#1
Cultivate an Engaging Brand Experience
Your brand — whether it is your personal brand as a recruiter, your agency’s brand or your brand as an employer — can be a crucial differentiating factor in a tech candidate's decision to proceed with the hiring process and ultimately accept a job offer.
A brand in this context is the collective experience a candidate has with you and/or your organization or agency — from outreach to employment. This includes visual representation (photos, logos), messaging, core values, company culture and much more. Now more than ever, building a pipeline of active and passive tech candidates requires a powerful brand story that is deliberate, data-driven and continually nurtured.
Historically, “employer brand” has only referred to the brand of the organization looking to hire and retain staff. However, the importance of brand has broadened to also include personal recruiter and agency brands. In short, your reputation, what you’re known for, and what you stand for, matters. Regardless of which brand you’re cultivating (personal/recruiter, employer or agency), it’s important to take the following three steps:
of tech professionals would not apply for a role at a company that offered them higher pay, but had a bad corporate and/or culture reputation.
Source: Dice Tech Sentiment Report
of global recruiting leaders believe employer brand significantly influences hiring success.
Source: Linkedin Report
1. Establish Your Brand Story
Reflecting on basic brand story elements like what it is you, your organization or agency are known for, what makes you unique and what your goals are will help you establish your brand and will serve as the foundation for executing your brand strategy.
Thoughtful reflection is important in this stage and asking for external perspective, for example, through a survey, can also provide valuable building blocks for your brand story. Understanding the essence of your brand will allow you to make stronger connections with the right talent.
2. Communicate Your Brand Effectively
Once you have determined your brand story and what you want to be known for, you’re ready to explore communicating those messages effectively through every relevant channel and interaction you have with candidates.
Understanding the candidate journey is incredibly important in this stage. The candidate journey generally follows this path: awareness of your brand, consideration of employment, experience and decision, and employee experience. Depending on the type of brand you’re optimizing for and the stage at which the candidate is, you’ll want to communicate your brand story in different ways for it to be most effective.
3. Measure the Success of Your Brand
Formalizing a plan for consistently monitoring your brand’s reputation is a key step in the branding process that will gain momentum the more you cultivate it and refine it. By regularly reviewing your efforts and optimizing your brand strategy, you’ll know you’re always taking the most effective actions toward cultivating an engaging brand experience.
Actions like completing a gap or competitive analysis, surveying employees and keeping tabs on metrics like cost per hire, time to hire, etc. are great practices to include in your regular measurement of success.
Bonus Tip: Develop Candidate Personas to Inform Everything Else
Candidate personas are the blueprint for a compelling employer brand. By deeply understanding your ideal candidates, you can tailor your messaging and employer value proposition to resonate powerfully with them.
Here's why candidate personas are so useful:
- Messaging that resonates: Know exactly who you're talking to when you create job postings, develop employment pages, and more. By crafting messages that speak directly to their needs, desires, and pain points, you'll cut through the noise and capture their attention.
- Optimized candidate experience: From career page content to interview processes, every touchpoint can be personalized to resonate with the right talent in the most engaging way.
- Strategy Improvement: Strong persona identification can be the first step in finding the best sourcing channels and recruitment strategies to reach your target audience effectively.
- Data-driven decisions: Use persona insights to measure the impact of your employer branding efforts and make informed adjustments.
- Stronger employer brand: By truly understanding your ideal candidates, you can build an employer brand that authentically reflects your company culture and values to the audience of tech professionals that are most valuable to you.
In essence, candidate personas are the key to unlocking the full potential of your employer brand. By investing time in creating detailed and accurate personas, you'll be well on your way to building a magnetic employer brand that attracts top talent.
Dice Employer Brand Solutions
If you’re looking for assistance building or communicating your employer brand, Dice can help. Dice Employer Brand solutions offer a multi-channel approach that allows you to target the best candidates for your open positions, and raise your brand awareness with an engaged, relevant audience. Plus, we can customize any and all of our solutions to fit your unique needs, wants and goals.
