What is Employer Branding?
Every employer has an employer brand and this brand is a key factor important when it comes to recruiting.
Employer branding, simply put, means your reputation as an employer. We can say that the retention and performance of employees depends on the quality of leadership, but the employer brand is a feature of the company culture.
If you are a small company or a new business, stop feeling that you don’t have an employer brand, once you hire your first employee you have a brand. Your employer brand might not be widely known and not written down yet, but it exists.
A simple way to define any employer brand is to answer the questions:
– What is good about working here?
– What is great about working here?
– Why would others want to work here?
– What do current employees say about working here?
– Are there any down-sides to working here?
While answering these questions, even if the exercise is not a complete survey of employee satisfaction and engagement, you will have given yourself the material you need to approach the recruitment process.
Company culture
Employer branding is a top-down thing, it is set by the senior management and owners of the company and we can say that it forms the company culture. In a very small company or a start-up we usually see that these things are based on the personality and beliefs of the owners. Because it is top-down it can’t be faked – no matter what is written in the company’s mission and vision statements employer branding depends on actions. What the senior management does is what counts because that is what the employees see every day with their own eyes.
Many entrepreneurs overlook the employer branding part of their reputation and focus only on the quality of their product or service and those employers often wonder why their company reaches a plateau when they become medium-sized. They often get stuck as they are unable to hire the best talent in the market to grow the business. At that point the reputation of the company has already been fixed and their employer brand is known in the market. Because of their actions as an employer they have problems recruiting.
We can say that a company which has a reputation as a third-rate employer only ever gets to select employees from the third-rate pool of people available. This is why employer branding is so important and why it counts from the first day a company starts operating in the market.
