Employer brand: developing a strategy for external and internal audiences

Ideally your employer brand strategy needs to be an octopus.  It needs to be able to touch multiple target audiences and do a range of different things.

Your employer brand strategy and message externally needs to attract passive talent through the content you share, the positioning of your leaders, the employee stories you tell as well as focusing on information that top talent in specific role families or industries want to know more about.

By doing that you can raise the brand awareness of your organisation which then spikes the interest of people who may not have known about you before or might not have considered your organisation as a potential employer.

It also needs to secure the active candidate who is out in the market looking at a number of options.  The messages around leadership, opportunities, future vision are critical for these candidates but what can be the deal maker or breaker for an active candidate is the recruitment experience.  You’re literally up against your competitors with how you manage the recruitment process, the message they hear from the minute they engage with your organisation through to hiring manger interviews and then potential offer.  Your employer brand message has to be consistent and compelling throughout the process or you’ll lose their trust.

Internally you have different audiences as well.  You have those who are highly engaged and they want to be part of the message and brand ambassadors.  These could be your high performers, people who love what they do and they’re in for the long haul – so you need to keep them engaged.

Then the 2^nd internal audience are people who aren’t engaged.  You either need to remind them of all the great things the organisation can do for them or share more around where the organisation is going and how they can be part of that journey.  It is possible to turn disengaged employees into engaged employees with the right strategies.  Forbes recently put the cost a disengaged employee at around $30k, so looking at how the organisation can make real change is always going to be worthwhile.

So when you’re looking at your employer brand strategy and recruitment marketing, segmenting your messages and really understanding who you’re talking to, what their drivers are and what’s important to them is what matters.