Articles 
There’s no doubt about it: your brand matters, and recruitment is no exception. In recent years, Employer Brand has evolved into the fastest growing area of recruiting, with 62 percent of global talent leaders saying Employer Brand is their top priority for 2016. As a key component of any forward-thinking organization’s hiring strategy, it’s no wonder that many companies are building dedicated employer brand teams to help them tell their brand narrative in engaging and creative new ways.
To help inspire your own efforts, here are five tips to boost your brand story, as well as your recruitment strategy, for maximum candidate engagement.
Career Sites That Go Beyond Application
Gone are the days of requirement-based job descriptions. If your organization wants to stand out, it needs a career site that goes beyond simple job listings. With the tagline “A unique perspective can change everything,” Deloitte’s Career Journey’s site showcases the stories of several employees. Each contains an image of the person and a headline like “Former luge team member turned cyber risk professional” or “Social guy – Former University of Notre Dame mascot – Tax professional.” The in-depth profiles humanize the corporation while also offering prospective candidates a behind-the-scenes look at the day-to-day lives of current employees.
Avature makes possible this kind of employer brand storytelling by offering the ability to configure multiple, fully-branded career sites with embedded multimedia content. These dynamic, interactive portals allow an organization to target different audience segments according to characteristics like experience level or professional interest. By personalizing these portals, users will be taken on a journey, from simply investigating a potential job offer to application and beyond, all while capturing their data for potential lead-nurturing purposes.
Video Content That Inspires Action
By 2019, video content is projected to make up of more than 80 percent of all web traffic, making it a crucial part of your recruitment marketing strategy and perhaps the most valuable area in which to focus your brand storytelling efforts. The visual medium is not only enticing for its widespread consumption, but also for its exciting narrative possibilities, allowing potential candidates a virtual window into life at your company. Plus, video is extremely SEO-friendly, increasing search visibility for any job postings and career sites that utilize it.
In short, there’s nothing like video to tell, or even reframe, your brand’s story. One such example is KPMG’s “Inspire confidence. Empower change” campaign, which hinged on a promotional video called “We Shape History.” This video highlighted dramatic stories about KPMG’s roles in famous historic events: from managing the Lend-Lease Act that helped defeat Nazi Germany to certifying the election of Nelson Mandela in South Africa in 1994.
Podcasts The Redefine Transparency
It’s no secret that podcasts can be a great way to showcase a company behind the scenes. Gimlet Media founders Alex Blumberg and Matthew Lieber took that one step further with their podcast “Start Up.” It chronicles their journey as a small company, describing fumbled pitches to venture capitalists, first successes as a company, first PR blunders, and beyond. This radical take on transparency not only resulted in an extremely popular podcast (number #1 on iTunes for several weeks), but also attracted many eager applicants who wanted to be part of such a scrappy, down-to-earth company.
Even if your company isn’t willing to commit to a full-on podcast, curated audio content can be an incredible tool for communicating your company culture. L’Oreal for example, has a channel on Soundcloud called, “L’Oreal Talent” which gives their employees the microphone (literally) and lets them illustrate what a day at work is truly like.
Social Media That Showcases Authenticity
Curated content has its benefits. But in the age of authenticity, your social media presence shouldn’t just be strong, but also seem genuine and spontaneous. While live videos and snapchat are obvious ways to demonstrate the “real feel” of your brand, the smart use of each social media platform can make interacting with your organization a more organic-feeling experience, even when the content is planned.
With Avature, you can embed landing pages and microsites in your company’s Facebook page to easily keep track of visits and registrations coming from each posting. This allows you to measure the success of your particular campaign and replicate the type of messaging that best resonates with its audience.
To engage your audience further, actively participate in both your organization’s Facebook pages as well as industry-related Facebook groups to encourage your audience to join in the conversation. A great example of this is AT&T, who uses the #LifeAtATT hashtag for employees to post funny moments from work, celebrate special occasions or work-related victories, and generally build a sense of community online.
Due to the rapid-fire type of communication favored on Twitter, the social media platform provides a variety of interesting options to share a brand story. Rather than simply publish promotional messages, brands such as L’Oreal, Virgin, and Johnson & Johnson have turned Twitter into a career development forum. For example, Johnson & Johnson’s career account acts as a dispenser of job-seeker wisdom, authored by both their internal talent acquisition team as well as popular career bloggers.
The more intimate, image-based social media platform is the perfect opportunity to share an inside glimpse of your offices, colleagues, internal events, and celebrations. Frequency is key here – posting too few photos can feel artificially curated. Make sure to post frequently and use appropriate hashtags to maximize customer engagement.
Automation That Maximizes In-Person Events
When organizations organize and attend in-person events, they usually focus the bulk of their efforts on the appearance of their booth and the quality of materials presented. But your brand story isn’t solely defined by the what and the how of your presentation, but also the little details of every interaction with your organization before, during, and after the event.
With Avature Recruiting Events Management, event organizers can maximize these interactions to communicate their brand: automating tailored pre-event communications to highlight key themes of an event, building custom microsites to register for talks, or even scheduling interviews for especially promising candidates. During the event, attendees have the option to snap a QR code to register their interest or “Text to Apply,” proving in the moment that the organization values their time even before they’ve applied. After an event, organizers can further nurture potential talent with industry-specific newsletters that communicate a part of a brand story to the audience most likely to be interested in it.
Novo Nordisk takes advantage of these Avature features and more with their extremely effective campus recruiting strategy. Starting with pre-event communications and maintaining continued contact for months afterward, Novo Nordisk keeps the next generation of talent engaged with the company’s brand story by developing mobile-optimized landing pages, thoughtful career web pages, and newsletters.
Want to learn more about how Avature solutions can help tell your recruitment brand story? Check out the related content below.
