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Every organization and company has a brand, and your marketing department or agency probably spends a lot of time and energy crafting the perfect ways to present it to the public. While organizations devote huge chunks of their yearly budget to ensure they present a good public image for potential clients or customers, many often overlook their employer brand. In other words, what do you, as an employer, look like to current, former, and potential workers? 

What is an Employer Brand?

Your organization’s brand tells the public who you are, what you stand for, and how you can help. Your employer brand should do the exact same thing internally. The first step to figuring out what that brand looks like is by taking stock of all the places where it might appear. 

Places like your organization’s social media pages, internal newsletters, and even the job postings you create can provide valuable insights into your employer brand. What commonalities do you notice? What kind of voice and tone do you use to communicate with employees? What values do you promote?

As you may have already noticed, your employer brand overlaps with your company culture, and that’s definitely something potential hires are interested in knowing about. Read reviews of your company on LinkedIn, or sites like Indeed and Glassdoor. These are great avenues to learn more about how you’re perceived, keeping in mind it may not be what you thought. 

Finally, ask yourself two important questions: Is the language you’ve discovered an accurate representation of your employer brand, and is it the brand you want employees to see? 

How to Develop a Strong Internal Brand

Why is developing your employer brand so important? By showing potential and current employees the “real you,” you’re communicating a part of your company culture and ideally attracting the kind of workers who you’ll actually want to work with and who will thrive in your organization. 

When it comes to developing your employer brand, think about what your audience wants to hear, and perhaps more importantly, what they don’t. For example, your employees probably aren’t interested in (re)hearing sales goals or even your company’s mission statement or values. While those are still important, they don’t provide that “peak behind the curtain.” There’s nothing that demonstrates who you organization and its leadership are as people. 

Let’s look at a specific example. What do some of your company’s core values look like in action? It’s all well and good to identify “teamwork” as a core value, but what are some solid examples you can point to? Maybe it’s sharing a successful sales initiative everyone had a part in, or formally recognizing an employee’s contributions to a particular project. The point is, if teamwork is part of your brand, show don’t tell. 

Employer Brand Storytelling

If you want to know how to promote your new employer brand, speaking with your marketing team might be a great place to start. A big part of marketing is the idea of brand storytelling—using the facts and experiences of your organization to present a clear and honest depiction of who you are in an engaging way. 

Instead of disseminating readily available information in a weekly email or team meeting, try getting personal. Spotlight different managers or supervisors from time to time. Sure, you can drop in fun little tidbits like random hobbies or who many dogs they own, but take it a step further. Communicate the ways these individuals add value to their employees’ lives. Explain why they’re passionate about their careers and your organization. 

Leverage the platforms you identified above to start honing your employer brand. Employees like to see engagement from their leadership. It could be as simple as a manager highlighting a recent victory on their personal Facebook or LinkedIn page, or perhaps sending a personal email to their team. Create a brand story that makes your employees feel good about where they work. Just like you want satisfied customers to advocate for your brand, you should also want employees to advocate for your employers.

Employee Engagement with CTR and isolved

Developing your employer brand is one of many aspects of fostering good employee engagement. With employee engagement tools from isolved and CTR, you can take command of every aspect of employee engagement. From learning management, performance management through isolved Mojo, and even full mobile optimization, you can enhance your employer brand and continue to make all of your humans happy.