When it comes to your employer brand, typically your challenge will fall into one of two categories. Lack of awareness, or misconceptions, of the brand.
If you have a Brand Awareness challenge, then talent literally doesn’t know who you are.
This can be frustrating for companies who feel they have great things to offer to their people and delivering a good employment experience.
Do you feel like you’re the world’s best kept secret. This is often the case with B2B businesses who don’t have the benefit of consumer brand awareness and can’t leverage their marketing efforts. Or for multi-brand businesses where the parent company, being brand that you take to market for talent is relatively known.
To address a brand awareness challenge, you need a strategy to get your brand in front of the right talent, more frequently. And you need the message to reach a broader section of your target talent. Doing so will help to build a sense of familiarity of your brand so that candidates get to know like and trust you.
You also need your message to cut through the noise in the market and helps to explain who you are and you want to be visible in the right channels on a consistent basis. So it needs to be creative, inspiring and differentiate you.
The goal is to become top of mind, or at least one of the brands considered when your target talent is considering a career change.
If you have a brand misconception problem this is different.
In this instance, talent knows who you are but has developed some beliefs about you as an employer that are not necessarily true.
Sometimes negative publicity about your business plays a role. In other cases having a strong consumer brand is a double-edged sword if your consumer brand doesn’t accurately reflect what it’s like to work inside your organisation.
Or, maybe your brand has traditionally had a very staid image. If you’ve evolved from being a slow moving public service organisation into the private sector where you’ve reinvented yourself as a fast-paced digital organisation, the legacy of your business may be holding you back from attracting the type of talent that you’re need.
To tackle brand misconceptions, showcase examples of things that you do that are the opposite of what people thing. One of the most powerful ways to do this is to adopt creative employee story-telling and harness your people as brand advocates to tell their stories.
Additionally consider how you can showcase the projects or your products that demonstrate innovation in your company.
Share the story of how you’ve evolved. Inspiring people around the vision of where you’re going can be a powerful motivator to have talent who want to be part of the journey and help enable change.
A solid EVP development process is the foundation to understanding whether you are dealing with brand awareness or misconception challenges. And your EVP becomes the platform for you to articulate the right messages to address them.