Employer brand matters as much as the company brand. People are the most important asset of a business, so it’s crucial to attract and retain your industry’s best talent. And you will only attract promising candidates if you have a reputation for being a good workplace.
To ensure that your business survives the pandemic and will tide over many more crises to come, you need the best people on your team. You need an excellent employer brand.
Why Improve Your Employer Brand?
Your image as an employer matters now more than ever. The pandemic has shown that companies with more innovative, creative, and motivated employees are more likely to stay afloat. Moreover, the best candidates have more options. They have many workplaces to choose from, and if your online profile is subpar, they won’t be submitting their application to your HR. You’ll be missing a lot of opportunities to hire promising talent.
The Focus on Remote Work
The first order of business for many promising candidates is to find out if the company offers remote work opportunities.
Before the pandemic, employee branding barely touched remote work. It seemed like a consensus that the economy is not ready for a wide-scale shift to remote work. Offering flexibility wasn’t much of a norm. But the COVID-19 outbreak thrust businesses headfirst into the work-from-home setup. Overnight, millions of Americans had to work remotely to curb infection rates.
Experts predict that even if the crisis abates, people would still be working from their homes. Economies would reopen, but only a fraction would be called back to offices. Some would remain in their cozy workspaces at home.
As such, candidates would naturally gravitate towards companies that offer this option. It’s not enough to offer remote work; remember, other companies are also offering work-from-home opportunities, so your vacancy has to be tempting enough for the candidate to turn down other offers.
- Assure Remote Workers of Belongingness – Remote work has its drawbacks. Since the employee is out of sight, they are also, sadly, out of mind. Harvard Business Review published a study of over a thousand employees and revealed that remote workers feel left out.
So during the application process, emphasize your company’s initiatives on making everyone feel like they belong. For instance, tell candidates that your communication tools allow watercooler conversations from lightning bolt tattoos to Christmas shopping. You can also share your virtual team-building exercises that promote camaraderie among remote workers.
- Tell Them about Your Tools – Results from any survey software would show you that buggy tools will frustrate employees and limit their productivity. This is even more pronounced in remote work, where workers rely on seamless communication channels to get in touch with their supervisors. As such, it pays to assure candidates that you have invested in reliable remote work technologies.You can walk the candidate through different tools that they will be using. You can also assure them that you have a dependable troubleshooting team ready to help should they encounter problems.
- Assure Them of Career Progression – Some employees feel that they lag behind their in-office counterparts in terms of opportunities for promotion. So curate a remote work-friendly image for your brand. Assure the candidate that employees have similar opportunities as far as career growth and learning is concerned.
- Publish Employee-Generated Content – It might be counterintuitive to let different workers with vastly different writing styles create brand content, but it’s an excellent strategy when employer branding is concerned. Stories from your employees make your brand unique and show that you give your workers a voice. It helps attract employees that fit the company culture, too. By reading employee-generated content, candidates can assess whether they’d fit in. This would save your HR team from dozens of mismatch applications.
Share Your Remote Work Policies
Ensure that the image you project on social media and job posts shows that your company values its remote workers. Candidates research companies before they hand in their applications. If they see that your company is invested in offsite workers’ well-being, they’ll be more likely to join your brand.
Remote work policies should be visible — this shows that you have a structured method of managing remote teams and that the candidate won’t face vague regulations. Publish photos and videos of your virtual workspaces, too. If candidates see that the workplace culture extends into the digital space, they’d be motivated to apply.
As businesses make operations more crisis-proof, they have to fortify their manpower with the best in their fields. They would have to throw their old employer brand handbook and devise a fresh image, but the effort would be more than worth it.
