Four pillars for building a strong employer brand

In today’s increasingly competitive labour market, building an employer branding is key, not just for attracting new talent, but also for retaining existing talent. Somaya El Sherbini, a partner at Egypt-based consulting firm RightFoot, shares how marketers and recruiters can develop a differentiated employer brand. 

Employer branding is how organisations intentionally build a reputation as an employer of choice. Becoming a talent magnet, and attracting external talent who want to be associated with this brand. With talent management a top three priority of CEO’s globally, employer branding is nowadays a key area of attention for HR directors and management. 

In parallel, employer branding is an effective tool for organisations to build their employee engagement. Employee engagement is the passion and excitement of being associated with a brand and accordingly an organisation.

Employee engagement is the broader sense of belonging, different from employee satisfaction, which is driven on an individual basis by the job, manager, team and context. When employee engagement is high, then it drives passion for the job, commitment to the organisation and the desire to go the extra mile.

International research from Gallup has shown that employee engagement is directly linked to productivity, which in turn is linked to the bottom line of organizations. Organisations with engaged employees can outperform their lower performing peers by up to 200%.

Employer branding model

So how can employers build an employer brand? At RightFoot, we use a model built on four key pillars: 

Tell your story

• Review the career site and build a social media plan
• Deploy an attractive well-placed career site
• Build engagement on the career site
• Execute activities that leverage your target audience 

Pro-active talent pipelining

• Identify the number and types of roles to be hired in a given timeframe
• Build simple and attractive job postings for roles required
• Use the job profiles to describe your company culture and values
• Build a detailed 'activity plan' for the year 

Build engagement

• Share the special DNA of your company with candidates
• Leverage your employees and leaders as brand ambassadors of the brand
• Communicate business priorities in a timely manner across the different tiers of the organisation

Empower employees

• Build an onboarding framework
• Grow career planning and talent growth options that boost retention

Somaya El Sherbini is the co-founder of human resources consulting firm RightFoot and passionate about helping organisations focus on their core – their people. She previously worked over a decade at Microsoft.