5 Steps to Create Great Employer Branding Through Social Media

Social media can put a face to your company’s employer branding strategy by depicting the personality behind your business and showcasing your ideal representation of company culture. Much like with your own personal social networking pages, sharing the day-to-day happenings of your brand can help cultivate positive impressions—and eventually attract top talent too. After all, businesses today are having to look beyond posting on traditional careers websites and pages with a reported 68% of millennials visiting employer’s social media properties specifically to evaluate an employer’s brand. Eyes are on your company’s social media pages—whether you’re ready or not.

Take advantage of this and utilize new opportunities for employer branding through social media. Not only will social channels offer new ways to reach job seekers, they can also be inexpensive to manage, simple to use and are effective recruiting tools when curated in a thoughtful way. Get started by following these easy steps to create a strong employer branding strategy through social media for your business.

Step 1: Get your company’s marketing department on board.  Your company’s marketing department is likely managing your company’s social media pages. Creating an employer branding presence on social media has the ability to not only help attract top talent, but can also leave a positive impression with everyday consumers—which can help marketing reach their goals too. Customers care about employee satisfaction, with a reported 64% of consumers having stopped purchasing from a brand after hearing news of that company’s poor employee treatment. Get your marketing team excited about supporting employer branding efforts by sharing the impact that these kinds of posts can have across multiple areas of the business. 

Beyond being a great resource for quality images and engaging copy, the marketing team could also offer useful statistics and user behavior information. Set aside some time to pick their brain, their input can help you develop content that complements existing posts and features brand stories job seekers can get excited about.

Step 2: Build career-focused social media pages. While it would be great to get some inadvertent face time with potential candidates on your company’s main social media page—a whopping 68% of millennials visit a company’s social media properties specifically to evaluate an employer’s brand—you may not have access or as much exposure to these pages as you’d ideally desire. In this case, it could be a good idea to create your own social media pages specifically dedicated to your recruiting efforts. These accounts can reflect your brand values, employee perks, company culture and any characteristics that set you apart from the competition. Further, the “happiest employees” are more discerning about the next company they work for, with 84% performing additional research before applying for a job and 40% being more likely to perform research beyond the company website, so you’ll want to deliver the resources they’ll be looking for throughout their job search. 

You can utilize these channels to foster employer branding through social media by sharing employee testimonials, behind-the-scenes videos and blog posts from current staff members. Again, it’s important to remember that job seekers won’t simply look at your careers page to learn about your business and its company culture. Dedicating time and creative energy to careers-dedicated social media accounts can give your employer branding strategy an edge when compared to more traditional approaches. Expand beyond LinkedIn, where one might expect to see recruiting efforts, and create Facebook, Twitter and even Instagram job-focused accounts. Employer branding through social media can help highlight who you really are, how you communicate and the goals you aspire to reach as a brand.

Step 3: Showcase top talent. Don’t overlook your existing employees when it comes to showcasing your brand—you may not realize that your top talent may be your company’s biggest asset when attracting job seekers. In fact, 67% of  survey participants ranked their employer with an above average rating of 4 or 5 stars on a 5-star scale when asked how they would rate their current or most recent employer. Highlighting these happy, fulfilled team members can go a long way in appealing to potential candidates—and it can also help boost retention rates. The showcased employees can end up feeling more valued and special when asked to contribute to these kinds of posts. And existing employee profiles or interviews can help job seekers better imagine themselves in prospective roles.

These types of employer-branded content can also provide a much truer taste of company culture in comparison to an “About Us” blurb. Using this tactic of employer branding through social media can put a literal face—or faces—behind your brand. This can help humanize your brand and ground lofty mission statements. Essentially, showing potential candidates who works at your company today can help answer why they should work for you in the future.

Step 4: Feature employee events. Show candidates what it’s like to work for your company beyond the day to day roles and responsibilities.  You can use employer branding through social media to highlight volunteer efforts, corporate runs and community drives. Not only will these showcased efforts attract top talent, but they can also support your overarching outward employer branding strategy goals. From January 2013 to July 2013, BAYADA received more than 1,000 applicants through CareerArc, and spread the firm’s brand to tens of thousands of other potential passive jobseekers on Twitter, Facebook, mobile and across the web.

Additionally, it never hurts to find another reason to throw a company happy hour, baking circle or potluck. Employee engagement events held purely to entertain could be what convinces a potential candidate who is on the fence about applying to move forward. Showcasing all of the fun your brand is having both in and outside of the office can support the impression of a desirable company culture and work environment. And career-dedicated social media pages are the perfect hub to house content curated from these kinds of events.

Step 5: Build an employee advocacy program. Your existing employees can promote most of your branding initiatives and strategies in an organic way. And, their posts will come across more authentically than if the company were to post about all of the job perks themselves. Their own experiences and outlook, shared in their own words, can come across as genuine and trustworthy—two attributes job seekers will be sure to appreciate.

Motivate your employees to get involved and encourage them to post, share and engage with the employer branding content on your career-focused social media accounts. Empowering your employees to share experiences and impressions from their own perspectives can communicate these benefits in a more relatable way. You can engage existing employees with polls for new initiatives or share call outs for examples of office pride. All of the fun that existing employees are having on these pages can impress potential candidates. Encouraging your employees to share their own personal satisfaction costs you nothing and can end up delivering in various beneficial ways—retaining top talent, attracting new talent and resonating with consumers.

Increase your chances of attracting top talent with very little cost and well thought out strategies when utilizing employer branding through social media correctly. And remember that employer branding through social media can help show job seekers just how different your company is from your competition by highlighting your best assets and sharing your company culture in a more authentic, real-time way.