A couple of weeks ago we had the pleasure of holding our first breakfast event. The event was focused around employer branding, and we had a great discussion on how different companies carry out their employer branding strategies. Everyone shared very eagerly and openly (although we wouldn’t really know if someone was holding on to a huge secret, would we?) and there was an air of excitement in the room once we had finished.

In this article, we’ll be sharing some of the main things we discussed, so everyone who couldn’t join us can still get something useful out of our discussion!

Employer Branding is Everyone’s Responsibility

The HR department is in charge of getting the right people in, so employer branding should naturally be their responsibility, right?

Wrong – employer branding is the responsibility of every single person working in an organization, whether it’s a tiny start-up or global giant. Think of it this way: the most talented people can pretty much pick and choose where they want to work.

If you want to work with these people, wouldn’t it be in your interest to showcase all the great things your company has to offer? Unless of course you’re not interested in working with the best, or you work at a company that you really don’t think is good (if it’s the latter, you can also have a look at our Career Page).

Your Employer Brand Stems From a Great Culture

Before getting head-over-heels excited about creating your employer brand, take a breath and think about your company culture – firstly, do you even have a defined company culture? If not, your first step should be to define your culture. After you have it defined, you can start showcasing!

When everyone within the organization knows what your company culture is like, it’s easy for them to share everything on and offline. Every company has a culture, but not all companies have it defined – a defined company culture will attract more of the people you want in your organization.

If you’re not sure where to start, by the way, our next breakfast event will be a discussion around company culture. Stay tuned for our next post-event blog with new insights, or even better- get in touch if you’d be interested in joining!

Where to Start?

If you’ve read this far, I’m hoping you’re actually interested in boosting your employer brand. In case you’re just starting to build a killer employer brand, I have just the thing for you – a list!

1. Start by thinking about your own needs: who do you want to attract, and why?

2. Spend some time to understand your target group. If the people you want to attract mainly spend their internet time on Stack Overflow, GitHub or the like, maybe you shouldn’t focus your resources on LinkedIn postings.

3. Focus on answering this question: what is your employer value proposition? In other words, why would people want to come to your company.

4. Put some objectives in place. E.g. “we want to have 200 new followers on LinkedIn by December 1st, 2016” or “we want to average 10 likes per blog post by the beginning of next quarter”.

5. Make sure everyone weighs in! This is crucial if you really want your employer brand to mean something.

6. To help everyone weigh in, make sure you create content your employees actually want to share. No one is interested in spending their time sharing boring, irrelevant articles (because they’ll get no likes on LinkedIn, and everybody enjoys a good like).

7. If you want to take it a step further, think about ways to involve your employees in content creation. As an easy example, here at Agile Search everyone writes blog posts, shares articles, and is involved in our social media posting (if you don’t believe me, see for yourself ).

Depending on the size of your organization you might want to scale this accordingly though, or you can end up with 200 people tweeting out drunk pictures from the company Christmas party. Unless that’s the employer brand you’re going for, in which case go nuts!

8. Lastly, make sure to keep executing and tracking your progress. With a systematic approach, it’s surprisingly simple to build and showcase your employer brand.

Practical Tips

There’s a whole array of tips we could list down, but I’ll limit it to just five now:

• Think about what represents your company. If you had to give an elevator pitch about your employer image, what would be the most essential thing to focus on?
• Employer branding can’t be forced, i.e. you cannot go around and tell people what to share or like if they don’t want to. That’s why I’m here at 5:30PM on a Friday – I just love writing blog posts, and there’s no place I’d rather be right now!
• Write some posts about the people within your organization. By doing this, you’ll allow potential applicants to start building a mental relationship with your employees even before meeting them.
• Showcase those values! You can do it through interviews, videos, or any other medium, but make sure to let everyone know what they are.
• Host some events for people who could be interested in joining. They can be small get-togethers or full-blown lollapaloozas, but the most important thing is to make people feel welcome, and for them to get to know you and get a feeling for what it would be like to work with you.

Employer Branding is NOT a Project!

This point, although at the end of the article, is extremely important. Too many people think they’ll just spend six months on building their employer brand, and then they’ll be done – but that’s not how it works.

In order to build a sustainable, genuine employer brand, you have to understand it needs to be something that’s incorporated into the structure of your organization.

It’s kind of like taking a shower; in the long run, it won’t help if you decide to shower every day for 2 hours, for a duration of six months. You need to do it on a regular basis, for as long as you live, or else you’ll stink.

In much the same way you need to work on employer branding on a regular basis, for as long as your company lives, or else you’ll stink.

What Now?

Even though we had a great discussion where everyone got a lot of actionable tips from each other, we were also left with a great question to which there’s no one right answer.

This question can act as a good mental exercise when thinking about how to build your employer brand, and can get you to think of some out-of-the-box ideas (that often aren’t as difficult to implement as we initially think). You can try it out by yourself, with your co-worker, team, or anyone else:

What would you do if you could do anything?

Written by: Saku Ruus & Sofia Pohls