Being in good standing with your employees and customers goes a long way for any company. This explains why sustainable employer branding is an important concept not to be overlooked.
Research shows 50% of potential recruitees won’t work for a company with a negative brand image. Another study shows only one in five candidates will apply to a lowly rated company with negative reviews.
On a positive note, a Workable survey shows that 9 out of 10 candidates will apply for a job from an employer brand that’s properly maintained. Undoubtedly, employer branding is the secret sauce of a thriving business, and some recruiters already know it.
If you’re yet to embrace sustainable employer branding, it’s never too late to start, and that’s why we’ve put this guide to help you get started!
Benefits of a Sustainable Employer Branding
There are numerous sustainable employer branding benefits. Below we take a deep dive into some of them!
Lower Cost of Talent Acquisition
Companies with robust employer branding have one thing in common–lower cost of talent acquisition during recruitment. So, to start with, sustainable employer branding helps lower your cost per hire.
According to Forbes, companies with robust employer branding enjoy a 50% reduction in hire costs. You’re probably wondering how it works. An attractive employer brand promotes a healthy work environment, making your company more attractive.
A favorable work environment makes your employees happy and satisfied. In turn, they talk about your brand to their friends and family members intentionally and unknowingly. In the process, you develop a positive public outlook, which is good for your brand.
Eventually, you spend less on advertising when you have job vacancies. Again, this is because your employees are doing the heavy lifting on your behalf by referring you to potential recruitees. Overall, this helps to lower the cost of talent acquisition.
Second, a long and tedious recruitment process is time-consuming and more expensive. You, therefore, want to speed up the process to reduce the cost. However, the best way to realize this is to establish a good employer brand.
According to the Vantage Circle, talent acquisition is often 1-2 times faster for good employer brands. What does this mean? You can never go wrong with a good employer brand.
Third, a good employer brand helps a great deal with lowering employee turnover. Acquiring new talent for your company can be a hassle. This is why you want to keep as many of your current employees as possible.
There are numerous ways to do that. However, you want to start with improving your employer brand. According to a LinkedIn study, companies with remarkable employer brands see a 28% drop in employee turnover.
Lastly, a good employer brand can help you save on salaries. More Linkedin research confirms that 40% of passive talent is willing to fill a vacancy without asking for a pay rise. Conversely, this is only possible when the company has a good employer brand.
Talent Attraction and Productivity
Employees are the bloodline of all successful brands. It’s almost impossible to scale a business without the right talent. This is why you want only to attract top talent in your field. The best part is, top talent is more skilled and can take your productivity to a new level.
That said, one of the best ways to attract top talent is through establishing a sustainable employer brand. In addition, a good employer brand can attract passive talent, comprising 70% of the global workforce.
Passive talent is the best because they’re more experienced and cost-efficient to hire. The good news is they’re often willing to take on new positions without stressing over more pay. You’ll want to establish a good employer brand to attract more passive candidates to your company.
How Environmental, Social, and Governance Principles Impact Employer Branding
A company’s environmental, social, and Governance principles influence its employer branding efforts. According to a PWC report, 66% of the global workforce desire to work for a brand with a social conscience.
In addition, an Appcast white paper posits 45% of US-based workers would ignore companies with controversial environmental conservation beliefs. It is crystal clear environmental conservation, social conscience, and good governance impact employer branding.
How to Build Sustainable Employer Branding
There are other ways to build sustainable employer branding besides exercising good governance and being environmentally and socially responsible. Below is a comprehensive step-by-step guide to help you get started!
1. Understand Your Company
The first step to establishing a sustainable employer brand is understanding the company. You want to start by familiarizing yourself with the company then defining your unique attributes. At this point, you should get straight your core purpose, vision, mission, culture, and value system.
This way, you can tell what type of talent is suitable for your company—then proceed to develop an employer value proposition to create a favorable work environment.
2. Audit Your Employer Brand
Next, you want to audit your employer brand by asking the right questions. For example, how do your current employees view your brand? How about the general public? You also want to know what customers say about you. According to NielsenIQ, 66% of consumers are willing to spend more on products made by sustainable brands.
This means your governance principles, together with social and environmental beliefs, have a direct impact on your company image. So, you want to lay the foundation by auditing all of them.
3. Spell out Your Employer Value Proposition
Your employer value proposition summarizes how you interact with your team of staff. So, you want to answer some questions when defining your employer value proposition. What things set you apart as a brand? Why would someone consider working with your company?
Remember that your company culture, social conscience, governance principles, and respect for the environment significantly impact employer branding. You, therefore, want to craft your employer value proposition around these principles. This way, you can build a good employer brand and attract top talent for your company.
4. Employ Recruitment Marketing Techniques
How you write your job adverts determines whether you get qualified candidates or not. You want to ensure the job description positively paints your brand. At the same time, your target candidates should also feel appreciated and needed after reading your job advert.
This takes a special skill to pull off. So, you want to have the right personnel if you can’t do it yourself. Recruitment marketing, when done right, can help you improve your brand awareness and visibility. But, most importantly, it’ll help you acquire the right talent.
5. Establish Rapport to Stir Engagement with Current Employees
Establishing rapport with current employees helps in many ways. First, it creates a bond that can’t be broken because everyone feels valued and appreciated at work. This way, your employees can freely engage with you to communicate how they feel.
In addition, happy and peaceful employees interact with customers positively, helping build an impressive company image. Believe in your employees. Be proud of them and let them know it. Most importantly, make them feel they’re part of your vision, mission, values, and objectives.
Unless they can identify with you and the company vision, emotional engagement can be a hassle. You can turn them to brand advocates when you get this right because they’ll naturally speak highly of your brand.
6. Start a Blog for the Company
Content marketing through blogging isn’t only good for generating leads. Instead, you want to use the company blog to establish your employer brand. Most job seekers scheme through a company’s blog to understand the company in detail.
As a savvy recruiter, you want to adequately prepare for them by clearly communicating your values, mission, and culture. You can effortlessly do this by publishing content covering these topics on your blog.
7. Incorporate Social Media and Video Marketing to Build Rapport
Social media is a powerful tool for building a sustainable employer brand. According to Backlinko, over 4.48 billion people use social media globally.
Since nearly everyone is active on social media, you want to ensure your brand is active on popular social platforms. This way, you can publish relevant content to showcase your brand story.
Many social media users already love video content. Therefore, this is an excellent opportunity to record and publish a welcome message from your brand ambassador. Overall, this will help you establish rapport with potential employees and customers.
8. Employ Diversity in Your Hiring Process
Employing diversity in your hiring process goes a long way. By this, we mean you want to have a diversified team comprising experts from different walks of life. The last thing you want to do is offer special treatment to certain groups while despising others. Therefore, the best way to build a strong employer brand is to diversify your recruitment process.
9. Advocate for Environmental Sustainability and Protection
Lastly, it’s good to show the world how you value the environment because it helps build a good image. However, you don’t want to stop at that. You should walk the talk by taking action and creating products that don’t jeopardize sustainability and environmental protection.
Sustainable Employer Branding | Wrapping Up
Creating sustainable employer branding will help with better employee retention and talent attraction. More importantly, this should be your focus for this year because of the labor shortage. If you’d like to get started but know not how to go about it, Recruitee can help you build an employer branding strategy. All you have to do is contact us here!
