You’ve got several open headcounts and have been promoting those roles everywhere. Even so, you aren’t getting the online traffic you’d anticipated – and you’re seeing competitive businesses in your market scoop up top talent. 

Especially for startups or companies new to a market, low brand awareness could be a potential recruitment hurdle. But, by tapping into your consumer branding – specifically, your mission, vision, and what customers have to say – you can begin building a robust employer brand quickly and, with that, increase engagement, consideration and applications. 

Start here: harness the voice of the consumer 

While potential candidates may not know a lot about your business, your most enthusiastic consumers, clients or users do – and that consumer branding is often a good jumping-off point for efficiently building your employer brand.

To get started, look at your internal north stars – what your brand does particularly well – and flesh out from there. These are your organisational reasons to believe and, should a new employee join your business, they, too, will wind up rallying around these core messages and pillars. 

From there, tap into the voice of the customer. 

  • What are consumers saying about your business, products and services?
  • What’s behind your positive brand sentiment?
  • What makes them buy into your brand promise – and what keeps them coming back? 

In many cases, you want your employees to believe in your product and identify with the mission – in other words, to understand what’s unique about your organisation and leverage that to best promote your firm to future employees. 

Next, sync with employee priorities and experiences 

Beyond that, it’s important to understand your market-specific conditions and what top talent wants right now. Especially now, those priorities continue to shift and evolve. Now, for example, almost half of job seekers consider flexible hours a key benefit and 13% are looking for career advancement. If you’re clear on what’s important to your core employee audience, bring those benefits and opportunities forward in job posts. 

What Job Seekers REALLY Want

As you’re assessing and refining your employer brand, consider what job seekers want right now– and if you’re offering these or other equally compelling benefits that differentiate you from the competition.

  • 37% say flexible hours is one of their top three factors in applying for a new role 
  • 57% are attracted by better compensation 
  • 50% are attracted by a good work-life balance

Source: Indeed, Search for Greatness Data (2021)

Then, promote this social proof to employees and job seekers

With your customer insights and employee-first offerings shored up, the last step is to promote your message to job seekers.

Reputation Matters

66% of job seekers in Australia agree that it has a significant impact on their decision of whether or not to accept a job offer.

Source: Indeed, AU Decipher/ Focus Vision Data (2019)

In an increasingly competitive market, reputation matters. Today, it is essential organisations focus on their employer brand and, specifically, promote a dynamic, authentic story that resonates with both prospective and current employees. Anchored by customer and employee experiences and opportunities built around what talent wants and needs right now, you’ll build a stronger brand reputation – and strong employer branding – that proactively attracts potential hires. 

Together, these three steps can help you build out a dynamic employer brand that, even for new companies or companies new to a particular market, help drive candidate engagement and consideration – and, ultimately, can help your business compete with well-established, well-regarded enterprises.