In a market where there are more unemployed Americans than there are jobs openings, companies need to take extra steps to stand out from the crowd. A simple job posting and an About Us page on your website boasting innovation and a relaxed dress code aren’t going to cut it anymore. However, having a well-thought-out, engaging and genuine employer branding presence will make the difference.
How do you showcase your company culture in a way that makes you enticing to job prospects? By using content marketing tactics to create a strategy to attract, recruit and retain the type of candidates you’re looking for.
In this post, we’ve found five different companies using creative and effective marketing methods in their employer branding strategies. But first, let’s clear up some of the terminology:
What is Employer Branding?
Employer branding is the process of promoting the reputation of a company from the eyes of the employee. HR professionals and marketers can use content marketing tactics to showcase a company’s business identity as a high-quality place to work in order to attract and retain top talent.
What is the Employer Value Proposition?
An Employer Value Proposition is a statement of what makes your company unique as an employer, whether that’s its values, company culture, work process or benefits.
1. Salesforce
Salesforce is an integrated CRM platform used by marketing and sales teams in over 150,000 companies. While they’re number one in their field for customer relationship management software, they also have a very impressive employer branding presence featured on their site and social media accounts. Despite all the content created, their company philosophy can be boiled down to one idea: the Salesforce Ohana.
Salesforce Ohana
If you’ve seen Lilo & Stitch, you know that “ohana means family.” In this case, Salesforce defines the company’s intentionally formed family as “a deep-seated support system we nurture inside [their] company.” Content marketing tactics such as blogs, videos and on-page copy all join together like puzzle pieces to tell the story of this concept and to show that the phrase “Salesforce Ohana” isn’t all just talk.
On the Salesforce “About Us” page, they feature reasons to take pride in working for their company, videos about equality and women in tech, as well as photos and quotes from their team.
Additionally, on their Careers page, each department within the company has its own landing page, going into even more detail on Ohana. These pages include more quotes from real employees and a description on how their team contributes to the culture as a whole.
2. Hootsuite
The industry’s leading social media management platform, Hootsuite employs 1,500 people at 14 locations around the world. They have a careers blog hosted on Medium and it’s filled with posts spotlighting various employees. However, their strongest suit is most definitely their social media. (It just makes sense, right?)
Hootsuite: Life
Hootsuite’s strongest employer branding social media channels are LinkedIn and Instagram.
- LinkedIn: Hootsuite takes advantage of LinkedIn’s employer branding tool. The “Life” tab allows companies to share photos, spotlight employees and tell the full story of why they’re a great place to work. Hootsuite focuses on life at the company, testimonials and external articles written about them.
- Instagram: #hootsuitelife is used on all posts that feature company culture, and employees are encouraged to use the tag on their own photos they publish. This Instagram feed shows what daily life is like at the company (hello, cute doggies!), as well as more formal events (ahem, Justin Trudeau collabs).
3. Atlassian
While Atlassian may be an $800 million company with seven locations in places like Sydney, Amsterdam, Manila and New York City, they use employer branding tactics that companies of ANY size will find helpful and doable. Even though this software giant has 3,000 employees, the company culture and branding on their site make it feel like a tight-knit community of people with real personalities. Speaking of personality:
REAL company values
Atlassian makes it a point to broadcast what they truly stand for in their five core values. I appreciate how genuine these are and the wording, while not for all professionals, immediately paints a picture of the type of people who work for the company. The concepts aren’t groundbreaking (collaboration, honesty, customer centricity), but the verbiage makes all the difference.
4. Tala
Tala is an app that underwrites and disburses loans to people who live in underserved countries. A motto they use often is Radical Trust, meaning that they “believe in people from every background, within our company and around the world.” With such a global mission, Tala’s employer branding also reflects the spirit of purpose, innovation and progress.
Diversity and employer branding
When creating your employer branding strategy, marketers and HR professionals need to be careful to: one, not sell yourself as something you aren’t, and two, be aware of overusing buzzwords. It’s one thing to tout your commitment to creating a diverse environment, but potential applicants will notice if something doesn’t add up when they take a look at your staff page.
Tala published a Diversity & Equity Open Letter, an in-depth report on their company’s mission, their philosophy of “diversity and inclusion,” transparent stats on their demographic breakdown (both of hired employees as well as applicants) and their future commitments to pursuing their goal of being fully diverse.
5. DriveTime Automotive Group
DriveTime is a used car retailer that hires employees at many different levels — they have a home office, as well as 140+ retail locations and various operations and inspection centers. With this many different positions, the messaging (while it should share a common voice) is not one-size-fits-all.
A personalized employer branding strategy
The careers page on DriveTime’s website is divided into individual landing pages for each location, and in those pages, readers are shown a tailored view into each section of the business. These pages include a description of the culture at each location, perks and benefits, and a section that includes photos and quotes from real workers from each area.
Featuring bios and quotes from actual employees — and not just the leadership team — is a great way to use content to show — not tell — that you value people at all levels of the organization.
Where do you start?
As with any other marketing strategy, the first step to take when solidifying your employer branding is to identify your main objectives. Do you need to start from scratch and create an About and Careers page that show off your culture? Are you running out of quality applications? Or, do you have a somewhat, uh, unfavorable reputation on Glassdoor or other social media sites that needs to be remedied?
Whatever your objectives, content marketing can help your employer branding hit these goals.
