FAQs

In order to create a strong and attractive employer brand is crucial to create a culture of sharing and continuous improvement and seek balance between good management practices and productivity.

Successful employer brands are not afraid to share their best practices publicly. According to Sullivan, it is important that senior managers within organisations encourage and reward the development and sharing of best practices. In their view, “in an era where technology can track spikes in sales and market value that correlate to such exposure, public touting has become a way of life in leading firms like GE, Cisco, Southwest Airlines, and Wal-Mart. Unless your firm wants to be left behind, becoming more and more obscure each year, it’s essential that senior management recognizes and encourages employment branding and the sharing of best practices”.

Having good management practices in place is one way of creating a good employer brand. It is important to maintain a good balance between management practices and employee productivity. Overly soft management practices have a negative impact on productivity whereas too much focus on productivity result in “employee burnout, increased error rates, decreased customer satisfaction and increased turnover, especially among top performers that have come to expect excellent management. Therefore, in order to insure a strong brand as well as improved employee productivity, firms must measure and reward balance between the use of good management practices and efforts to improve employee productivity”.

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Here are a couple of ways to make your organisations known as a good employer:

• Obtain public recognition (great-place-to-work lists). Getting your company on the list of great employers creates a good exposure which leads to increased credibility of the firm and interest from potential employees. The great-place-to-work lists can include those published by Fortune but also local news agencies and industry trade magazines.
• Getting talked about. Publications about your business and practices contributes to building a strong employer brand. “Having others talk about you and site your great management practices has more than impact than any employment ad that you could place" (Sullivan). This exposure can be created by getting a review in the periodical column, presenting at the conference, by giving speeches and writing articles, engaging with the business press reporters and editors. 

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Sharing employees’ views and feedback on the firm’s business practices and management is a good way of generating attention from the prospective talent. Storytelling inside and outside the organisation about the organisation as a good place to work is part of a viral marketing and it is more effective if the word is spread by employees rather than the organisation itself. “Having employees proactively tell stories within the organization builds pride and increases retention rates. Having employees that tell stories externally increases the number and the quality of employee referrals for open positions” (Sullivan). Employees spreading the word about your firm being a good place to work has a significantly higher impact than the firm spreading the word that it is a great place to work.

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“The best managed firms are those also known as benchmark firms. These are the firms that have best practices that everyone else wants to learn about and emulate. A great brand requires management to participate in major benchmarking studies and to make a conscious effort to respond to those that highlight your best practices” (Sullivan).

Make sure that your company is known not only for your product brands but also management practices. Increasing the job applicants’ awareness of good management practices within your organisation attracts the right candidates for the job and your workplace. It is important to talk about the best management practices in recruiting materials, annual reports and on the company’s website. .

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As organisations build and improve their product brands so they have to employ a similar approach to strengthening their brand as an employer. It is important to continue improving your employer brand given that the target candidates’ preferences and needs change. Employment brands are no different. “The key to that continuous improvement is the use of brand assessment measures or metrics. Any branding campaign should begin with side-by-side comparison numbers that can be used to judge the relative success and improvement of the effort. Branding metrics should become part of the assessment criteria for all major business functions and their managers. You can’t improve what you don’t measure” (Sullivan).

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