to work with a unique set of benefits in return for skills, capabilities and experience? Are you promoting this through your people and all your marketing channels to find new talent needed by your business to help meet your business growth goals and objectives?

And remember, a strong EVP is a must for any business keen to win the challenges of attracting, recruiting and retaining the right people; ensuring it aligns with their aspirations as well as yours.

There are plenty of tools, blogs, free webinars and e-books available online to help get you started.

Take a look at Recright’s Employer Branding Canvas. It will help you identify who you are as a business, what makes you credible and what you need to do to succeed.

Good luck on your journey to create a winning brand personality and finding prospective employees who are the perfect fit for your business.

About GM Leadership Hive Delivered by GC Business Growth Hub in partnership with Greater Manchester’s university business schools, the Greater Manchester Leadership Hive brings together the best leadership and management training the region can offer, all in one place. Find out more at https://gmleadershiphive.com/.

Guest Blog: [Debbie Jackson, Business Advisor at GC Business Growth Hub]

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jo Li .