Employer Branding and Employee Branding, two terms you have probably heard used interchangeably. Let's find out how the strategies actually differ and why it's important to work with both to strengthen your employer brand.
What is Employer Branding?
Employer branding is about strategically marketing your company and workplace in an attractive way to attract, recruit and retain top talent. An employer branding strategy is often based on an EVP, Employer Value Proposition, which highlights your clear, truthful and unique candidate offer.
By strategically and continuously targeting your candidate audience, you build and reinforce awareness of yourself as an employer. At the same time, you reach out to both active and passive candidates, so that when you post a vacancy, they are already engaged with the message and more likely to apply. In your employer branding advertisement you can highlight things like your culture, benefits, development opportunities, vision and much more.
Employer branding can help you build a positive image of your company as a whole, reach more potential candidates and, in the long term, reduce your recruitment costs.
3 benefits of working with Employer Branding:
- Benefit 1: Builds a strong employer brand
A strong positive image of you as a company and an employer helps you stand out among other employers. This creates the conditions for you to attract top candidates. - Benefit 2: Creates a continuous presence
In today's competitive candidate market, it is important to always be top-of-mind. Therefore, continuous Employer Branding advertising is very important. Through the advertising, you ensure that you are always reaching both active and passive candidates where they actually are. - Benefit 3: Reduces your recruitment costs
Employer branding allows you to be proactive in your recruitment strategy. When you advertise a vacant position, those top candidates are already aware of you as a company and workplace, which helps to increase the number of applications and faster appointments. Read more about Employer Branding.
What is Employee Branding?
Employee branding is about promoting your employees and their experiences of working for you, as well as creating a positive internal culture. By engaging your employees in your company's vision, mission, values, products or services, a strong sense of belonging is created between employee and workplace. Strategic Employee Branding can improve internal culture and ensure that your employees feel motivated and valued.
A positive effect of actively working with Employee Branding is that you create your best "brand ambassadors" - employees who spread your Employer Brand in their own networks. By actively promoting different employees on your social media, careers page or website, you can more easily attract the right candidates. Today's top candidates are increasingly more focused on finding a workplace that shares their values and opinions than the one that offers the highest salary or coolest benefits. Statistics also show that credibility increases by 3X when an employee talks about the workplace than when it comes from a manager.
A strong Employee Brand can help your employees choose to stay with the organization to a greater extent, but also to continue to be your ambassadors after they leave. The goal of Employee Branding is to make your employees feel proud and happy to work for you. This is to help attract new employees who want to be part of your workplace.
3 benefits of working with Employee Branding:
- Benefit 1: Creates a better candidate match
Engaged employees who are visible to the outside world can help you attract and hire top candidates more easily. By highlighting people in different professions and their daily lives, candidates can more easily form a picture of how they fit into your workplace. - Benefit 2: Increased engagement
A workplace where all employees feel part of something bigger creates a sense of community. When your employees share your values and vision, it contributes to a more positive work culture. - Benefit 3: Employees choose to stay longer
As the work culture improves and your employees feel engaged and motivated, a stronger connection to the workplace is created. This not only increases productivity, but also makes them choose to stay with you longer.
What is the difference between Employer Branding & Employee Branding?
Okay, now we know what Employer Branding is and what Employee Branding is – but what's the difference? The two strategies have a lot in common, but differ in one area in particular: external perspective and internal perspective.
Employer branding gives you the opportunity to create an attractive Employer Brand for people outside your organization. Here you can for example: highlight your company vision, your products or services and your employee benefits. Employee Branding shifts the focus from your brand and your organization to what happens inside your organization – your workplace and your employees. Employee Branding highlights the power of your employees to authentically and credibly communicate your Employer Brand.
The two strategies can work very well together to create an overall Employer Branding strategy where you focus on building your Employer Brand as well as promoting your employees. Employee Branding can easily be woven into your Employer Branding strategy through Employee Generated Content, ECG. This refers to content created by or about your employees, such as employee quotes, employee interviews, selfie videos or actual photos.
Two strategies - one goal
Employer Branding focuses on how your organization is perceived by people on the outside, while Employee Branding focuses on how your organization is perceived by your employees on the inside. By implementing both strategies, you can make sure to cover all aspects of how your employer brand is marketed.
