In today’s fiercely competitive talent landscape, an organisation’s reputation as an employer is more important than ever. Having a good employer branding is one of the most effective ways to attract talent. That is why you should always reassess your employer branding strategy from time to time, so that you can consistently attract the best candidates during recruitment.
According to the 2022 Randstad Employer Brand Research, more people are looking for jobs online. 1 in 4 respondents looked for jobs via job search portals and 37% used Google as a job search channel - in stark contrast to job seekers’ pre-pandemic preferences.
In 2019 and before the pandemic, 25% of respondents used Google as a job search channel. The pandemic has motivated job seekers to be more creative in their job search and explore every digital avenue available to find the latest job openings in Hong Kong SAR.
With more job seekers looking for jobs online, employers should focus on building an attractive employer brand on digital platforms to attract the best talent - especially since potential employees will decide whether they want to work for you after understanding your employer brand more.
This creates an especially compelling case for companies to broaden their reach across multiple touchpoints.To make your employer brand more attractive, employers should leverage technology and digital channels to share powerful employee stories, create an impactful brand experience and connect with their target audiences more effectively. An organisation’s brand also tends to have a halo effect on its overall business reputation.
On the other hand, a weak employer brand coupled with a haphazard recruitment process is a recipe for disaster. Poor hiring decisions cost companies a lot of time and money, which is bad news for the bottom line.
Maintaining your employer employer brand isn’t easy as technology continues to evolve at breakneck speed. While some employer brand-building activities require subject matter expertise and project management skills, there are many tasks that can be automated or facilitated by technology - and knowing which tools to use can be intensely confusing.
From understanding which technologies to use to familiarising yourself with candidate push and pull factors, there are myriad factors to consider when creating your employer branding strategy. Here are the top 5 digital platforms to build and monitor your employer brand.
1. recruitment marketing platforms
Today, data is our best friend - which is why a good recruitment marketing platform is one of the most impactful technologies for any employer. Typically, recruitment marketing data comes from many different sources including job ads and social media, which makes it difficult to collect, organise and analyse it all.
Having a recruitment marketing platform can simplify that process. Besides data collection and analysis, these digital tools and platforms usually come with an impressive range of features that can help manage your entire online recruitment process. These include maintaining your employer brand, building talent communities, fostering stronger candidate relationships, as well as enhancing messaging and communication efforts.
advantages of having a digital recruitment platform:
- Automatically scans for candidates
- Personalises your career site and landing pages
- Tracks where candidates are in the interview process
- Helps drive greater teamwork and collaboration through trackable communication and calendar integration
- Gives you dashboard access to useful analytics including data points across earned, paid and owned media
- Provides you with AI-powered recommendation engines that allow employers to prioritise candidates according to their skills and competencies
- Helps optimise campaigns and job descriptions through suggesting keywords or bids based on channel, location and occupation
Platforms such as Zoho Recruit, Workable and Jobvite help recruiters source and hire best-fit candidates with ease. Though subscribing to such platforms can be costly, the payoff is often worth it. Not only do these platforms optimise candidate search and data collection for you, job applicants will also have a much easier time connecting with the company through a seamless recruitment process - helping create a positive impression of your brand.
2. social media monitoring tools
A social media monitoring tool isn’t simply a tool that’s nice to have - it’s a necessity for your brand. Whether it’s your corporate brand on Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram, what you share and what’s being shared by others about your brand online should be carefully monitored.
In most cases, the first contact job seekers have with your business is through social media. Our Randstad Employer Brand Research found that 29% of job seekers are already using LinkedIn as a reliable job search channel.
You can fine-tune your employer branding strategy by using these platforms to interact with your target audience. By maintaining a high level of engagement and interactivity with your followers, you can create a unique reputation that differentiates you from your competitors.
Fortunately, many social media listening tools have minimal or no costs to implement. The key lies in investing time and resources to train employees to effectively use these tools to gather and disseminate data and recommendations. Hubspot, an inbound marketing and sales platform, allows you to build campaigns from scratch and track their success, conduct social listening, as well as keep an eye on the latest social conversations, trends, and brand mentions.
When it comes to measuring and tracking the employer brands of companies competing for the same talent you need, consider a platform such as HowSociable, which provides analytical data on any brand you want to track - yours, competitors, industry leaders or others. Sites such as BuzzSumo can track content relating to your organisation’s brand while Sprout Social offers a platform for leveraging employee advocacy to amplify your employer brand.
benefits of using a social media monitoring tool:
- Gives you access to a central library of multimedia assets to create eye-catching content
- Delivers social content and campaigns with cross-network scheduling
- Gets customised social insights with automated, presentation-ready reports
- Tracks campaign performance and respond quickly with personalised messages
3. digital assessment tools
Companies looking to evaluate their candidates’ skills-fit and personality-fit can consider making use of digital skills assessment tools.
Pymetrics is one such example of useful digital assessment tools, which is a form of aptitude testing that uses gamified behavioural assessments to assess the kinds of soft skills candidates have. The tool leverages proprietary AI and behavioural data models and it has been used by companies such as Randstad to evaluate how candidates problem-solve in hypothetical situations.
Employers can use the data from such tests not only to assess candidates’ fit for the positions they apply for, but to guide those who don’t manage to land their desired roles toward other jobs that are better-suited to their personality traits. For example, a candidate with high emotional intelligence may be more suited for a client-facing role. This helps open up more job opportunities for the candidate to explore within your organisation.
In short, digital skills assessment tools help to identify the best-fit talent during the recruitment process. Doing so not only helps to save time, it improves your accuracy in hiring quality candidates.
key features of a digital assessment tool:
- Makes the early stages of the recruitment process more fun and enjoyable for candidates
- Accurately identifies best-fit candidates - those who have high scores on their assessment typically have a higher correlation to passing in-person interviews
- Makes pre-screening much more efficient - rather than sourcing candidates simply from local platforms, you’re able to consider job applicants from anywhere in the world
However, it’s also worth noting that despite supplementing your recruitment strategy with additional data, digital assessments should not be the be-all and end-all of your recruitment process. While AI can help to speed up your candidate selection and use indicators and models to match jobseekers to your ideal candidate profile, it is not without its biases.
With every platform and technology comes its own advantages and disadvantages - and digital assessment tools are no exception.
For example, top performers are often rated subjectively at any company. If a particular employer is constantly showing more bias for men where promotions are concerned, then their attributes may be deemed more relevant and favourable by the software. People who didn’t grow up playing video games may be unfamiliar with the formats of such gamified assessments and could also fare more poorly on them.
4. employer review sites
You’ve implemented fresh changes to boost brand value, refine your recruitment processes and improve your candidate and employee experience. But how do you now determine if your employer branding strategy is performing well?
Employer review sites such as Glassdoor often offer authentic feedback from employees and candidates, where they will typically share their experiences openly and reveal what it’s like to work at or interview with a company. This will help you benchmark your company’s performance and allow you to intercept or address any potential issues before they tarnish your employer brand.
Today, candidates expect more from their employers and work. Our Brand Employer Research revealed that people prioritise non-monetary EVPs more than ever - in fact, “work-life balance” (60%) tied with “attractive salary and benefits” as the most important employee value proposition (EVP) in 2022. Candidates also want a financially healthy employer (49%), job security (48%), and good training opportunities (44%).
Due to today’s intense competition for talent, candidates are in a good position to ask for the benefits they want and would simply switch employers if their expectations aren’t met. Employers need to understand what candidates want in order to develop and launch initiatives that matter most to employees today.
Employer review sites allow you to track the performance of your organisation’s brand in real-time, rather than having to wait until the end of the year to review your efforts. The honest reviews left by candidates and alumni are an invaluable source of insights for HR and business leaders to help them better identify their strengths and gaps as an employer.
Companies looking to improve their employer branding strategy can leverage on such feedback to re-evaluate or update their existing talent, HR and compensation policies. It’s important to stay objective and analyse the worth of each review. When your employees advocate for your brand and share their positive experiences, it will attract job seekers who have similar career aspirations.
Analysing past employee reviews is incredibly important when you want to develop an effective employer brand and better understand how to provide a better employee experience for employees in future.
On the other hand, when it comes to managing negative reviews, HR leaders and employers should always make a concerted effort to reach out and provide comprehensive responses to address the issues raised, demonstrating with facts that the company is genuinely trying to drive positive change.
5. google business profile reviews
A company’s consumer brand has a significant impact on its reputation. For example, if a company receives hundreds of negative reviews from its customers on Google - that’s a red flag for potential candidates. It could be a sign that a company may not be investing as much as it should into building a positive candidate experience for talent. This will leave a negative impression on job seekers and potential employees, potentially tarnishing your organisation’s reputation.
Though this isn’t your typical digital recruitment channel, it has become increasingly important for employers to consider building their Google Business Profiles (GBP). Employers can actively gather a large amount of genuine, positive reviews from satisfied customers and display this feedback on their GBP.
When talent conducts research into the company they want to work for, their first point of contact is often a quick Google search - introducing an organic opportunity for companies to leverage Google’s immense scale, reach and visibility and brand for free.
Employees tend to feel proud working for companies that have good social standing and an excellent reputation, opposed to one that frequently receives criticism and negative feedback from disgruntled customers or clients. Perception is the co-pilot of reality, and good talent will care about how potential employers are being perceived, both by its employees and the general public.
manage your employer brand more effectively and refine your talent attraction process.
Whichever tools you choose to use for recruitment marketing, it’s important to keep the following factors in mind:
- Will this tool collect the data I need to make informed decisions?
- Can this tool help me organise reports for both myself and stakeholders?
- Which tool has the most intuitive and easy-to-use dashboards and analysis?
It’s natural to make adjustments to your employer branding strategy over time, whether that’s augmenting your recruitment process with technology or using social listening to give candidates the best possible experience.
The best way to ensure you’re hitting all the right notes is to assess whether the employee experience is satisfactory at your company. Ask for feedback from employees who have gone through your recruitment or onboarding programmes and find out if you have an effective and strong employer brand.
By knowing exactly what you need to attract and retain quality talent, you can build a strong and effective employer brand that strikes the best balance between candidate and employer expectations. Our Employer Brand Research provides you with the latest trends, observations and a clear vision on what candidates are looking for in today’s changing world of work.
Find out more about our specialised talent recruitment services and let us help you build a winning talent attraction strategy.