.png?width=200&height=50&name=Untitled%20design%20(21).png "Untitled design (21)")
Presenting and meeting with over 100 experts and professionals in the employer branding and recruitment marketing space across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth has been an incredibly enlightening experience.
These interactions have provided invaluable insights, highlighting the critical importance of strategic planning, audience understanding (personas), employee storytelling, and demonstrating ROI in our field. Here are the key takeaways from our discussions on four pivotal topics.
.jpg?width=488&height=366&name=IMG_5285%20(1).jpg)
1. Translate EVP Themes into Meaningful Communications
Understanding EVP
An Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is more than just a buzzword; it's the core of what makes your company an attractive workplace. However, having a strong EVP is not enough. It needs to be communicated effectively to resonate with potential and current employees.
Strategic Planning
Creating a strategic plan to translate EVP themes into meaningful communications involves several steps:- Assessment and Alignment: Ensure that the EVP is aligned with the company's overall mission and values.
- Message Development: Develop clear, consistent messages that reflect the EVP and are tailored to different stages of the employee lifecycle.
- Channel Selection: Choose the right communication channels (social media, career site, intranet) to reach your audience effectively.
- Implementation and Review: Regularly review and refine the communication strategy based on feedback and engagement metrics.
Key Insights
One major insight was the importance of authenticity. Employees and candidates can quickly discern when messages are not genuine. Therefore, involving employees in crafting and delivering these messages can significantly build trust.
2. Identify Your Audience and Design Targeted Content
Know Your Audience
Understanding your audience is crucial in designing targeted content that resonates. This means going beyond demographic data and diving into psychographics – what motivates your audience, what are their interests and pain points?
Segmentation
Audience segmentation allows for a more personalised and relevant content strategy. For instance, the way you communicate with recent graduates will differ from how you engage with seasoned professionals.
Content Design
- Personalisation: Tailor content to specific audience segments and consider crafting multi-gen personas.
- Value-Driven: Ensure the content adds value and addresses the audience's needs or challenges.
- Engagement-Oriented: Use interactive and engaging formats such as infographics, polls and videos — did you know that users typically retain 95% of the information presented in a video, but they only retain 10% when they read it in text-based content?
Key Insights
During my discussions, it became clear that many were excited to create specific personas for each generation (primarily Millenials and Gen-Z) to resonate more closely with their target talent and their preferences. This multi-gen approach allows for more precise targeting and content customisation, leading to higher engagement rates.
3. Design Collections of Employee Stories that Inspire and Engage Candidates
The Power of Stories
Employee stories are the most powerful way to showcase your company's culture and values. They humanise your brand and provide authentic insights into the employee experience.
Story Collection and Curation
- Diverse Perspectives: Include stories from employees across different departments, levels, and backgrounds to provide a holistic view of the company.
- Authentic Voices: Encourage employees to share their stories in their own words and voices utilising question prompts not scripts.
- Strategic Placement: Feature these stories on your careers page, social media, and email communications to improve the candidate experience.
Key Insights
One significant insight was the impact of visual storytelling, not just through a single video but through a collection of videos that highlight various perspectives within an organisation (e.g., company values, career progression, job families, etc.). Incorporating video into your company-wide employee story strategy can significantly enhance appeal and engagement. Additionally, providing a platform for employees to share their stories voluntarily on social media, rather than through a scripted process, tends to yield more genuine responses and is crucial for attracting higher-quality applications.
4. Demonstrate the ROI of Employer Brand and Recruitment Marketing to Stakeholders
Measuring ROI
Demonstrating the ROI of employer branding and recruitment marketing efforts is crucial for gaining stakeholder buy-in and continued investment. This involves setting clear objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs).
Metrics to Track
- Applications, aligned to your Employer Brand, quality increases
- Conversion, higher offer acceptance rates
- Time to Fill open positions drop
- Empty Seat costs decrease
- Referrals & advocacy increase
- Retention, incoming staff better aligned to the mission
Reporting and Communication
Communicate the results and impact of your efforts to stakeholders regularly through detailed reports and presentations. Highlight successes, areas for improvement, and the overall impact on the company's talent acquisition and retention goals.
Key Insights
Leverage the data from Talent Acquisition by consulting your Talent Ops Manager or Head of Talent Acquisition to identify optimisation opportunities through employer branding and recruitment marketing activities. By combining quantitative data with qualitative success stories, you can craft a compelling narrative that highlights both the tangible and intangible benefits of your initiatives.
A huge shout-out to TQ Solutions for inviting VideoMyJob to be part of this amazing journey. We met some incredible Talent Attraction folks and had a blast along the way. Chatting with over 100 professionals in the employer brand and recruitment marketing space across four major Australian cities gave us some fantastic insights into the best practices and strategies out there.
From turning EVP themes into meaningful communications to proving ROI, these experiences highlighted how crucial authenticity, knowing your audience, engaging storytelling, and data-driven decision-making are. By applying these insights, organisations can really boost their employer branding efforts and do a better job of attracting and keeping top talent.
