Employee Engagement
Updated: July 10, 2024
Published: May 7, 2024
Branding has always been an integral part of a company’s overall marketing strategy. However, too often the focus is on branding to customers, not to employees.
For brands struggling with attracting and retaining top-tier talent, brand reputation matters. Whether it’s positive or negative, the lens through which employees perceive their employers will affect morale, productivity, and retention. Here’s where employer branding can help.
A strong employer brand not only helps in attracting the crème de la crème, but it also plays a crucial role in retaining them.
However, building a compelling employer brand isn't easy. Companies often face challenges like aligning their internal culture with external perceptions, standing out in crowded job markets, and effectively communicating their values.
So, what’s the solution? Having a strong employer branding strategy and using the right employer branding tools.
In this article, we’re going to break down what is employer branding along with the role of employer branding platforms, plus share eight of our favorite employer branding tools.
Employer branding is a strategy for attracting (and retaining) talent by showcasing a company’s personality and reputation as an ideal place to work. Employer branding plays an integral role in your company’s recruitment and onboarding processes as well as professional career development opportunities.
However, employer branding is not just about having a flashy logo or a cool office environment. An employer branding strategy helps you identify your target audience, define your company’s unique value proposition, and convey your brand’s value through marketing campaigns on social media, in job postings, and via employee testimonials.
Ideally, through these efforts, you’ll attract top-tier talent and entice them to stick around for the long haul.
Having a robust employer brand is a game-changer. A strong employer brand promotes a positive workplace culture, boosts employee morale, and fortifies your company’s reputation. In turn, it attracts top talent, reduces recruitment costs, and elevates the quality of incoming applications.
While employer branding has its benefits, there are some challenges, too, that many companies face when implementing an employer branding strategy.
Getting management and employees onboard with employer branding can sometimes be difficult. As GaggleAMP Director of Marketing Michelle Brammer explains, companies feel people don’t want to hear about their employer brand, or they’re not making employer branding a priority.
“I think that’s one of the biggest challenges - focusing on employer branding is usually not somebody's primary focus. Of course, there is usually somebody focusing on it, it just may not be the primary focus of the organization when it comes to social media. So, they only post when they have a new position open, or when they have some big award that they've received, and they're not necessarily posting like, ‘As a brand we have this particular challenge right now, how are others overcoming it, or know focusing on their employees.’ They're just talking about what their brand does - not necessarily what the employee does.”
- Michelle Brammer, Director of Marketing at GaggleAMP
As long as companies push employer branding to the bottom of their to-do lists and refrain from letting their employees be a part of their employer branding strategy, their employer branding will stagnate.
Instead, companies need to make employer branding a priority and give their employees the right tools for employer branding along with training to help transform them into positive brand ambassadors. But, before they can do so, they’ll likely need to show the value of a strong employer brand to upper management.
Getting executive buy-in for employer branding isn’t easy when they want to know the ROI for employer branding.
So, how do you measure the success of your employer branding efforts?
There are several key metrics that you can track to show upper management (and employees) the value of a strong employer brand:
To keep your employer branding strong, you need to be consistently monitoring your employer branding goals. Using an employer branding platform can help you track these important metrics. It can also boost your employee advocacy by transforming your employees into brand ambassadors, which will further strengthen your employer branding efforts.
By leveraging employer branding platforms, you can entice potential candidates to choose your brand over a competitor’s brand. Here’s how: an employer branding platform can help you manage marketing your brand to prospective employees.
The best employer branding platform will provide you with the tools to craft a strong, positive employer brand that will weather a PR crisis like the one that lululemon faced.
Source: Priscilla Oluwasola
After an interview with Forbes, founder and former CEO Chip Wilson faced serious backlash for several comments he made regarding the company and diversity and inclusion. Not surprisingly, these negative comments caused quite the stir.
However, lululemon was quick to distance itself from these comments by issuing a statement:
“Chip Wilson does not speak for lululemon, and his comments do not reflect our company views or beliefs [...] lululemon is committed to creating and fostering an inclusive, diverse, and welcoming environment throughout our organization and across our communities.”
Taking it a step further to protect their image, they even hosted an Inclusion Month and shared content from one of the attendees on their LinkedIn company profile:
Source: lululemon
As lululemon shows, if you have a solid employer branding strategy already in place, you’re going to bounce back a lot easier (and faster) from a PR crisis.
Now let’s take a look at some professional employer branding tools that can help you supercharge your employer branding efforts.
There are a variety of employer branding tools available that can help you. Depending on your needs, there are tools for research and metrics, content creation, testimonials and reviews, recruitment, and employee advocacy.
Here are eight of our favorite employer branding tools.
Link Humans’ Employer Brand Index is a comprehensive tool designed for in-depth research and metrics analysis specifically for employer branding. It goes beyond conventional analytics, providing insights into engagement, traffic, and user behavior on employer branding content.
The tool is particularly great for HR professionals and marketing teams. It offers a nuanced understanding of how candidates interact with a company’s employer brand, so they can tweak their strategy as needed.
BuzzSumo’s Content Analyzer is a powerful tool for assessing the performance of content in the digital landscape. It helps with identifying what content is trending, what people are sharing, and even what your competitors are up to.
Once you know what type of content resonates best with your audience, you can tailor your employer branding content to maximize its impact. This way, you stay relevant and competitive, and can easily stay top-of-mind with both clients and future employees.
Ahrefs is a must-have in your toolkit for elevating search engine optimization (SEO) and refining your content strategy, making it a game-changer for employer branding.
It offers advanced backlink analysis, nuanced keyword research, and seamless competitor tracking, providing a deep understanding of user search behavior.
Canva is a user-friendly graphic design platform perfect for crafting visual content for blogs, social media posts, and video thumbnails. Its intuitive interface and extensive library of templates make it an essential tool for enhancing your visual narrative as a brand.
Its collaborative features also make it easy for teams to work together on creating engaging employer branding content.
ChatGPT is a chatbot developed by OpenAI. Through chat-based conversations, ChatGPT can answer specific questions about a brand’s culture, values, and work environment.
This personalized engagement helps in fostering a more authentic connection and allows candidates to get a feel for what it's like to work for the company. Not to mention that this is a great tool if you want to brainstorm potential content for blogs or social media posts.
Glassdoor is a leading platform for employee testimonials and reviews, offering a transparent and authentic view of a company's workplace culture. It has an extensive and highly engaged community of active job seekers, who rely on the platform for profound insights.
You can leverage Glassdoor to showcase positive employee experiences, highlight company values, and address any workplace-related concerns transparently.
SmartRecruiters is an end-to-end recruitment platform that streamlines the hiring process. Its user-friendly interface for creating branded career sites, managing job postings, and tracking candidates enhances the overall candidate experience, which contributes positively to your employer branding reputation.
The platform also integrates with various recruitment marketing tools to help you attract, engage, and hire the right talent efficiently.
Now, to really revolutionize employee advocacy as part of your branding strategy, you need to transform your team members into dynamic brand ambassadors. GaggleAMP empowers you to mobilize your workforce, seamlessly sharing branded content across social media platforms. This not only amplifies your message but also significantly expands the reach of employer branding initiatives.
What makes GaggleAMP one of the best employer branding tools is that it functions as a centralized hub for managing advocacy campaigns with an easy-to-use interface. It tracks employee engagement, and it has gamification to keep users actively engaged with your employee advocacy program.
Picking the right tools for employer branding can be a game-changer for making your brand story stand out.
Consider investing in an employee advocacy platform like GaggleAMP. Picture your team turning into brand ambassadors, spreading the word about your amazing company culture.
Remember, employer branding is not just a buzzword — it's your story. And with the right tools, it's a story that can genuinely boost your brand.
Ready to let GaggleAMP help your employer brand shine? Schedule your demo today.
Employee Engagement
Employee Engagement
Employee Engagement
