Employer branding is one of the most important strategies in recruiting today. Done right, and your employer brand can attract your ideal candidate personas and differentiate your employee value proposition from your talent competitors. Done wrong, and candidates won’t understand why they should choose to work for you.
To help you create a stand-out employer brand, we’ve pulled together the most popular resources on RallyRecruitmentMarketing.com with step-by-step guides, pro tips, videos and examples, contributed by expert practitioners in the Rally community.
Here’s the top 10 Rally Recruitment Marketing resources on how to build an authentic employer brand and differentiated employee value proposition.
Building an Employer Brand
1. Employer Branding Strategy: Why You Need One
What candidates see, think and feel about your company as a potential place to work is more important than ever before. These perceptions shape the reputation that your organization has among job seekers, and this reputation plays a significant role in how you’re able to attract and recruit talent as well as how you retain your employees. Employer branding is how you market your company as a great place to work and what makes you unique as an employer of choice. Even if you haven’t created a formal employer branding strategy, you already have an employer brand. To turn your employer brand into one of your sharpest and most effective recruiting tools and to help you frame the narrative, you’ll need leadership support to create a cohesive strategy that positions your company as an excellent place to work through the right channels with the right content and targeted to the right audiences.
This blog post will help you learn how to lay out the benefits of an employer branding strategy, teach you ways to gain leadership support and show you what should be included when you start developing an employer brand strategy for your organization.
Start with conducting research to craft your EVP and continue on to strategy and application.
2. 5 Employer Brand Launch Lessons from Rally Award Winners
Launching (or relaunching) an employer brand is one of the most visible projects that you’ll ever lead in Recruitment Marketing strategy. Fortunately, an effective launch strategy comes down to 5 areas:
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- the depth of research you conduct to uncover your Employee Value Proposition (EVP)
- the people you choose to feature your employer brand in action
- the training, support and incentives you provide to ensure company-wide adoption
- how easy you make it for candidates to see your employer brand, and
- how well you adjust to changing candidate priorities
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This blog post shares pro tips from the 2021 Rally Award winners for Best Employer Brand Launch: ADP, McGraw Hill and Lockheed Martin. These strategies and results of the Rally Award winners can inspire an award-winning employer brand launch of your own.
McGraw Hill placed their research-backed EVP pillars front and center for candidates to see when they visit their careers site.
3. The 3 Most Effective Ways to Differentiate Your Employer Brand
In a market filled with the same roles, benefits, values and messaging, how can employers truly stand out to today’s limited supply of top talent? Recruitment marketers are always trying to find a channel that their competitors don’t know about. But there are no secret channels – we all know about the same recruiting channels. The advantage goes to those who know how to attract and engage their talent audience through those channels.
In this blog post, Rally’s Lori Sylvia shows you how to differentiate yourself long-term through human-sounding messaging that conveys your employee experience, authentic content that covers topics candidates care about most and the ability to quickly adjust to what the data is telling you.
Defining Your Employee Value Proposition
4. How to Define Your Employee Value Proposition: The DIY Approach
If you want to take charge of your company’s employer brand, a good place to start is by defining your employee value proposition. Your EVP consists of the tangible and intangible rewards (i.e. the value) employees can expect in exchange for their time and effort working for your company. A clearly defined EVP serves as the basis for your employer brand strategy and gives you a framework for creating authentic, compelling Recruitment Marketing content.
Working with a consulting firm or recruitment marketing agency is one way to approach your EVP, but uncovering your EVP yourself may be easier than you think. Follow the steps in this blog post on how to design and activate your own employee value proposition.
5. An Expert Methodology for Defining (or Refining!) Your EVP
Defining an employee value proposition is an important first phase in building out your employer brand and understanding who you are as an organization. Your EVP communicates to candidates what they get out of the experience if they come to work specifically with you.
In this blog post, Debbie Celado shares her methodology that’s helped to uncover EVPs at a range of organizations where she’s worked. You can use Debbie’s approach as a starting point when defining or reworking your EVP through internal and external touchpoints.
6. Creating An Employee Value Proposition: A 5 Phase Guide (+Example Plan)
Defining your organization’s employee value proposition is no small feat. There are many stakeholders and stages required to get this work done right. Getting your employee value proposition defined is also vital because without knowing your employee value proposition, your content won’t resonate as well, and you won’t be able to build an effective employer brand that’s rooted in the reality of your employee’s everyday experiences.
In this blog post, Charlotte Jones shares her Employee Value Proposition Project Plan so that you can succeed in your next employee value proposition project.
7. How a Small Team Can Lead a Large-Scale EVP Activation Strategy
When it comes to employer branding initiatives, one of the most important is creating your employer value proposition. But once your EVP pillars and messaging are created, what happens then? It’s time to activate your EVP to ensure you clearly communicate your employer brand to candidates and internal employees.
In this blog post, Kumari Williams will show you what she learned about EVP through thinking about what comes next, pulling in activation help and her 3 main takeaways.
Using Employer Brand to Retain Top Talent
8. 3 Ways Your Employer Brand Can Re-Recruit Employees
Whether or not you have a formal employee value proposition in your organization, your employees are experiencing one—right now—whether you know it or not. While we may focus our employer branding efforts on talent attraction, it’s important to remember how important employer brand is to talent retention. How employers treat their employees, from mental health benefits to flexible remote work, remain as important as ever.
Learn from Charlotte Marshall on what to start doing to upgrade your EVP and three steps to re-recruit your workforce.
9. 10 Ways to Activate Your Employer Brand Internally
It’s not enough to just develop your employer brand or an EVP, you have to continually activate it by engaging with current employees. Too often organizations spend precious time, money and resources on developing their employer brand or an EVP, only for it to just sit there and not get leveraged properly to drive results. Not only that, but many organizations continue to focus on using their employer brand only to attract external talent, which is a major missed opportunity because your employer brand is also critical for engaging and retaining your current employee base too.
In this blog post, learn from Lori Sylvia, Charlotte Marshall and Cheyenne Sexton on what “employer brand activation” means, why it’s important and 10 ways to activate your employer brand.
10. 14 Employer Brand Opportunities in the Candidate and Employee Journey
Infusing your employer brand throughout the candidate experience and employee journey is not just good practice, it’s vital for attracting and retaining great talent. In addition, activating your employer brand internally helps to provide a positive and purposeful employee experience that keeps talent sticking around long term.
However, knowing how to bring your employer brand to life across your candidate and employee journey is often easier said than done. To help you make it happen, this blog post shares 14 opportunities to infuse your employer brand across every candidate and employee journey touchpoint.
Bonus!
8 Breakthrough Ideas in Employer Branding.
In this Rally Ideabook, 8 industry leaders teach you their breakthrough strategies so that your company can rise above the noise, be found even when candidates aren’t looking, stand out as a great place to work, and offer a compelling value proposition that attracts top talent.
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This list of the top 10 Rally resources on employer brand is just the beginning. Search for “employer brand” in the search bar at the top right of our website to discover even more resources on how to create a stand-out employer branding.
Thanks to all of the practitioners and companies who have shared their pro tips and advice to Rally so that you can learn how to attract and retain quality talent. You got this!
