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With the ongoing workforce shortage, the employer brand is a key factor to recruit and retain competent staff for your business.
How can you recruit new staff with the requisite qualifications for the positions to be filled? How do you keep your current employees when there is a labour shortage and extensive competition?
Enterprise leaders must adapt to this new reality and take the volatility of human resources into consideration in their decision process.
The employer brand is more than an image
Using the employer brand is gaining momentum among Quebec enterprises and can be an efficient solution to offset some of the human resource issues they are facing.
Before developing an effective employer brand, your organization must first analyze its identity.
- What image does it project outside the organization?
- What is its intrinsic DNA?
- What sets the organization apart, makes it unique?
Once the identity has been defined, a marketing team will determine the most appropriate tools to promote and showcase it.
This approach makes it possible to target potential employees. The objective is not to please everyone, but rather to draw those workers whose profile meets your organization’s needs.
However, the employer brand is not just a hiring method. It must also be an integral part of the organization’s philosophy and the employee experience.
Finding the right profile is key
Traditionally, recruiting involved posting the greatest number of job openings on the greatest number of channels. This approach could be frustrating for both recruiters and potential employees.
The objective of using the employer brand is to make the organization attractive for the desired profiles. Better targeting makes staff recruiting and retention more effective. It helps to develop digital tools that are consistent with the brand and will work on their own, without the need for advertising. This increases your chances of attracting a steady stream of qualified candidates.
The employer brand must be authentic: the employer’s discourse must reflect the employees’ reality. This is why there must be a strong focus on internal communications. They ensure that employees are understood and shown consideration, while keeping them informed about the organization’s latest news.
From this point of view, what employees say carries a lot of weight. In this age of social media, information about negative experiences travels much faster than good news. Also, a job offer posted by the organization and shared by employees on their social media will have much better visibility, because, let’s face it, information shared by an organization’s employees inspires trust. It provides even more incentive for potential candidates to apply.
The interview shift
Lastly, recruiters must always keep in mind that it is now employees who have the upper hand. It is no longer employees who are interviewed so much as the organizations themselves, employees now have a lot of choice. It is therefore in an organization’s interest to be attractive.
The employer-brand approach can be much less costly than one might think, especially for small businesses that have the advantage of being flexible.
Our experts offer support services for all of the steps of this transition, from the first reflection to adopting the employer brand.