The Importance of Employer Branding in Recruitment & Retention

It’s not simply a buzzword you tack onto your organization’s to-do list. Employer brand is the very reputation you’re known for. It’s your mission, vision, purpose and personality. It’s how you bring people into your company — and even how you let them go. Your employer brand is the reason your employees show up every day and why top tech talent will even consider applying for your jobs.

Recently, we've seen some layoffs at high-profile tech companies but the broader IT talent market remains tight.

There are many factors driving this shortage:

• An aging workforce: More than 20% of Canadian working adults are nearing retirement and 19% of the total population is already aged 65 or older. That means fewer workers across all industries. 
• Growing demand for key IT skills: It’s a familiar story, but it bears repeating: there are more tech jobs than there are qualified people to do them. According to some estimates, Canadian employers might need to fill an additional 250,000 tech jobs by 2025 if they are to close the gap. This challenge is especially acute when you look at IT skills needed for cybersecurity and digital transformation efforts.  
• Canada’s tech brain drain: Tech talent is in such high demand that U.S./global tech firms are aggressively competing for high-quality Canadian workers. The resulting increase in salaries is hurting Canadian firms most of all.

While layoffs and agile workforce strategies, such as contractor staffing, help businesses weather economic storms, it doesn’t always benefit the people working for you — or your employer brand. How you handle those layoffs, onboard your contractors and motivate the rest of your team every day, can make or break your ability to rebound quickly when you’re ready to hire.

Role of employer branding in talent acquisition

You can’t control the economy or skyrocketing IT talent demand, but you can control your employer brand experience for potential candidates. Focusing on your employer brand among traditional candidates and potential contractors is the best way to attract more high-quality talent. This is especially true for companies that can’t afford to pay significantly above current market rates. 

Here’s how to leverage your employer brand and improve your ability to attract high-quality IT talent.

Get to know your audience. What do IT workers want?

Whether you’re trying to appeal to traditional candidates or contractors (hint: you should be appealing to both!), your first step should be to understand your audience.

What motivates them? Learn what tech workers really want from an employer. What kind of work environment appeals to them? You can get a lot of this information just by talking to your current IT staff about these topics. This process will help you fine tune your employer brand messaging to attract the IT talent you need. 

Have a large IT department to staff? Consider segmenting your audience to see if different parts of your messaging resonate more or less with different groups of IT workers. Pay attention to how and what motivates candidates within different generations or subsets of IT (e.g., pay v.s. development opportunities, etc.).  

Make sure your employer brand is authentic to who you are

Nothing kills a brand like false advertising. As you craft your employer brand and messaging, don’t forget to focus on what the IT function at your organization is actually like. What is it like to work there? Is it different from the rest of your organization?

Remember, each department in your company will tend to have its own subculture that is distinct from the broader whole. In our experience, this is especially true for your IT department. Make sure you’re not just using your broad, corporate-level employment branding to attract IT talent. Take time to validate your messaging and tone as being representative of your IT department. 

Ensure your staffing partners represent both your employer brand and recruitment strategy

Employers often skip this step but, if you use staffing partners to fill roles, make sure they understand your employer brand and know how to communicate that to candidates. Staffing partners are often the first touchpoint people have with your brand, and the first impression is a powerful one. Ensure they’re helping you stand out.

Not hiring right now? You’re still recruiting.

Even if you’re not in aggressive hiring mode today, now is the time to invest where you can in employer branding. 

Measure and improve the impact of your employer branding

Reputation can feel fluffy and nebulous. But employers can — and should — measure the strength of their reputation and keep tabs on ways to sustain or improve it. 

To measure your employer brand, establish a baseline for how candidates, employees and past employees feel about your company as a place to work. We’ve included a few ways to do that below. Once you have that baseline, what can you learn from it? Think about areas your brand is weak or getting negative feedback. Consider ways you can learn from that feedback, grow from it and gain a more positive reputation.

Collecting intelligence on your employer brand can get complex — but it doesn’t have to be. Start talking to candidates and employees about how you’re doing, early and often. Here are a few ways to collect that information and start quantifying where you are:

• Candidate NPS and surveys
• Employee surveys and engagement rates
• Reviews: Glassdoor, Indeed, Google, Facebook
• Employee referral rate
• Applicate rate
• Quality of your candidates
• Offer acceptance

Make your employer brand stand out in the talent marketplace

IT talent shortages aren’t going away. The demographic and economic factors are too strong to ignore. There are no easy fixes to this macro problem but there are things you can do right now to set you apart from your competition for talent. Focusing on your employer brand is a highly effective way to make your organization more attractive to top IT talent.

Once you’ve listened to your job candidates and employees, collected ratings and feedback, align your employer brand and messaging with your target audiences. Be clear about what you’re promising to IT employees and contractors. Make sure it’s an authentic reflection of your company and what workers can expect. Then work with in-house recruiters, hiring managers and staffing partners to make sure that your employer brand is reflected, from start to finish, across your candidate experience.

When partnering with an IT staffing agency, work together to ensure their process aligns with your brand promise and your candidates’ expectations. Precision is a key function for staffing firms. Take time to understand how they work and measure success, keep teams aligned and candidates engaged. 

Staffing agencies may vary in their approach or their secret sauce. But every staffing partner should bring to your process a reliable recipe for successful hiring outcomes. Learn what they are and how to evaluate your next staffing partner — explore three key elements of a strong staffing process.

If you have questions about how to leverage your employer brand to attract and retain top talent, reach out to our team.