Why did the last person who joined your organization choose you over another company? What makes your team members stay? What do your employees like best about working with you?

The answers to these questions hold important insights into your hiring brand. Whether or not you have intentionally put time into cultivating it, a version of it already exists. Your hiring brand is how your existing employees, prospective candidates, and past employees perceive and experience your business as a place to work. Many points of engagement, across elements such as digital and other personal interactions, all come together to help people form an opinion.

It is the value that you add to employees’ lives. It’s who they become as a result of working for you. Now, more than ever before, people want to understand their role within the organization beyond the job description. Is your company a good business to work for? What can people expect from your work environment, team, and culture? What is your North Star?

Information on a business’s hiring practices, interview process, salary ranges, employee reviews on company leadership and culture are all easily obtained online. Businesses that have leaned into this reality by involving their existing teams, creating dramatic transparency and managing their online hiring brands are reaping the rewards.

Hiring Brands Aren’t Made. They’re Experienced.

Branding is often thought of as a marketing exercise. This is where hiring brands differ from traditional branding. The architecture of a hiring brand needs to go beyond a mission statement, values, or the products and services that you sell. It is the literal ‘human’ part of your business, the core is your people – past, present and future. So what impact can be realized?

A thoughtful hiring brand has been shown to have clear business impacts, such as reducing cost per hire (by as much as 50 percent), and attracting 50 percent more qualified candidates. Whereas a strong showing will entice great candidates, a poor reputation can cost you as much as 10 percent more in wages per hire.

Investing in your hiring brand shortens hiring cycles (time to fill), reducing the investment your company makes searching for candidates (as well as the risk of misaligned hires). It also helps you to retain existing employees. Turnover is not just the added cost of training new people. It is also the added cost of lost opportunity, revenue that you could have been generating.

Mirror Reflection is Key

Business brands are heavily curated, scripted, and, at times, quite aspirational. They are focused on selling, not sharing, and herein lies the problem. When building your hiring brand, ensure you base your offering in reality, not vision state. Individuals considering you as an employer need to see you as you really are. The benefit of authenticity is that transparency will attract better aligned candidates to your business.

Successful hiring brands are honest. They are a direct reflection of your organization as it exists today, and provide transparency into your company leadership vision for the future. Come as you are, live your culture out loud in your hiring brand.

The Cost of Hidden & Inauthentic Hiring Brands

We all know the tremendous costs that come with a bad fit. If your hiring brand doesn’t match your firm’s reality, you will struggle to attract the right individuals for your business.

Think about that incredibly memorable restaurant that you went to. It was off the beaten path. Perhaps it didn’t even have a sign. You only discovered it because a friend, social media post, or food review caught your interest. Is your business hiding in plain sight?

A few questions to ask yourself: Is it possible a candidate hasn’t applied to a position within your firm because of something they saw online? Who has been swayed from accepting an offer with your company, because another workplace offers the “perk” that they crave? Worse yet, what if your workplace offers that same benefit — and more — but people just don’t know?

Consider these stats:

• Applications: 68 percent of Millennials, 54 percent of Gen-Xers, and 48 percent of Boomers visit employers’ social media properties to evaluate employers’ hiring brands. 86 percent of job seekers research company reviews and ratings to decide on where to apply for a job.
• Misalignment: Roughly one in three job seekers has left a job within the first 90 days, indicating a misalignment between the hiring brand and candidate.
• Turnover: Companies actively investing in their hiring brand can reduce turnover by as much as 28 percent.

Let Your Hiring Brand Lead the Way

In today’s talent wars, it’s your hiring brand versus your talent competitors’. Consider what your hiring brand says about your workplace, and how it aligns with employees’ perspectives of you as an employer.

From ‘Top Company to Work For’ awards to passionate employee testimonials and tenures exceeding the industry norm, MRINetwork firms are full of hiring brand gold. There is no better time to begin than now.

Get Started with Our Hiring Brand Scorecard

How does your — or your client’s — hiring brand measure up? Download our Hiring Brand Scorecard to take inventory of your current employer brand.

Keep in mind, this is a baseline, your hiring brand is always evolving. Regardless of where you are starting, we recommend considering the following next steps:

• Determine level of priority: How many people do you plan to hire in the next 12 to 18 months? How critical are those people to the success of your organization? If you’re making multiple hires or seeking leaders for key positions, a strategy around your firm hiring brand will require time, attention and resources in order to deliver impact.
• Scrutinize the competition: What are your competitors doing? How does your website, social media, About or Careers pages, etc. compare?
• Review your EVP: What’s missing from your Employee Value Proposition? Does what you offer an individual align with your culture and message about you as an employer?  What internal adjustments do you need to make as a business to offer a more desirable workplace and employee experience?
• Seek expert guidance: Schedule time to meet with your MRINetwork leaders, to discuss internal hiring strategies, your hiring brand and recruitment marketing program.
• Engage your team: Enlist your team for feedback, to gain a better understanding of your employer brand. Need help? Contact us for a worksheet to help facilitate conversations.