 When you hear the word “branding” your mind might think of logos, colors and design. While a consistent visual presence certainly plays a part in creating a positive impression to the job candidates that you want to attract, employer branding encompasses a whole lot more than your graphic style. It’s your reputation.
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 Your employer brand is your reputation as a good employer and companies that actively manage their employer brand are using marketing tactics to help job seekers find the information they're looking for to make confident career decisions. The result is that they’re able to nurture relationships with candidates and develop their credibility as a good employer. They’re also seeing their efforts translate into cost and time savings for their businesses.
Would you ever buy a house without walking through it first? Do you think you could make a confident purchase if you weren’t even allowed to peek through the windows? Probably not. Yet that’s what you might be asking your job candidates to do if you don’t use employee testimonials in your recruitment marketing. Employee testimonials give your candidates a window to peek through to see if your company is a good place to work, and if the job you want to fill is right for them.
 Technology has made us predictable. We use the same behaviors to explore, discover and research job opportunities that we use when we’re shopping for the products and services we need for our personal and professional lives. We seek out answers to our own questions and by the time we’re ready to contact a business or walk through their door, we have a pretty good idea of what direction we want to go. Asking and finding answers to questions helps us develop confidence that we’re making a good decision.
 Lori Creighton has earned Recruitment Marketing Certification through the Smashfly* Transform Academy. The certification is recognized by SHRM (Society for Human Resource Professionals) and the HR Certification Institute as eligible for continuing education credits for HR professionals. Recruitment marketing is the use of marketing tactics to achieve recruiting goals. It’s considered an emerging discipline within the field of HR but it requires a very different skillset.
 Once you decide to start a storytelling initiative, it’s time to rally support within your company and get people excited to participate. You’ve already got buy-in from leadership, because they understand how the right talent enables their business strategy. Now you need to get everyone else in the company onboard. This is critical, because you can’t tell employee stories with your employees!.
 HR professionals aren’t the only people thinking about recruiting. Recruiting is on the minds of business owners and executives who are tasked with implementing business strategy because they know that their ability to meet their business goals depends in large part on their ability to attract and retain the right talent. Recruiting is more difficult than ever in our low unemployment economy and traditional methods just don’t work like they used to. Part of the answer to getting better recruiting results is to change your approach and become proactive instead of reactive.
 If you have been involved with hiring for your company, you probably know how this scene plays out. You have a position to fill so you post the job. Applicants come in and you screen the candidates for a shortlist, and so on. You end up with a hire that may or may not be a good fit. Time will tell, and hopefully you don’t find yourself filling the same job a few months or even a year or two down the road.
 I don’t have to tell you that it’s difficult to find the workers you need. That’s stating the obvious. A low unemployment economy, however, isn’t the only challenge that you need to overcome in order to swing that situation around. Chances are good that if you’re still doing recruiting the way you’ve always done it, that your process is broken. The time to fix it is now and here’s why.
 We’re getting quite predictable, you and I. We use our consumer behaviors to shop for just about anything, be it a new dishwasher for our home, a software tool for work, or even our next job opportunity. Don’t believe me? Answer these questions. What do you do first when you need to buy a product or service? You go to the internet to research the problem that you need to solve, and you learn about the options available to solve it. When do you usually contact a company that you have put on your short list of possibilities? You probably don't want to talk to anyone until you have a pretty good idea of which direction you want to go.
Many businesses now realize that it's vital to create online interactions to guide people towards a purchase decision, but when it comes to recruiting talent and building a candidate pipeline, they’re missing the mark. Read on to learn why recruitment marketing is a growing trend not to be ignored. |
