To earn their attention and respect of the great employees you haven't hired yet, you need as many ways as possible to engage them. High-quality future hires all have different preferences, and they’re at different stages of involvement with your brand. If someone just started to look for a new job, they'll want a different information about you than someone who has been eyeing your company for a long time. Some hires-to-be are visual learners, while others would prefer to read. Some have short attention spans, while others could dig through your content for hours. The best way to present your Employment Brand (and more importantly, connect with your audience) is to create a universe of different content.
Who Does It Right
Although this example isn’t specific to Employment Branding, it still shows just how many possibilities there are. Look at all of the different things casinos do to make money. They have table games, slots, video gambling, stores, restaurants, shows and even gas stations. If there’s a way to take your money, they utilize it. You’re not trying to earn your potential employees' winnings back, but you are trying to earn their attention and respect. With the power of word-of-mouth, that's almost as valuable.Build Your Stars, Planets and Galaxies
Observe your company’s (and industry’s) universe through a few different vantage points. You could examine the company as a straight-out-of-school, entry-level worker, a CEO or a seasoned middle manager. Pretend you’re an HR person looking for a job, or an IT gal or sales rep. Are you a lone wolf or a team player? Chances are, some of your future applicants will be one of those, and there will be plenty of the other type too. Whether it's through their backgrounds, work styles or skills, no two employees are the same. What your employees are like, what your office looks like, the policies your company has, your personal attitude, the clients you’ve worked with, the projects you’ve created, the teams you’ve been a part of and even the sports teams you root for are all different lenses/filters you could use to see how different people might perceive your employment brand. You don't need a piece of content for every single one, but a diversity of articles, photos, videos and other content will certainly help.Examples
Anything can be turned into multiple forms of content these days. Your content strategy should be like a mind map: anything can be related to anything else, and you can take many different approaches to the same things to get different results. For instance, How does your sales department operate vs. how does your marketing department operate? What skills are necessary to be a great customer service rep, and how do they compare to HR?How To Do It Star-by-Star
It will be a huge undertaking to share that many different pieces of content, but it’s something that you can be working on over time, instead of doing it all at once. Brainstorm the different themes you would want (how-to’s, profiles, jokes, press release-style posts, etc.), the formats of content you could use (text, audio, video, mixed media, infographics, pictures, memes), the departments in your company and the people you want involved in creating the content. Once you have those planned out, ask the participants to pick one thing from each other group and, and you have your first piece of content. For example, tell someone to create a how-to post involving text and an infographic about your marketing department. The story could be “How to Write a Post Company X’s Marketing Department Would be Proud Of” or “How To Survive A Day In Company X’s Marketing Wing” or “How To Think Of Something New To Write Every Day.”Organizing Your Universe
Use a spreadsheet or content marketing software to categorize the content you’ve created according to the criteria we mentioned above. With some simple sorting, you can find out how many pieces a specific employee wrote, or how many were about marketing, or how many infographics you have. Tying in some analytics, you can start to see trends about which types of posts your visitors interact with most. Create more of what works, or spend more time/effort on giving the lesser posts more of a push. If you know which types of visitors are engaging with one type of content or another, you can also change your publishing accordingly. (If you find sales leads like text, but potential recruits like video and you want more employees before more leads, then produce more video. If you want more customers, write more text posts.)The Unreachable (But Still Important) Goal
With the right approach, you can take your content strategy from the Big Bang all the way to a spread-out, growing complex universe of information, any of which could potentially help you attract great employees. Although you’ll never have a finished universe of content, you should try to create anything and everything involved with your industry. Our goal at CAREEREALISM has been to create a content universe of career advice. If this sounds like a daunting task, book an Employment Branding consultation at the link below. We’ve been creating & curating content for our whole existence, and our CEO spent almost two decades in HR hiring, firing and restructuring for other companies. We know what it takes to attract & hire great employees, and we can teach you how to do the same for as long as your content stars shine.Can't find the right talent? We can help!
Tired of waiting around for the perfect job candidate? Let us do the work for you! Learn how our Employment Branding services can help your company connect with the best job candidates and acquire top talent.
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