Your employer brand is the core of your talent strategy. It helps you focus on the best audiences, increases outreach conversion, and makes more people say "YES!" when you offer them a role.
It lowers overall costs, helps build connections to the business, and makes every recruiter, sourcer, and hiring manager more effective.
And the best part? Any company, no matter how small, can succeed at building and leveraging their employer brand.
Here's a secret: Smaller companies, because they are more focused, because every hire has the potential to be transformative, because they can challenge expectations, they can do employer branding better than anyone.
Twenty years ago, great hires were a job board posting away. Heck, you didn't even have to write a useful job posting and still expect to attract talent worth hiring.
As talent acquisition has evolved, incremental shifts have led companies to spend ever-growing amounts of money on job boards, RPO/agencies, insanely complex platforms, and recruiting tools you aren't getting the most out of.
All while your leaders are looking at your budget and wondering where all the money goes. And if it's worth it.
Employer branding isn't pixie dust that you sprinkle around to make things magically better. It is a way to see who you are, where you are, what you offer, and who would want it so that you can build a talent strategy that works.
Once established, your employer brand will make immediate and obvious impacts, but also drive long-term success. It will attract more of the people you want to hire. It will speed up your marketing process and eliminate internal friction so that HR, TA, social media, and hiring managers are all working together (finally). It will help you close more offers, allowing you to point to a pile of money that you just saved the company.
The future of talent acquisition isn't job boards. It is about developing a strong brand that people opt into.
And that brand is absolutely within your grasp.
Take the first step to better and smarter talent strategy and hiring.
Every company has an employer brand that will drive business outcomes. That's not a question.
The question is whether or not you intentionally use your brand. If you consider what your hiring goals are, who make the best hires, and what strategy will bring them to you.
With the right branding, your recruiting gets easier.
Having spent the better part of a decade developing employer brands and EVPs for Groupon, Roku, Enova, Recursion, TradeShift, SavATree, Gearset, CreditShop, and others, I focus exclusively on helping companies build and activate their employer brand so that they can compete (and win) against much larger companies. How? By creating and growing the next generation of employer brand leaders, managers, and specialists.
That's why Google calls me the employer brand nerd.
-James Ellis