Just imagine someone tells you: “I am working for Google”. Surely, you will utter surprisingly with great admiration “Oh! Really?” Indeed, nowadays, many people pride themselves on working for large corporations such as Google. What creates the attraction of these leading employers? The answer is their recruiting brands – the magnet attracting talent.
General brand and specific brand
Branding strategy is crucial to the sustainable growth of all companies. However, some executives focus on building brands only for their products and make light of recruiting brands. Other people think that a recruiting brand (specific brand) should be independent of their corporate brand (general brand). That belief should not be right. In fact, recruiting brand is a key element of corporate brand since it communicates the organization’s values, goals and culture to talented candidates you want to attract.
Benefits of developing a strong recruiting brand
A strong recruiting brand brings corporations many benefits. First of all, this brand can streamline the recruitment process. If you promote aggressively your organization’s values, goals and culture, you can avoid interviewing people who are out of sync with it. More importantly, if you build up your company’s reputation as an employer of choice, you can attract and retain talent more easily because great people always seek out for great brands.
So what should you do to build a recruiting brand effectively? Major points you need to pay attention to include:
Targeting the right talent
You need to recognize the right candidates. Let’s find out things your target candidates are keen on as well as goals, dreams and values they expect from their employer of choice.
Knowing well values your organization can bring to employees
Generally people want to work for corporations that offer them certain physical or mental values; while the latter e.g. pride is more important. For example, Google promises to create favorable conditions for all employees to contribute to its cause, i.e. helping everyone around the world access to the huge information freely. Therefore, you need to identify the most important values your company can bring to their desired employees. This is the basis for you to develop powerful marketing messages to attract the right talent.
Developing the right branding strategy
All strong recruiting brands these days have been built in many years. To develop the right branding strategy, executives should set clear visions for their human resources development, align the values of their recruiting brand with your corporate and product brands as well as set targets for every stage of the branding strategy development.
Making the most of communication tools
Once you identify your recruiting brand, you will select the most effective communication tools that fit your budget. Each executive has his or her favorite communications channels, but marketing experts advise you to use a career site as the key weapon. This site will communicate to candidates that your company is the right place for their career growth. In addition, you can use other supporting tools such as online and offline PR articles or video and photos that demonstrate the values and culture of your company.
Measuring the effectiveness of recruitment branding
When building a recruitment brand, you need to measure your progress in many ways. For example, you can mention your company’s name at a party and see how many people know your company and whether they have a positive or negative impression on it. Another way is to base on the quality of applications you get when your company posts job ads. Particularly, you can evaluate your company’s reputation based on the number of your company’s employees poached by your competitors.
Recruiting and retaining talent are important tasks that always concern executives. However, with a strong recruiting brand, these tasks will become lighter. Therefore, you should invest your time in developing a strong recruiting brand. Once that mission is successful, your employees will be proud of their company just like Google’s staff in a very near future.
