Build Awareness for Your Brand—and Jumpstart Your Recruitment and Hiring

You’ve got several open headcounts and have been promoting those roles everywhere. Even so, you aren’t getting the online traffic you’d anticipated – and you’re seeing competitive businesses in your market scoop up top talent. 

Especially for startups or companies new to a market, low brand awareness could be a potential recruitment hurdle. But, by tapping into your consumer branding – specifically, your mission, vision and what customers have to say – you can begin building a robust employer brand quickly and, with that, increase engagement, consideration and applications. 

Start here: harness the voice of the consumer 

While potential candidates may not know a lot about your business, your most enthusiastic consumers, clients or users do – and that consumer branding is often a good jumping-off point for efficiently building your employer brand.

To get started, look at your internal north stars – what your brand does particularly well – and flesh out from there. These are your organisational reasons to believe in your company and, should a new employee join your business, they, too, will wind up rallying around these core messages and pillars. 

From there, tap into the voice of the customer. 

• What are consumers saying about your business, products and services?
  
• What’s behind your positive brand sentiment?
  
• What makes them buy into your brand promise – and what keeps them coming back? 

In many cases, you want your employees to believe in your product and identify with the mission – in other words, to understand what’s unique about your organisation and leverage that to best promote your firm to future employees. 

Next, sync with employee priorities and experiences 

Beyond that, it’s important to understand your market-specific conditions and what top talent wants right now. Especially now, those priorities continue to shift and evolve. Now, for example, 87% of people want hybrid work and 60% are looking for career advancement as part of their job offer. If you’re clear on what’s important to your core employee audience, bring those benefits and opportunities forward in job posts. 

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What jobseekers REALLY want

As you’re assessing and refining your employer brand, consider what jobseekers want right now – and if you’re offering these or other equally compelling benefits that differentiate you from the competition.

• 64% say they want clear hybrid working guidelines when considering a new job 
• 63% think employers need to offer home office equipment 
• 60% are looking for career advancement

Source: O.C. Tanner Global Culture Report 2022.

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Then, promote this social proof to employees and jobseekers

With your customer insights and employee-first offerings built up, the last step is to promote your message to jobseekers.

In an increasingly competitive market, reputation matters. Today, it’s essential that organisations focus on their employer brand and, specifically, promote a dynamic, authentic story that resonates with both prospective and current employees. Anchored by customer and employee experiences and opportunities built around what talent wants and needs right now, you’ll build a stronger brand reputation – and strong employer branding – that proactively attracts potential candidates.

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Reputation matters

71% of jobseekers in the UK agree that it has a significant impact on their decision of whether or not to accept a job offer.

Source: Indeed survey, n=750.

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Together, these three steps can help you build out a dynamic employer brand that, even for new companies or companies new to a particular market, help drive candidate engagement and consideration – and, ultimately, can help your business compete with well-established, well-regarded enterprises.