Your Employer Brand is Controlled By Your Employees
Your employer brand is important. It determines how candidates perceive your company. Ultimately, the best candidates will ask themselves, “Do I want to work there?” Passive candidates have to be encouraged to apply for your job openings, and your employer brand helps entice them. Just look at what Etsy does to stay open, authentic and provide an interesting experience on their site for potential candidates.
But, do you really control your own employer brand?
The simple answer is: to a degree.
Julian and Shannon make the excellent point that it’s really your employees and how they talk about your company that creates and controls your employer brand.
They use the term, “a river of reputation”, which is absolutely fantastic. Through all manner of online tools - Twitter, blogging, tumblr, micro-blogging, social networking, social media, etc. - your employees are talking about you. They’re creating a perception of your company, they’re developing its reputation.
You can’t really control that. But, you can embrace it. Julian and Shannon put together a slideshow online as a quick demonstration of how a river of reputation is created, and how it affects your employer brand.
The two most important points they make are as follows:
- Your Employer Brand has been de-centralized into a river of continuous data streams.
- Aggregate the data streams to create a ‘Career Channel’ full of the real content candidates care about.
Aggregating the data streams is key. But it’s also a somewhat scary proposition, to pull together everything that your employees are saying and present it in one neat package to candidates. What if they’re saying nasty things? What if it’s inappropriate? What if it’s a different representation than our corporate brand?
Remember: They’re saying these things whether you aggregate them or not. And any top candidate can easily use a search engine to find and track these data streams. You should expect them to.
When you realize employees are talking about you, and when you realize they’re the ones creating the reputation and employer brand, you can start to use the content they create to your advantage. You can regain a manner of control over the de-centralized data streams and give candidates what they need to see in order to make the right decisions about you as a great employer.
[…] Your brand is controlled by your employees. They’re the ones that are chatting about you through a variety of de-centralized streams: blogs, micro-blogging, instant message, Facebook, social networks, etc. Your job as an employer is to gather all of that data and present it in a useful way to potential candidates…unless your employees aren’t saying anything that’s particularly nice, and then you have a whole other problem to deal with. […]