Is social media key to your employer brand?

Social media has had a dramatic impact on employer branding. Prior to the rise in social media an employer brand was just a veneer for companies, there was no vehicle to challenge or dispute its statements.

Social media is now an arsenal in the ‘War on Talent’. It is used to attract the best talent to your company, providing you have got your employer branding right. The external brand of a company must be reflected in the internal workings of the company - staff become the brand advocates as they live and breathe the values of their employer brand. Creating the right employer brand means you will attract the right people for your business.

A company can showcase their brand culture via social media. BPS World have a “Unique People First Culture”, empowering our people to deliver a great service and we invest heavily in education and training. This statement is clearly supported on social media through the presentation of apprentice’s video diaries on Facebook and employee reviews on Glassdoor.com. Due to the presence of social media employer branding is now a two-way communication and companies need to be aware of this and of the impact their brand has on their recruitment process and staff retention.

Brand consistency is essential for enhancing the employer brand. The brand message needs to be the same across all platforms in social media. What you state on your company website has to match up with how your brand advertises itself on other forums and how it is viewed elsewhere on social media.

Social media offers many opportunities to increase awareness of the brand and the key to success is to make the workplace more digital and more accessible to people which will result in more engagement from potential candidates. BPS World invests heavily in social media tools to project their brand out into the market place and have achieved great success with this; we were awarded LinkedIn's Top 25 Most Socially Engaged company in 2016.  In addition to Facebook and LinkedIn, building a page on sites like Glassdoor.com creates a forum for people to leave independent reviews, enhancing how the company brand and culture is portrayed online.

YouTube is only second to google as the most used search engine. A company video or ‘vlogs’ gives the viewer real insight to the workings of the company and immediately establishes the employer brand. Whether it’s an expensive professionally produced company video (click here to see an example) or employees recorded on an iPhone talking about their role and the company, (click here to see an example) the result is the same – an instant connection to the brand. To see an example of BPS World’s as experts in the global recruitment market take a look at our YouTube Channel. The videos support the company brand  and are our consistent with the content on all our social media sites.

However, an organisation must be aware of different employer brand approaches to different social media sites: an article which may have a more informal, personal insight to the company would be best posted on Facebook while a more professional article should be used on LinkedIn.

The use of social media opens up many opportunities to build and develop the employer brand and the smart employer will build this into their recruitment strategy.

Where do you think social media will go for your organisation?

For further information please contact Joanne Lea on joanne.lea@bps-world.com