Employer Branding vs. Recruitment Marketing: How You Can Benefit From Both
Read on to gain a clear understanding of employer branding and recruitment marketing and how to use them together to best attract top talent.
As today’s job market is increasingly candidate-driven, companies need to put effort into cultivating a good reputation as a place to work.
When it comes to hiring, you may employ recruitment marketing to attract the right candidates but before that, your company’s employer brand needs to be defined. In this article, we explain the differences between employer branding and recruitment marketing, while highlighting the benefits of both.
How to build an employer brand
A bad reputation can increase hiring costs by at least 10%, therefore it is essential to manage your company’s image as an employer. Building a strong employer brand requires incorporating marketing in human resources and using the combined expertise.
First and foremost, to position your company as a great place to work, your employee value proposition (EVP) needs to be defined.
When formulating your employer branding strategy, think about the values you offer to your employees. Are you communicating them clearly to attract top talent but also to retain current employees?
Use your EVP to differentiate yourself from your competitors but make sure you deliver what you promise, otherwise talent retention will soon become a problem.
After having the EVP defined as the base, approach your employer branding from a strategic perspective:
- Define your target audiences (are you looking to address entry-level job seekers, job hoppers or seniors looking for a new challenge?)
- Build your messaging around the EVP and the target audience’s needs
- Choose the right platform and content strategy – evaluate where you can best reach your candidates and what KPIs are important to you (for example likes, comments, shares or time spent on reading a blog article about your company culture)
Employer branding benefits
By combining marketing and HR expertise, you ensure not only talent acquisition but also retaining the talented employees and boosting employee morale and engagement.
When you build an impactful employer brand, you use your organizational culture and the values you provide to your employees as a way to build a reputation. Translating the benefits of those intro metrics depends on what you choose to focus on: building a following, connecting with potential talents or receiving job applications in general?
Using social media for employer branding provides an easy way to calculate Return On Investment (ROI) plus a sure way to get noticed as 79% of job seekers use social media during their job search. You can run a branding campaign, communicating your EVP to your defined target audience and evaluate the results based on the campaign metrics.
In addition, it is possible to measure the benefits by looking at employee satisfaction, the enhanced quality of job applications and candidate experience in general as well as the reviews and ratings on employer review and career sites, such as Glassdoor or kununu.
What is recruitment marketing?
On the other hand, once you have your employer branding strategy in place, you might want to actively promote that you are searching for qualified candidates.
It is important to note that your employer brand will remain stable but your recruitment marketing strategies will vary depending on trends. You can test new channels and new content formats to see which performs the best with your target audience.
The goal of recruitment marketing is to reach the right candidates with the right message on the right channel in order to get them to apply. This can happen through social media presence, employee referrals, career opportunities posted on the company’s website or by running paid job campaigns and job postings.
How to use employer branding and recruitment marketing together
Both employer branding and recruitment marketing deal with your employer brand, your company’s reputation as a workplace but they approach it from different angles. Employer branding lays down the foundation, the strategy and messaging framework, while recruitment marketing promotes what has been defined.
Using one without the other is a recipe for disaster as they are interrelated but not interchangeable: you should not forget about the promotion aspect of your employer brand but you also should not promote it without having a clear EVP and candidate persona in mind.
It is best to first define your employer branding strategy before moving on to recruitment marketing efforts to ensure attracting high potentials.
Let RDB be your partner in building an impactful employer brand!
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