You’ve worked hard to define a clear employment brand. Your message is well defined, distinct and compelling.
Now what?
This post will outline the first steps to integrate your employment brand into your content strategy.
Missed our last post? Check out the other installments in the series here:
Using Content to Drive Your Employment Brand Part 1: What’s An Employment Brand?
Using Content to Drive Your Employment Brand Part 2: How to Build Your Employment Brand
To maximize branding’s recruiting and retention benefits, craft a comprehensive, multi-channel content strategy (this will be a subset of your overall marketing strategy for candidates).
1. Integrate your EVP messaging.
Review your current marketing arsenal and weave EVP messaging into all job postings, website, collateral, social sites, review sites, candidate newsletter, content marketing initiatives and anything else you use to communicate with job seekers and employees.
2. Gather proof.
Simply stating your value proposition isn’t enough. You need to prove it.
If you haven’t already:
- Solicit candidate testimonials and success stories.
- Have someone who’s a great storyteller create case studies of candidates who have found amazing careers, thanks to your team.
- Gather statistics that matter to job seekers (e.g., placement statistics, temp-to-hire conversion statistics, redeployment rates, etc.)
- Get permission from high-profile employers to use their name in your candidate marketing (in today’s candidate-starved market, they’re more willing than ever to do this).
- Seek third-party validation that you’re an employer of choice. ClearlyRated’s Best of Staffing Talent Satisfaction Award and other “best places to work” listings provide objective proof.
3. Proactively manage your online reputation.
You need to create content to build your employment brand, but the job seekers, associates, internal employees and placed talent you work with all create brand “content” about your staffing firm, too: in the form of online reviews.
Make sure you know what people are saying about your staffing firm, and stay in control of the conversation:
- Employee voice is 3x more credible than the CEO’s when it comes to talking about working conditions in that company.
- Nearly 9 in 10 people (88% of candidates) trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
- Read your reviews (especially the bad ones) on Facebook, Google, Glassdoor.com and other review sites. Pay attention to patterns: For example, are there themes to negative comments, or are they isolated incidents?
- Improve what you can. Can you place every applicant? Pay every employee a million-dollar salary? No, but making a few small improvements to your processes, communication policies or culture could have a big positive impact on candidate/employee satisfaction, future reviews and your employment brand.
- Proactively generate more positive reviews. The best way to minimize the impact of a bad review is by offsetting it with 100 great ones. Create and implement a process to systematically gather positive reviews, so that the occasional complainer’s comments are drowned out by feedback from happy associates and satisfied job seekers.
- Manage reputation at both the recruiter and brand level. For many staffing companies, especially healthcare, the recruiter brand is the staffing company brand. Tools like Great Recruiters and Haley Marketing’s reputation management services can be used to gather feedback at the recruiter level.
Up Next: Using Content to Drive Your Employment Brand Part 4: Building a Library of Branded Content
In our next post in the series, we’ll explore how you can build a library of branded content for your employment brand. Don’t want to wait? Check out the full ebook here!
