8 Ways You Should Be Using Great Content to Strengthen Your Employer Brand

It’s hard to underestimate the importance of employer brand. Seventy-two percent of jobseekers indicate it has a significant impact on their decision to apply for and accept a position, and 69 percent report they will not take a job with a company with a bad reputation, even if they are unemployed.

In a nutshell, in today’s competitive hiring market, jobseekers seek out employers with brands that resonate with their personal values and goals. They follow and engage with the brands that interest them and for which they want to work.

This has created a paradigm shift in how companies source candidates. Organizations that robotically regurgitate job openings simply won’t attract and hire the best talent. Instead, companies must attract and nurture jobseekers much like how marketing organizations attract and nurture buyers of their products and/or services.

Content Marketing for Candidate Sourcing

Content is at the center of this new recruitment marketing approach. Good content in the right places helps establish relationships with candidates and then nurture those relationships over time. This content is about educating, not selling, candidates on your brand. It’s about telling your brand story through your employees, partners, and customers.

Topics might include attributes that make your company a great place to work, thought leadership and insights, or simply news about the industry, your products, or your company. Content can be curated or organic, and it can be in the form of everything from eBooks and white papers, to case studies, newsletters, videos and photos.

8 Easy Ways You Can Create Great Employer Brand Content

The following are eight content marketing recommendations that you can implement today that will get you on the road to building a great employer brand.

1. Tell Your Company Story. Every company has a story. Articulating it so that it resonates with jobseekers, prospects and customers, partners, and investors is often overlooked. Consider building a foundational content asset, such as a video or corporate brochure, as a good starting point for communicating your story (this can concurrently be used by marketing and sales for nurturing leads in the sales funnel).

2. Showcase Your Employee Stories. Telling your brand story through your employees is one of the most effective ways you can communicate what it’s like to work at your company. Many of the Fortune 500s are waking up to this reality: 57 percent share employee stories on their career sites and list these as one of their top five recruitment marketing practices. These can be told in video, audio, written, or visual formats. These content assets provide transparency into your brand and use storytelling to communicate your core values and how those are embodied in your employees.

3. Evangelize Your Customer Stories. Candidates want to work for a company with solutions—products, services, or a combination of both—that make a tangible difference for customers. Including compelling customer testimonials that relate not just to the business benefits but that communicate a human-interest side to the story can attract and energize active and passive candidates.

4. Leverage Your Company Blog. Your company blog is a great place for content that builds your employer brand. The posts you publish on your blog can include infographics, videos, photos, and images, all of which are easily discoverable through search engines. In addition, you can leverage your employees to write posts about their brand experiences, something candidates view as more authentic and genuine.

5. Hone Your Career Page. Nearly 85 percent of jobseekers visit a company’s career page when applying for open positions. Your career page is the most important advocate of your brand and a key platform to leverage when searching for and attracting new candidates.Some of the things that are a must on your career page include your company logo with a cover photo, brand messaging, all of your job openings, recruitment-related event updates, social media integration, overview of company benefits and perks, and your company story and culture. Regarding the latter, think about including a video on your company and culture: application rates increase 34 percent when companies do so. Making sure your career page is mobile friendly is also critical, with as many as 80 percent of jobseekers conducting their job searches from mobile devices.

6. Make Your Social Media Count. Virtually all jobseekers use at least one social network when searching for job openings and conducting research on prospective employers. Nearly three-quarters of recruiters and hiring managers report having made a new hire from social media in the past year, and 59 percent of those believe candidates sourced from social media are the highest quality.In addition to making sure your “big three” social networks (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) are configured with visuals, videos, and content that align with your brand identity and showcase elements appealing to jobseekers, there are some other tactics that you can use to generate more engagement—and thus more and better candidates. First, use links in your social media posts; posts and tweets with links drive twice as much engagement as those without any. Second, include images in your posts and tweets; these generate an astounding 98 percent higher comment rate. Third, make sure links to video play directly within your social media feed; these generate a 75 percent higher share rate. Finally, know what times and what frequency are best to post or tweet content on each of your social channels.

7. Build and Nurture Talent Pools with Email. The majority of businesses are missing huge opportunities to build and nurture talent pools that can be tapped to fill open positions. Think of everyone as a possible future candidate, so once you connect with them via social media or another channel, make them part of your community and use content to convince them to buy into your employer brand. One great way to do this is to use blog subscriptions and even email campaigns to communicate company news, thought leadership, and more.

8. Amplify Your Brand with Employee Advocates. As mentioned earlier, employees are your best advocates. They simply need to be mobilized. Apart from motivating them to share their stories, getting them to create positive company reviews on employment sites such as Glassdoor is a great way to build powerful employer brand content. Jobseekers use those to decide whether to apply for job openings or even accept a job offer. On average, they read four to seven reviews about a company before forming an opinion.

Why Wait?

A great content strategy can go a long way in helping you to build an employer brand that makes it easier and faster to source outstanding talent.

So why wait? Get busy today by implementing the 8 above content recommendations and see the difference your employer brand can make when it comes to sourcing great talent.