Building Your Employer Brand: Key Strategies for Retaining Top Talent

Building your employer brand involves more than attracting talent to your workplace. It also requires an in-depth understanding of how to use social media and technology to attract talent and support employee engagement. Today, whether it’s workforce retention in the manufacturing industry or talent acquisition for corporate offices, this issue represents a major challenge in the workplace.

To expand on your efforts, you need to support employee advocacy; make your company’s culture interesting and welcoming; popularize and build your brand on social media; use AI for staffing and hiring; and support education outreach initiatives. These five key strategies will get you started.

1. Support Employee Advocacy

Supporting employee advocacy within your organization humanizes your employer brand and extends your influence in branding, advertising, marketing, staffing and hiring, and talent retention. By developing an advocacy program, you can encourage brand ambassadorship from your employees.

Creating an Advocacy Program

Creating an advocacy program involves:

• Identifying your employer brand in innovative terms.
• Focusing on service.
• Showing support for employee concerns and needs.
• Highlighting your employer brand as a leader in your field.
• Giving back to your community or the world through environmental sustainability or volunteer assignments.
• Developing a company culture that inspires trust, which is instrumental for staffing and hiring top talent — and for continued employee retention.

Do your employees love coming to work? Do they like sharing their work experiences? Answering these key questions will help you develop an employee advocacy program that enhances employee retention and helps you find top talent. Passionate employees can serve as indirect — yet powerful — staffing and hiring recruiters. They also make it possible for your staffing agency to find and recruit the best of the best employees.

You can easily develop an employee advocacy program today, thanks to social media. Using your employees’ perceptions of your brand can be helpful for workforce retention.

To begin, you need to establish goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). While employees of your company may post their impressions about work on social media, you still need to set defined goals for your program to track and analyze results.

Make it your goal to step up employee engagement by increasing brand awareness. Encourage employees to post their views of your employer brand and offerings. For example, if you plan to provide a new service, create shareable information — something that will excite and motivate employees to post the content.

Next, you need to focus on the key metrics, including:

• The top contributors, or which employees or teams share the most information on social media. What is the level of employee engagement?
• Your brand’s organic reach. How many people see employee-generated posts?
• Outside engagement. How many people comment on the content posted by employees?
• Traffic. How much traffic does employee engagement drive to your employer brand and site.

Finally, review how your employer advocacy initiatives affect your employer brand perception on social media.

Other Activities That Build Your Employer Brand

You can also improve your employer brand for employee retention and hiring purposes by taking these steps:

• Create testimonial videos and share them on your website and social media.
• Craft tweets that convey employee satisfaction or share career advancement opportunities.

By turning your best-performing employees into brand ambassadors, you will raise awareness about your organization and employer brand.

2. Turn Your Employer Brand Into a Talent Magnet

To become a talent magnet or increase talent retention, you must make your company’s culture inviting and interesting. Here are several ways to accomplish this goal:

• Establish a protocol that supports transparent management and leadership.
• Show appreciation to your employees regularly.
• Treat all your employees with respect and fairness.
• Encourage employee engagement, collaboration and communication.
• Build positive relationships in the workplace.
• Highlight company innovations.

If you make your workplace culture inviting and supportive, you cannot help but become a magnet for top talent.

3. Build a Popular Employer Brand on Social Media Accounts

To popularize your employer brand, you need to maintain a high-quality profile on your social media accounts — one that will allow you to connect with top talent and support your talent retention initiatives.

Studies reveal that candidates research company profiles before applying for jobs through a staffing agency online. It pays off, then, to use employee engagement and your employer brand to fuel interest in your company.

This requires starting meaningful conversations, tracking engagement, and positively taking part in social media activities.

4. Use AI for Staffing and Hiring

You can collaborate with your staffing agency by using artificial intelligence (AI) for staffing and hiring as well. Here are some ways automation can improve these processes:

• Automating the recruitment process.
• Screening and short-listing candidates.
• Scheduling and coordinating interviews.
• Supporting mobility of redeployment for workforce retention.
• Sourcing or reactivating the data on passive candidates.

Using the latest recruitment software or AI technologies can help you organize your HR activities for better workforce retention and employer brand awareness.

5. Develop Apprenticeship Programs and Internships

You can also develop your employer brand and increase talent retention by working with schools and colleges to develop apprenticeship programs and internships. An education outreach program gives students the initiative to find work in a job they love and helps you, as a company, maintain employee retention.

Final Thoughts

In the current digital climate, it pays to build your employer brand to attract top talent and increase employee retention. By becoming more proactive on social media and collaborating with a staffing agency, you can meet many of today’s HR challenges.

Because you have special staffing and hiring requirements, you need support from an expert in the staffing field. At Dover Staffing, we can help you with your unique HR needs. Contact us now to learn more about our services.

Image credits: Photo by Shurkin on Freepik.