5 Steps to Ensuring Your Employer Brand is Consistent
The way a candidate now researches and learns about jobs has changed. Candidates now research job options the same way in which they would decide on where to eat and where to stay for the weekend. Reviews and ratings allow consumers and candidates to make educated decisions to set both them and any business up for success.
So what happens when a candidate sees your mission statement and then reads a review that contradicts that statement? Chances are the employer brand that you’ve worked so hard to create will not be credible or gain the trust of the candidates that you are trying to reach.
Here are five steps to ensuring your employer brand is consistent across all platforms:
1. Read all employee generated content
Step one involves reading all employee generated content. This includes listening on social media and monitoring the conversation so that you can spot themes and trends that you can weave into your messaging and company mission. Your employees are your brand, so ensuring you are in touch with their wants, needs and experiences sets you up for success and consistency across all platforms.
Pro Tip: Don’t let negative reviews scare you. In fact, job seekers actually get skeptical when they don’t see negative reviews. According to Revoo Insight Research, 95% suspect censorship or faked reviews when they don’t see bad scores.
Too busy to read every review? No problem! With an Enhanced Profile on Glassdoor, you can identify pros and cons via word cloud to save you time. You can also set up alerts to be notified every time a new review is left.
2. Create employee focus groups
After you have read all employee reviews and noted all pros and cons, host focus groups with choice employees from each department. This will allow you to tailor your message by role and department. For instance, a sales rep isn’t going to be interested in the same things that your software engineers are. The only way to ensure your culture is consistent is to be sure that the qualities that you decide upon work for every team.
For instance, at Hubspot, their culture code’s foundation is trusting employees to make smart decisions. This allows employees to have freedom but also be accountable for their actions. It requires an extra filter in their interview process to ensure that every employee embodies this trait and is up for the responsibility.
3. Have a mission for each employee
After forming and hosting focus groups, be sure that you are in touch with each team in your organization and weave the role they play into each individual job description. Getting to the core of what motivates your employees and ensuring that each part of your organization contributes to the overall mission will allow employees to feel like they are playing an active role in your company’s success. Studies show that engaged employees are twice as productive and increase customer satisfaction levels by 80%.
4. Get stakeholders on the same page
The reason that this is one of the last steps is because you have to gather intel from your employees before leadership teams can decide what your overall mission statement and employer brand message will be.
Be sure to come prepared with results from your analysis of your external message that’s already out there, and the message you gather from your own employees. Then, get everyone in alignment internally on what the employer brand direction and company mission should be.
Pro Tip: Employer branding is not a set it and forget it strategy! Guarantee that you are monitoring employee sentiment weekly and monthly and reporting on changes to address any changes that need to be made.
5. Get employee buy-in and amplify the message
Once everyone is happy with the direction of your employer brand, get buy in from your employees and run the message by them to ensure accuracy and consistency. Then, amplify that message! Just as you included your employees in developing the message, you should also include them in spreading it. Allow them to post jobs on social media to help you recruit, use hashtags to make your content searchable on social and host contests to keep employees engaged.
Pro Tip: Link to external sites like Glassdoor from your own career site. Glassdoor has widgets available to pull in reviews and ratings to your career site. See how Kaiser has done this on their career page, and email us to get help implementing on your career site!
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