Employer branding: how to optimize your strategy online?

The employer brand refers to the overall state of a company’s online reputation in the eyes of its current and future employees and of all the company’s stakeholders: customers, former employees, collaborators, and so on. Working on your employer brand makes the company more attractive to everyone, and in particular makes hiring easier.

Defining your identity and communicating it effectively online reportedly makes it easier to hire and results in more effective employees. That matters when you consider that a failed recruitment is said to cost between 40,000 euros and 100,000 euros, according to Gwenaëlle Quénaon-Hervé, deputy managing director of the Regionsjob website.

In this context, how can you effectively optimize your employer brand online? Here are a few best practices for optimizing your employer brand using today’s internet practices.

Using today’s practices, define your identity internally to communicate it effectively externally

To manage your employer brand effectively, you need to define the company’s values internally and then showcase them.

For Fiona Burnett, art director at the digital agency Emperor, and Ingrid Brown, consultant at Emperor, translating a company’s vision, its goals, its employee strategy, its culture and its beliefs into an employer brand involves a few basic principles:

• To build an employer brand, the first and most important thing is to listen. Consulting employees is essential, and generally more effective than letting management define a company’s values.
• Next, values that are clear and easy to understand are more readily adopted and put into practice.
• Finally, education, dialogue and the application of these values are very important in order to avoid the old saying: “Do as I say, not as I do.”

Then, externally, the message must be consistent with what is actually experienced internally, so as not to create a sense of disconnect.

The Greatplacetowork.fr website, for example, aims to help leaders create their own company where it is good to work. “A great place to work is a place where you trust the people you work for, you have pride in what you do, and you enjoy the people you work with,” according to Robert Levering, co-founder of Great Place to Work. Employees are involved in this process.

Given the greater visibility of internal cultures, encourage and highlight reviews

Having clear values that are shared by all is also built through the greater visibility of internal cultures. Indeed, sites where employees rate companies are multiplying. After Meilleurs entreprise and Glassdoor, Viadeo has just opened a platform on the subject.

Company reviews page on the Glassdoor website

Tips for companies: these platforms can help companies improve. Sites where employees rate companies make it possible to gather feedback from staff. Negative reviews can highlight areas for improvement that might not have been reported internally. The new company rating platforms also allow employee ambassadors to give their message even greater reach. In that way, they offer more visibility.

The mindset of today’s generation: knowing how to communicate with them

Companies therefore need to be clear about their internal values and then know how to engage with candidates, who are particularly demanding of recruiters. What is the company’s culture? What role does training play? How will I be able to grow? These are all questions raised online by Generation Y, the famous digital natives born between 1980 and 1994. This generation is impervious to preformatted, old-school marketing messages that fail to adapt to new marketing practices. They are, on the other hand, particularly sensitive to the search for meaning and to social impact.

For Franck La Pinta, “employer brand” marketing manager at Société Générale, “candidates see themselves as a product. They seek to optimize their own value, their résumé.” In other words, their personal brand needs to be looked after!

Tips for companies: Companies must take this into account by developing a value proposition that goes beyond the job itself. And why not use today’s internet codes, in keeping with their brand image?

For Société Générale, a winning strategy on social media is to segment offers in order to build communities and profiles with homogeneous expectations, and not to hesitate to steer clear of “popular” social networks that would not be considered relevant for employer communication.

To test and pre-qualify candidates for a “specialized” target, the insurer Allianz launched a serious game, that is, a game that uses new technologies in an engaging way: Allianz Experience. Users can practice, for example, becoming a wealth management advisor. After various missions, the “boss” gives their level of satisfaction. The goal of this game is quite simply to recruit by using interactivity and the playful side of gaming.

In Allianz Experience, the “boss” Emmanuelle Federicci responds to the virtual candidate, “Jérémy”

Google’s role in recruitment: be bold, always be bold!

Displaying your values on the first page of Google is far from negligible. According to a 2014 study by CareerBuilder, candidates google the recruiter’s company in nearly 80% of cases. The image conveyed by the search engine that is by far the most widely used in France will influence the potential candidate. Google does provide direct and immediate access to information about companies.

In this context, how can companies gain better visibility and put across a message that reflects well on them?

Tips for companies: For Emily Andrews, writer at Communicate magazine, with Google “brands need to be bold in talking about the work they do and in discussing their corporate culture with external audiences. The importance of corporate culture among employees also helps improve the perception of the brand externally.” The goal is to attract potential candidates and stand out in the market.

The food brand Michel et Augustin thus earned itself a great showcase on the first page of Google for the query “Michel et Augustin” with its video “Does anyone know anyone who’s looking for a job?”. The links pointing to this video appear on the first page of Google for the query “Michel et Augustin”.

Results on the first page of Google for the query “Michel et Augustin”

With today’s web practices, the employer brand is therefore no longer the company’s alone, under the control of human resources (HR). It should no longer be worked on solely internally and disseminated in a top-down way. Companies must also take into account everyone’s reviews and actions, especially those of the stakeholders that will have an effect on recruitment.