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Growing your organization means that sooner or later, you need to hire people. And even if you’re not growing, you still need to replace people when they leave your team. So employer branding should always be an important part of your recruitment marketing activities. If you want to attract the right people, you need to clearly tell them:
We studied a lot of vacancies, ads for vacancies, job boards and so on. We gathered all of that and put together 8 ways to use content to improve your employer branding.
If you haven’t identified your organization’s vision, mission and values yet, then that should be the first thing you do right now. If you have that clear, then start from there to define who your ideal employees should be. This is much like defining your buyer persona, but instead of buying your products, they ‘buy’ you as an employer. (You could use our buyer persona worksheet also to map out your potential employees)
Usually companies define their vision, mission and values with the customer in mind. So you’ll need to translate this to potential candidates for your job openings. This is just a small extra step to take that will surely help you build a better employer brand.
After taking a closer look at your mission and values, it’s time to start looking into what stories you can tell about your organization. If for example happiness is a value you aim for, then that should definitely also be clear in the stories you tell. The main thing about these stories is that they’re not just a list of values you claim you have. It’s about showing that you are applying them throughout your organization on a daily basis. We talked about the importance of storytelling before.
Simultaneously, you should also decide on who can tell relevant stories. For this, you can look at your current team. And don’t just look at management: get people from different teams to tell these stories. You can also look at partners or customers you work with. They often have very relevant stories to tell about your business and the people that work for you.
You can also check what the competition is doing and learn from that. Things you can check:
These are not meant for you to copy: nobody likes a copycat. Instead, use this information to get some inspiration. And dare to be different: your future candidates are not looking for another copy, they want to work for an organization with their own set of values that matches theirs. They have to feel this is al genuine and in line with what you do.
By now you should have a good idea about the stories you should be telling. Before you dive into that, let’s first do a content audit. This should paint a picture of the things you are already doing to stand out as an employer. The goal of this audit is to find the gaps:
Now you’re ready to start publishing content relevant to your employer brand. You should already be using a content calendar for your content marketing. There are plenty of tools that help you and your team set up and manage a content calendar, like Asana or Monday.com. Using a cloud solution like that helps your teams collaborate, and they make it easy to involve partners or clients as well.
Anyway, you’ll want to publish stories that support your employer brand. With a content calendar, you can plan these in so your team knows what content it needs to provide by when. Make sure to plan well ahead, so you can create good content. And do publish employer branding content often enough. You want your efforts to have the desired effect, and for that you’ll need to make some online noise.
And don’t just stick to publishing your job openings all the time. Sure, you need to let the world know that there is a vacancy in your organization. But that alone is not going to convince potential candidates unfortunately. You’ll need to post stories about what it’s like to work for your organization, what a day in your offices looks like, how people are treated, and so on.
Also don’t stick to only text. Video content is thriving online, so why not post some videos of your team working, testimonials of happy employees, after movies of a team event etc. This way, you’re showing off your company culture and the values you stand for. So when the time comes to actively recruit, people will already know how great your company is, and you’ll see the applications rolling in.
Your own team is a great source of stories for your online content. But you can also ask partners or clients you work with. They have stories to tell too. Even if they are not employees, they should still be able to tell something about your values, how you treat people and what it’s like to work with you. Especially for customer facing roles, this can be a great way to support your employer brand. And most companies have more of those roles than you might think.
You need to know what is working and what is not. So as you try out stories, different content types and channels, make sure to look into your analytics from time to time. You can use tracking codes to keep track of where your organization is mentioned and where new people are doing their research on your organization. You should also look at what content performs well and what doesn’t. Keep on doing this, so you can also understand what is changing over time.
There you go: 8 ways to improve your employer branding with content. I hope you’ll start seeing the results very soon. Be sure to check the rest of our blog for more tips on content marketing.
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