Your company is “a great place to work.” It says so on your careers website.

That should be enough to attract talent. Right?

“Wrong,” says Melissa Kirtley, founder and owner of Proper I.D. Branding. “To attract talent, you need to get to the essence of your company and build a narrative around it.”

Melissa has over 15 years of experience in employer branding, employee communications, and engagement. “When I started my first gig in 2006, employer branding wasn’t really a job people had. When a company was looking to hire, someone in HR would just write a few job descriptions and create flyers for job fairs.

“Today, career experience is a product that companies are trying to sell. They’re looking to understand and market the entire employment cycle.”

The career or employee experience is the heart of employer branding. With today’s candidates’ market and consumerized workforce, a strong employer branding strategy is essential to attracting and retaining top talent.

Employer branding isn’t a fuzzy concept. It’s a process-based strategy with measurable ROI. Drawing on her hands-on experience, Melissa shared the basics of building an employer brand strategy:

1. What is employer branding and why is it important?
2. How do you discover or create your employee brand?
3. How do you promote your employee brand?

What is employer branding and why is it important?

Any company has three distinct brands:

1. Product brand is the customer-facing image and identity of the product or service that a company offers. This is the branding most people are familiar with.
2. Corporate brand is the company’s mission, vision, and culture as perceived by stockholders, analysts, other businesses, and clients.
3. Employer brand is a business’s reputation among current and prospective employees. It’s based on the employee experience at every stage of the employment cycle, from interviews to onboarding to promotions to leaving the company. Employer brand includes employees’ concerns such as pay and benefits, where they’ll work, is there room to grow, and all aspects of day-to-day work life.

Melissa stresses that these three brands aren’t independent of each other. They’re different facets of the same diamond. However, product branding tends to get the most attention. Marketing departments pour time and money into cultivating a strategic product brand while the other brands may be left to chance.

But they shouldn’t be. Employer and corporate brands impact a company’s bottom line just as much as the product brand does. A positive employer brand, for example:

1. Makes it more likely to attract top talent. Attracting talent with less effort streamlines the hiring process and saves money. LinkedIn Business estimates that a great employer brand reduces cost-per-hire by 50%.
2. Makes it easier to retain top talent. A well-planned, authentic employer brand helps companies hire not just top talent, but talent that’s tops for them. Once in the company, those “perfect-fit” employees are more likely to stay. And since new hires cost anywhere from $1000 to $5000, depending on the industry, less churn is more money in a company’s pocket.

3. Can also attract customers and business partners. A well-marketed employer brand will reach non-employees, too. Everyone prefers to do business in a positive, upbeat environment.

How do you discover or create your employee brand?

As Melissa explains to her clients, all companies have an employee brand. They may not know what it is. They may not like it. But it’s there.

The trick is to understand it and then tweak it if necessary.

How do you find it? You ask the experts. In this case, that’s your employees themselves.

• Send out internal surveys
• Search social media
• Read your online reviews

Speak to your top performers, recent hires, and employees whom you wish would have stayed. You’re working backward, starting with your target talent and discovering what does or would attract them to work for you.

Ask focused questions such as:

• What do they like about working for you?
• Why are they here?
• What are they getting at your company that they wouldn’t get elsewhere?
• What do they wish they had?

You want to discover what makes you special, to whom, and why. “There are a million things that make you great, but find the few that are unique,” explains Melissa.

Through this process, you narrow down your ideal employee profile and know why they would want to work for you. Then you can build an employer brand around that story.

Hubspot calls this your employer value proposition, and it’s the message telling what it’s like to work for your company. Once you have it, keep your employer value proposition consistent across all channels, such as your careers website, social media pages, and recruitment materials. It should also be consistent with your overall corporate brand.

It’s ok if this seems to reduce your talent pool. You’d rather focus on attracting five ideal job candidates than 20 ‘meh’ ones.

And it’s ok if the discovery process uncovered weak spots in your employer brand and company culture. This is a chance to fix them. But don’t try to fake it, warns Melissa. An employer brand must be 100% authentic, or your existing employees will intentionally or unintentionally torpedo it. Plus, there’s nothing worse than a new hire feeling disillusioned when the job doesn’t meet expectations.

How do you promote your employee brand?

Melissa sees two parts to promoting your employee brand.

1. Part one is publishing content. Job prospects should immediately find content that accurately portrays your brand. This is where your website and social media pages come in. Whether you want to emphasize your learning opportunities, diversity, voluntary benefits, or excellent onboarding, your selling points should be easy to find on your media. Company leaders can also publish correlating articles or blogs.

But positive content can also come from the bottom up. Collectively, your employees have an incredible reach. Encourage and enable employees to start conversations about your workplace.

“For example, if a company wants to attract more women, it can spotlight a female employee each week on its intranet. Once the content is there, ask employees to re-post on their social media with a designated hashtag. This type of organic content is unbelievably powerful.”

“Control your narrative to get the right people at the right time,” says Melissa.

2. Part two is a job candidate’s journey. When you go out to recruit, how do you talk to people, what is the interview process, what is the new hire experience? It must match up very, very authentically to your promoted message.

And as the new hire becomes a seasoned employee, the experience should continue to be positive and consistent. Your employees are your “internal customers” and focusing on them and their experience is crucial to your success. Employer brand spotlights and protects the human element that powers your business.

“Today, job candidates want to know what they’ll get out of a job beyond a paycheck. Your employee brand should both communicate and deliver on that promise,” concludes Melissa.