Employer branding during recruitment process. How to take care of the good name of the brand?

Employer branding during recruitment process. How to take care of the good name of the brand?

Employer branding, or the employer's brand, is the way in which a company communicates with current and potential employees, describes the set of rules that govern the company, influencing the brand's reputation and defines what value proposition the company is able to provide its employees. Employer branding is an integral part of any professionally conducted recruitment process. What aspects of employer branding are important during the search for new talents?

1. Professional online presentation of the company

Take care of the professional website, without spelling mistakes, with good copy and authentic photos showing your team. In addition to the website, it is also worth focusing on social media channels to be updated frequently - one channel of communication, well-managed, is better than empty Instagram or Facebook accounts. Give candidates a chance to know your organization from all sides - the more credible the brand, the better its reception among future employees.

2. Communication method adapted to the target group

Pay attention to the communication method on social media and on the website. Who are you reaching? Who is your target group - is it a 25-year-old Java programmer or an experienced team of telecommunications engineers? The communication method, the style, must be adapted to your organization and fit the characteristics of the target group. Do not forget about politeness, active communication with users, for example, in comments under posts - it is very important. Remember that technical people are often people who enjoy analyzing the smallest details. Sometimes a detail can decide whether you will hire a particular person or not.

3. "Career" tab on the website

This is one of the most important pages on your website. It should present aspects such as:

Provide as much detailed information as possible, be transparent, and show that your company is open to dialogue and development. The Career tab should also have a well-updated list of positions for which the company is recruiting. Each of them should contain a number of information important for the candidate, including the salary rate - more on this in the last point.

4. Process for a candidates

A very important and inseparable part of Employer Branding is how the company reacts to the submitted candidates. The ideal solution is to keep the candidate informed about each stage of the process on an ongoing basis - ATS systems have special functions built for this. Thanks to this, the candidate is informed on an ongoing basis (email, sms) what is happening with his candidacy. When arranging a meeting with a candidate, a good solution is also to remind about the meeting the day before, along with detailed information about the course of the meeting (agenda) and the duration of the interview. After the interview, of course, feedback for the candidate cannot be missing, and even if it is negative, it should contain information about what went wrong during the interview so that the candidate could learn any lesson from the process.

5. Easy application and detailed job posting

The last but equally important issue is the way of applying for specific offers and the way they are presented. Let's start with the application itself - it should be simplified to the necessary minimum. Recruitment forms cannot be overloaded with questions that are not crucial at a given stage because it simply discourages potential applicants from joining the process. The application should be quick and hassle-free for the candidate. In many large companies, special application accounts are created where the user must first set up an account in the system to be able to participate in the recruitment process. This, of course, has a background related to the GDPR and security, but it does not help in the recruitment itself. Another issue is the job posts - very often they come down to only 3 things: mentioning the name of the position, indicating the duties and requirements for the candidate. But that's not enough. Each job post should be full and exhaustive, e.g. it should contain a full description of the project, what exactly is being created, what stage it is at, what the project team looks like (how many people, what is the team's experience), what the candidate will be responsible for, what we require from him, what we can offer - what salary, what additional benefits, form of cooperation, remote work - how much % and many others. The job post is often the first contact with the candidate - so take care of it in the first place.

Summary: there are several important aspects of Employer Branding itself, which I have tried to mention in this article. However, the concept itself is so broad that more than one book could easily be written about it. The above, such as the website, presentation of the company on the web, the method of communication with candidates, the process for applying or finally easy application and detailed job posts seemed to me to be one of the most important, taking into account conversations with over a hundred companies and cooperation with a recruitment agency over the last 6 years. It is worth taking care of Employer Branding because it is a long-term investment