Finding the perfect candidate to fill your open position is no easy task. Luckily, there are ways to get highly qualified applicants to come to you. An attractive and informative career site is a great starting point, but you’ll need more than that to consistently source and hire the best talent.

An employer branding strategy can help you develop a focused process for attracting talent to your company. Employer branding considers everything that might influence how both internal and external candidates feel about your company, from the content of your job description to the design of your recruiting platform.

To ensure you’re putting your best foot forward for job seekers, carefully consider the following three strategies.

1) Define Your Audience

Your approach to career portals should never be “one size fits all.” Internal and external candidates will see opportunities through very different lenses, so your talent strategy must be tailored to the motivations of internal and external candidates.

Internal candidates likely understand your company’s culture. They already have a sense of what your business stands for and how that mission aligns with their personal beliefs. Talent teams must consider internal applicants’ motivations and design internal career portals accordingly. If your current employees are looking at your open positions, it’s probably not because they’re seeking a better cultural fit. The more likely scenario is that they’re ready to grow in their careers or gain new skills.

According to recent research, 63% of people who left their jobs cited lack of growth as a top reason for leaving. Bearing this in mind, internal recruitment efforts must convey to candidates that your company is a place where they can continue to grow and thrive as professionals.

This messaging is also important for external candidates, but their motivations for applying to your company will be broader. Your mission, values, culture, compensation package, attitude toward work-life balance, and more are all potential motivators when an external candidate hits the “apply” button on your job site.

The external audience might be trickier to define initially, but insights from your recruiting software can help you determine which branding strategies are helping you attract high-quality applicants. Your career portal bounce rates and applicant sourcing data can inform how to move forward with your talent acquisition process and fine-tune your career portal for an external audience.

In a 2022 study, 29% of North American job seekers said they wanted more information about company culture, and 27% wanted to learn why current employees continue to work for an employer. This means relevant messaging is critical. If your career site isn’t immediately telling prospective candidates what they want to know, then they won’t stick around. Recruiting software that allows you to create multiple career sites that are fine-tuned to answer your specific audiences’ questions can help you align your job postings to appeal to multiple candidate groups and increase your chances of building a high-quality talent pipeline.

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2) Align Your Messaging

Defining your audience and tailoring your messaging isn’t where the alignment stops. Whether they’ve just applied for a job or are in the final round of interviews, your recruitment process needs to be consistent with your organization’s brand and culture. Every communication candidates receive should reflect how your company operates. Inconsistent messaging can be off-putting and cause applicants to question your sincerity.

Career portal templates in your recruitment software can help avoid “off-brand” messaging. Templates save talent teams time since they can be duplicated and customized to fit any number of audiences. You get the best of both worlds with consistent branding that conveys your organization’s values while still adjusting your content to attract specific groups of applicants.

Regardless of your intended audience, your career portals should always be using people-first language. Candidates aren’t interested in professional jargon. Instead, use clear, concise language geared toward the things applicants are most interested in. Be upfront about your employee benefits, but don’t limit yourself to discussing health insurance. Appeal to your ideal candidates by including details about your work perks that align with your organization’s culture.

For your external career portals, employee testimonials can be game-changers. Your employees can be the greatest asset to a great employer brand, and their endorsements are free. Applicants want to hear what current and former employees have to say about a company, and many applicants research organizations on third-party sites before they’ll apply. Including employee testimonials directly on your career site puts positive messaging about your company front and center for applicants.

Employee testimonials are also a great way to showcase your company’s work culture. Pictures and videos embedded in your external career sites can be a meaningful differentiator for job seekers who care deeply about finding the right culture fit. When using photos and videos, always be sure to get your employees’ permission before publishing their images online, and keep your content current.

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3) Consider Your Content Layout

Your design layout is just as important to your employer branding as your content. Career websites that are clunky, difficult to navigate, or outdated won’t win top talent. Our digital world demands efficiency, and career portals that feel less than efficient will leave most applicants with a negative impression of your organization.

For external candidates, your career site could be one of their first interactions with your company. Ensure that your website is aesthetically pleasing and showcases your company culture. The site should be welcoming and easy to navigate.

It’s also important to consider where an applicant’s eyes will first land when they get to your career portal. Prioritize the most important information about your job posting in relation to your organization’s needs, as well as what candidates are looking for.

Remember that job seekers are also using their phones and other mobile devices to search for employment. Consider the design differences between mobile web pages and desktop computer screens. Your recruitment software should allow you to optimize your career portals to accommodate these different devices.

Employer Branding Is An Ongoing Process

Defining your audience, aligning your messaging, and carefully considering your platform’s layout are crucial steps to attracting your target applicants, but employer branding will never be “one and done.” Just as job seekers’ wants and needs will continue to evolve, your talent acquisition strategy will need to change to keep up with applicants’ demands. Even so, taking the time to initially develop and refine your employer branding strategy can set your organization up for recruitment success and give you the blueprint you need for future recruiting efforts.

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