If you’re struggling to drive traffic from job sites, your recruitment brand may be to blame. As an employer, you aren’t just branding and marketing a product to your customers. You’re also marketing your business to potential applicants. By building the right recruitment brand, you can attract and retain a better quality of workers.

What Is a Recruitment Brand? 

Your recruitment brand is essentially a kind of employer brand. Recruitment branding involves all the strategies your company uses to market and attract your job postings to potential applicants. It forms a major part of your employer brand. 

It’s important to note that your recruitment brand isn’t the same as your company brand, although there is a lot of overlap. A strong company brand can help your employer brand. In turn, this can help you attract potential applicants to your organization. 

The Benefits of Having a Strong Recruitment Brand

By building a strong recruitment brand, you can enjoy a few important benefits.

• Talent: With a strong recruitment brand, you can attract employees who match your culture and mission. This leads to a better quality of talent and a better fit.
• Retention: When workers are passionate about your mission and brand, it leads to better retention. Employees who are well-suited to their positions are more likely to remain at your company for a longer period of time.
• Recruitment Costs: If you have a strong recruitment brand, it’ll take less time and money to recruit the best workers. 
• Productivity: By attracting better workers who are more aligned with your mission, you can increase your productivity and profitability.
• Morale: Employees take pride in working for an amazing business. When you create a strong recruitment brand, it can impact your employee morale.

Top 10 Best Practices for Building a Recruitment Brand 

To start building your recruitment brand, use the following best practices and tips.

1. Audit Your Existing Brand 

To design your recruitment brand, you should start by auditing your existing brand. Your current customers and employees work with you for a reason. Your business may have an excellent reputation, a commitment to eco-friendly ingredients, a great work-life balance, or employee ownership options. 

Your existing brand is the best starting place. For your recruitment brand to resonate with potential employees, it must be authentic. People are naturally distrustful of any type of marketing strategy, and the only way to disarm that distrust is by creating an authentic strategy.

2. Host a Strategy Session With Organizational Leaders

To figure out your company’s brand, try getting your C-suite together for a brainstorming session. In a Mission to Grow podcast, Philip VanDusen, founder and CCO at Verhaal Brand Design, discussed the best way to host a strategy session. He says, “Take the senior management team and get away to a hotel suite and have a little powwow about where you are. Because you have to kind of assess where you are in order to establish what needs to be fixed and how to go forward.”

During the strategy session, you can look at your mission, values, and objectives. Then, determine how these attributes connect to your recruitment brand. 

3. Get Employee Feedback 

One of the best ways to understand what you have to offer workers is through employee and applicant feedback. Give workers a survey or sit down for some informal chats. Often, senior management is surprised to learn why employees are drawn to work for their organization. Besides simply looking for a higher salary, employees may be drawn to work-life balance, stability, inclusivity, and the ability to do what they do best.

In addition to surveying employees about why they work for you, you should also use the survey to get critical feedback. Ask workers and applicants how your company can do better to live up to its values and mission. 

4. Write an Employee Value Proposition

An employee value proposition is essentially the benefits, offerings, and values you can offer prospective workers. For instance, you may be a family-owned company or a business that has remote flexibility. Similarly, your mission may focus on saving the environment, finding a cure for cancer, or catalyzing the next technological advancement. All of these qualities are selling points and a part of your employee value proposition. 

5. Review Existing Policies for Alignment

Once you know what your employee value proposition and recruitment brand should be, you need to make sure your company’s policies are in alignment. You should take a look at your recruitment, onboarding, offboarding, and engagement processes. Then, make modifications or adopt new policies so that your HR procedures line up with your recruitment brand.

6. Build a Positive Hiring Process 

Right now, the existing hiring process has major drawbacks. When a prospective employee applies for a job, they are simply one of hundreds of applicants. Then, a software program recommends a handful of applicants for an interview. The remaining applicants never hear back at all. 

This entire process is confusing, tedious, and demoralizing. By adding transparency and communicating clearly with applicants, you can create a more positive hiring process. Even when someone isn’t hired for the role, having a positive experience with your company changes how they’ll deal with you as a customer and whether they recommend you to friends who might want to apply. 

7. Respond to Applicants

As a part of improving your hiring process, make it a point to respond to applicants. Instead of leaving them hanging, send an email with the hiring decision. You can also send out an update when the job posting closes so that applicants know that the job has been filled.

8. Educate Workers

Your existing workers play a major role in creating your company’s culture and recruitment brand. Once you’ve decided on the type of brand you want to have, you need to educate your existing employees. After you get their feedback and buy-in, they can help to bring your recruitment brand to life.

9. Incorporate Different Media Types Into Telling Your Story 

The methods you use for building a recruitment brand aren’t significantly different from the methods you’d use to brand and market your company. Depending on the type of applicants, you may want to use the following types of media to create your employer brand image. 

• Blog posts 
• Videos
• Advertising
• Interviews
• Career site
• Social media videos 
• Reviews and testimonials from your employees
• Public relations

10. Monitor Your Results

Once you’ve implemented your new recruitment branding strategy, track how successful it is. For instance, you can monitor the number of applicants you receive or how long new hires last at your company. Additionally, you can survey new hires and existing employees to see how effective your new brand strategy is.

Develop Your Company’s Recruitment Brand

With the right recruitment brand, you can recruit the best quality of employees to your company. Building a strong recruitment brand takes time. By collaborating with your senior management team and getting feedback from your workers, you can create an authentic, inspiring vision for your recruitment brand. 

If you’re ready to take the next step in building your recruitment brand, we can help. For more information, reach out to our team of small business HR and payroll experts today.