Employer Brand is one of the most crucial aspects of an organization. It is the backbone of the culture an organization follows. Employer Branding plays a significant contribution in maintaining the value the employers give to their employees. But before we dive into this interesting concept of the Corporate and Management World, let’s look at the true meaning of Employer Branding.

●   Employer Brand: Explained

1.    Employer Brand is the term commonly used to describe an organization’s reputation as an employer and its value proposition to its employees as opposed to its more general corporate brand reputation and value proposition to its customers.

2.    The term, ‘Employer Brand’ was first used in the early 1990s and has since become common and widely accepted by the global management and corporate community.

3.    A good Employer Brand describes the image of your organization as a great place to work in the mind of the current and future employees and key stakeholders in the external market.

The term, ‘Employer Brand’ was first publicly introduced to a management audience in 1990 and was defined by Simon Barrow, Chairman of People in Business, and Tim Ambler, Senior Fellow of London Business School in the journal of Brand Management of December 1996.

This academic paper was the first published attempt to test the application of brand management techniques to Human Resource Management. In this paper, Simon Barrow and Tim Ambler defined the Employer Brand as a package of functional economic and psychological benefits provided by employment and identified with the employing company.

In 2003, an Employer Brand Survey conducted by the Economist among a global panel of readers revealed a 61 per cent level of awareness of the term, ‘Employer Brand’ among HR professionals. The first book on Employer Brand was published in 2005 and the second in 2006.

●   Employer Brand: Purpose

1.    The art and science of Employer Branding are concerned with the attraction, engagement, and retention initiatives targeted at enhancing your company’s employer brand. The same way Customer Brand is used to define a product or service offer.

2.    Attracting and the acquisition of the best talents in the market and creating a good reputation of the organization as a place to work.

3.    A good Employer Brand leads to hiring the top talents, as reports suggest around 50% of the job-seeking candidates don’t even apply at organizations with a bad employer brand. Thus, a company might be missing out on great potential employees because of a bad employer brand.

●   Employer Branding: Process

1.    Consider your Overall Growth Strategy

There are several ways for a company to grow. Some of the ways are to grow (A) Organically, (B) Acquisition, or (C) A Blend of Both. It is important as understanding your growth path is going to impact the way one position themselves as an employer and the type of talent you need to attract.

2.    Research your Prospects and Competitors

Researching your candidates, prospects are responding to the marketplace and how they are making decisions and how your competitors are selling the same types of services and expertise that you are, helps in understanding how you need to be positioned to attract the top talent to set you apart.

3.    Developing a Strategy

After having an understanding of your growth path and how your prospective audience is going to respond and knowing the competitors, the step of developing a strategy comes in. This is all about knowing how you need to be positioned as an organization and employer to attract the right talent that’s going to lead you to that growth path.

4.    Tools to Communicate the Brand

Communicating the strategy you have created for an organization is important as it lets others know what your organization is truly about. This is the advertisement stage. Tools to communicate could be a website, templates, and marketing techniques and strategies.

5.    Launch the Brand

This isn’t about a big press release where you launch a brand or anything but launching the brand is something that happens over time that is proving and living the employer brand that you have just developed.

6.    Optimize for Visibility and Impact

This is the last step in building an employer brand. This is about getting your reputation out there, the word of who you are, and how your organization functions. It could be done through publishing, social media posts are means to help you get more visibility around your brand to be more impactful around the people you need to attract.

As an organization goes through the process of Employer Branding, the need for connection automatically arises and it’s required to be done to make your branding known out there. Connectivity is a huge function of the corporate world, and this is no exception that connection or connectivity is a major part of forming an Employer Brand as well.

●   Conclusion

Employee Brand or Employee Branding should be real; it can’t be based on something that doesn’t exist. One can’t just say who they are as an employer and reap the benefits from that, but one has to act like it. As Employer Branding comes from multiple factors, it becomes crucial to manage and prioritize it as one of the most major parts of an organization as it is what helps you set yourself apart from the other organizations. If you stand out from your competitors, you are more likely to acquire the top talent in the marketplace.