Get Ahead of Your Competition With This Simple Idea

Midsized companies know that when sales prospects have a positive perception of the company it makes selling faster and easier. The same thinking applies to prospective employees and a company’s employer brand. Employer brand is your company’s image and reputation with prospective candidates, current employees, and the general public. Seventy-nine percent of midsized company executives believe that having a good employer brand is essential to their ability to attract top talent.

Small companies may hire so infrequently that it isn’t economical to spend on their employer brand. But for emerging midsized companies, that kind of brand-building will definitely contribute to growth. Human capital management like this is generally for mid-sized business. Midsized organizations with strong employer brands capture better talent, and thus report significantly higher average revenue and recruiting success than their counterparts.

How to shape and promote your employer brand is a topic worthy of its own book. For our purposes, let’s assume cultivating a strong employer brand includes how the company and its employees create a culture that makes everyone more successful. To activate your employer brand, you must live it, then push it out into the community.

Ascent Environmental uses its employer brand as its primary recruiting tool. The Sacramento, California- headquartered company positions itself as an expert in the environmental service industry by having leadership and other staff speak at conferences, lead trainings, and write articles for industry publications. The goal is to attract like-minded individuals who would want to work alongside acknowledged experts and eventually become thought leaders themselves. Ascent’s brand has thought leadership at its core.

From 2010 to 2017, the firm got enough employment inquiries from its employer brand efforts to increase its workforce from five to 70 people with minimal recruiting effort. It’s only been in the past few years that the firm added other recruiting best practices to fill a few hard-to-find leadership positions. Even so, it still doesn’t use outside recruiters.
Once you envision your employer brand, you must live it. Walk the talk; live your values; honor your promises. Employer brand isn’t marketing-speak. New hires, like new customers, can quickly detect empty boasts. They’ll leave. They’ll talk. And so much for your employer brand.

Once you have established your employer brand, let your marketplace know about it. Use your website, and specifically your careers page. Run video testimonials from current employees. Talk it up at industry conferences, colleges, or other places where you recruit. Better employee recruiting as a business growth driver.

Property management company HNN Associates is a good example of a company that lives its employer brand. HNN Associates is a subsidiary of DevCo, a privately held real estate investment company in Bellevue, Washington. Part of DevCo and HNN Associates’ stated mission is to build relationships with the community and give back. To that end, HNN regularly participates in local community efforts to provide shelter for homeless families. HNN gives employees 16 hours a year of paid leave time for volunteer work and offers its personnel a 20% housing discount. “I like the fact that they pay you for it so we can all donate our time and help the community out,” says Chris, an HNN groundskeeper.

As with building a customer brand, building an employer brand requires taking a long-term view and investing resources with the expectation that results will not come immediately. That’s okay. Some things take time. Some things reward that time. A company’s employer brand dovetails with its customer brand, as the two are halves of the same whole and they support each other.