Employment Branding: Increase your employee retention by attracting better candidates.

Earlier this month, I presented a workshop at the 13th Annual Maine HR Convention. The topic was creating an employment brand to attract better candidates. Here are a couple excerpts of that presentation. If you'd like the 6 page summary of this information, please send me a request to jblais@jobsintheus.com, or if YOU are "Linked In", you can shoot me a request through that site.

Today, we'll focus on just one area affecting employee retention: Attracting the RIGHT Candidates for Your Organization. Simply stated, if you recruit and hire the right people, it will be easier to keep them satisfied within your organization, and thus retain their services long term.

Employment Brand Defined
In this session, we'll talk about creating and leveraging a "brand" to increase your recruiting success. We'll identify the strategies that are used in marketing and advertising to attract customers, and apply them to the goals of attracting the best possible candidates. So, instead of building a consumer brand focused on selling your products to customers, your goal is to develop an effective employment brand focused on promoting your business to attract the best possible candidates for your culture.

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When an employer can establish, communicate, and reinforce an effective employment brand, they will realize an increased stream of applicants better suited to their work environment, which in turn leads to an increase in employee retention. Later on, we'll address some of the key factors that influence an employee's decision to stay with an employer.

A brand can generally be defined as the sum of all characteristics and distinguishable features associated with a good or service – its unique personality. Brands are comprised of logos, images, slogans, and features of the good or service, along with all the supporting communication and promotion of these items. Simply put, a consumer brand should be built around the customer experience; therefore, an employment brand needs to be built around your employee's experience.

Identifying Your Unique Employment Brand

Establishing an effective brand in the consumer market requires a company to understand what drives consumer behavior. Likewise, in order to establish an effective employment brand, a company must understand what drives employee behavior.

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Review your surveys and identify the top 10 traits. From this list, work with peers to remove traits that your competition for employees would also have. For instance, if you had 'flexible' as a top 10 trait and you know that your competitor offers far greater flexibility in the workplace, remove that from the list. Once you have identified the most unique three to five strengths of your employer "personality", or Unique Employment Proposition (UEP), you've got your foundation.

The next step is to identify the types of employees that you want to attract with your brand- your "target market".

Do you have experience with building or implementing an employment brand? I'd love to hear how it worked, or any feedback you have on the process...

I see everyday that the companies that put more time, energy, and creativity into attracting the best candidates are always the most successful in their recruiting efforts. Branding your company as the employer of choice, and promoting all the unique qualities that you offer as an employer will help you attract people that will fit into your culture, and therefore be happier and more productive employees... Give it a try, I think you'll agree.