How to define and leverage your employer brand in a remote work world
Many organizations — particularly in the tech space — from Shopify, to Facebook, to Twitter, have announced that they will become a remote company for the rest of the year or even permanently.
What does this mean for talent acquisition? Well, a lot! But there are two implications we’d like to focus on today:
Employers that embrace remote work have access to a wider pool of candidates than ever before.
Recruiting teams are no longer competing solely against local hiring competitors, but also against best-in-class orgs from around the world.
This means, many companies will have to work harder to attract and retain qualified talent. They will need to do so by:
Delivering on a range of employer brand and employee experience initiatives to stand out to candidates and give them the information they need to decide if an organization is the right fit for them
Executing on recruitment marketing campaigns and creating careers content to build up brand awareness and convert qualified candidates
Providing a top-tier candidate experience that encourages the best talent to pick you over other options
In short, employer branding becomes more essential than ever in the new remote work world to attract and retain talent.
However, there’s a big challenge that emerges too when it comes to employer branding — how do you define and leverage your employer brand when your employees are no longer working in a shared space?
How to approach employer branding in a remote work world
First things first, it’s important to note that some things really don’t change when it comes to employer branding for a remote vs. in-office company.
For both types of organizations your employer brand really starts with defining your employee value proposition (EVP). Your EVP is the “what’s in it for me factor” that outlines in a creative way why candidates and employees should choose to join your organization. You can learn more about how to develop an EVP in this blog post: How to uncover your organization’s EVP in 7 steps.
Your EVP becomes the guiding star that you use across a range of internal and external touchpoints to promote your culture, attract candidates, and engage and retain employees.
However, what’s changed now is that even if you already have an EVP, you’re going to need to make adjustments to it if you’re moving to a remote-first approach. Remote companies will emphasize other factors in their EVPs, after all, than non-remote companies.
You see, your EVP is composed of a range of factors (see infographic at right), and many of these factors gain or lose importance depending on if you’re in office or not — so your EVP will need to reflect that.
At the end of the day though, your EVP is now more important than ever either way. Finding out how your company stands out in some of these areas and what’s appealing about your employee experience, will help to differentiate you from all of the organizations around the world that will now be going after the exact same talent as you. (Side note: this is why it’s also important to conduct a hiring competitor scan as part of your EVP development/refinement process, so you can ensure you’re not saying the same thing as everyone else).
Leveraging your employer brand for talent attraction and retention with remote talent
From there, once you’ve developed or refined your EVP, you’ll want to activate it internally (to create a positive experience and engage and retain employees) and externally (for talent attraction).
Internal activation
Whether you’re remote or in-office, you’ll activate your EVP internally in two key ways:
By ensuring your EVP is being communicated across employee touchpoints (think onboarding, L&D courses, leadership emails, town halls, etc.), and,
By reinforcing your EVP through employee activities alongside HR programs and policies.
Both of these activation approaches will involve close partnership with your internal communications and HR teams.
Essentially what you’re trying to do here is reinforce the key positive patterns that emerged from employee EVP research (ie. what employees value about working with you) so that these factors are strengthened and become an even more visible part of the employee experience over time. This is how you create a self-reinforcing EVP that contributes to a positive culture that keeps people sticking around.
If you’re a remote organization, you’ll need to work a little harder to do this because you won’t have in-office events and activities to reinforce your EVP. Instead, you might think about ways you can translate elements of your EVP into new digital experiences, activities and platforms to uphold elements of your EVP.
External activation
When it comes to activating your brand externally, remote and in-office organizations can continue to post on social media, create content for their career sites, and build out recruitment marketing campaigns. (If you’re just getting started, you can learn and access a free recruitment marketing campaign template here).
However, the difference now is the type of content will vary depending on whether you’re in office or not. After all, when employees are no longer in the office, you can’t walk around and take pictures at different office events, or ask someone to participate in a casual iPhone photo shoot
At the same time, creating content that showcases your employee experience and EVP will be more important than ever before in many ways, since candidates won’t be able to pick up on in-person cues about your culture and how you operate. They will need to learn this from the digital pieces you create and share with them instead.
This begs the questions, what type of content can you create with all remote employees?
The answer is employee generated content! This is content that’s produced by your employees and that they either tag on social or/and send to you to post to your company channels.
This type of content works well because it also aligns with the type of natural and authentic-feeling content that’s resonating right now and that people want to engage with (think: Instagram stories, live videos, Tiktok, etc.).
This will mean your team still needs to be involved to create a content calendar, provide instructions and source content from employees, come up with captions, add visual elements that brand the image, post on social, track performance, etc., but that some of the actual creation will reside with employees (ie. taking pictures or videos of themselves or their work environment, writing blogs, etc.).
Outside of the type of content you’ll be focused on, the other thing that will change now is your targeting criteria. If you’re now a remote organization, you’ll likely want to adjust the locations in your ad targeting to reach a broader geographic audience.
That being said, your recruitment marketing dollars will likely be going to waste if you make this too large of a segment. For example, you wouldn’t want to target all of the U.S., since there may not be many software developers in certain rural small towns. So you’ll probably want to do a bit of research to understand where pockets of talent are residing so you can ensure you’re targeting cities that are likely to deliver on the type of talent demographics that you need to hire.
If you partner with organizations like Glassdoor and Indeed, your account team may have valuable information on job markets that you can benefit from — so it’s certainly worth having a conversation with them before targeting your ads.
You can also use LinkedIn, Facebook, or other platforms’ ads campaign manager tools to better understand select hiring markets. You can do this by entering a city and talent segment into the campaign manager tool and seeing how many approximate people it predicts you can reach there.
We hope these tips are helpful as you begin to adjust your talent acquisition and employee experience strategies to respond to this new world of work. If you have questions about how to adjust your employer brand efforts to get a leg up in a post-COVID world, feel free to get in touch with our team. We’re always happy to chat all things employer brand and recruitment marketing!
About The Employer Brand Shop
The Employer Brand Shop is a boutique recruitment marketing and employer brand agency located in Kitchener, Canada. Our team helps organizations around the world attract and engage talent using creative marketing strategies.