Strategies for developing a strong employer brand and fostering a positive work culture
We buy, recommend, and stay loyal to brands we trust. An employer brand works the same way.
If your neighbour leans over the fence to ask ‘what’s it like working in your place?’, how would you answer? This matters because (a) talent is attracted through word-of-mouth channels, and (b) in a tight labour market applicants are also strongly influenced by organisational reputation.
Employer brands and values
The word ‘values’ is widely heard from organisations relating to the environment, society, and their workforce. Values are easy to broadcast, harder to live out in practice; how far language translates into action varies. Some organisations do the exact opposite of what they claim.
Part of the due diligence career coaches teach job hunters is spotting the difference between organisations who ‘spin’ reputational information, and those that make a reasonable effort to put values into practice. The gap is much easier to see than many organisations realise.
The negative experiences that often find their way onto sites like glassdoor.com are often around behaviours which feel inhuman, particularly the way organisations redefine jobs, restructure or ‘let go’ of staff, and the way sensitive decisions like this are communicated.
Organisations regularly undertake engagement surveys measuring job satisfaction, often forgetting that disgruntled workers pass their feelings on. Bad reviews travel further than positive comments. This doesn’t simply impact work culture, but the chances of attracting talented and motivated people.
Employer branding and recruitment
This brings us to the second key point about employer branding: the way any organisation treats job applicants has a big impact on whether talent is likely to walk in the door.
Any career coach will tell you that the picture is mixed. It’s become very common for candidates to receive no acknowledgement after an application, and no indication if they are rejected. Radio silence is the norm – even at times when someone is being moved, slowly, into a selection process. Delays encourage people to look elsewhere.
It takes time for organisations to respond to job applications, but not much time. A short, positive email saying ‘thanks but no thanks’ doesn’t take much organisation or effort.
Where candidates are invited deeper into selection processes, the strange irony in a world of talent shortages is how extended and convoluted these have become (multiple interview stages, different assessment events - with no real evidence that this improves the quality of hiring decisions). Candidates sometimes hear (or more likely don’t hear) that the employer has had a change of mind about role content or timing, or has decided to appoint internally.
What’s even more concerning is what feels like a growing trend to ‘ghost’ candidates - abruptly dropping all contact without any explanation and failing to respond to follow-up enquiries.
It’s important to realise how off-putting and confidence hammering this is. Silence isn’t neutral. If you apply for a role and hear nothing back at all, you fill that absence of information with all kinds of fears and assumptions about your CV, background and skills. Worse still, you tell all your friends how badly you were treated, and this becomes an ingrained part of an organisation’s reputation.
I advise candidates that the way that they behave in a selection process and around the job offer is taken as a reflection of their future work performance. The counterpart reality is also true. Any candidate who feels they have been treated unprofessionally in a hiring process may assume that everything promised about the organisational culture is suspect.
A modest proposal
What steps can organisations take to create a meaningful employer brand? Some pragmatic suggestions:
Communicate well and often, showing that your claimed organisation values live out in the promises you make and keep to your staff.
Be as transparent as you can be. Don’t overpromise, do overdeliver in the way you treat current and potential hires.
Take retention seriously, remembering that this requires attention to individual needs and career drivers.
Treat applicants with simple courtesy – treat them as you would potential investors, not passing strangers. Don’t drive the ghost train.
John Lees, career strategist and author of How to Get a Job You Love works with a wide range of employer organisations and business schools.
