11 Proven Steps to a Kick-Ass Talent Brand
Talent is the most important asset of any business. In this article, we discuss the 11 steps to build an effective talent brand strategy to make sure you can differentiate yourself from your competitors, attract the right talent, retain top talent, and build a strong alumni community that is happy to refer or return.
Table of Contents
The 11 components of a great talent brand strategy include:
Discovery
- Craft the employee value proposition
- Invest in retaining talent
- Identify a talent brand custodian
- Audit your talent brand
- Define your talent brand positioning
- Visualize your talent persona
- Map your talent’s lifecycle journey
- Distribute on two-three channels to begin with
- Stay consistent with a content calendar
- Leverage your talent brand for recruitment marketing – Glassdoor / AmbitionBox
- Measure and monitor key metrics periodically
1. How to Craft the Employee Value Proposition
What is EVP?
The EVP is a document that tells prospective employees what they can expect when they join your company; it describes how you want them to feel about working for you.
EVP, undoubtedly, is an important part of the overall human resources strategy because it helps you attract the best talent and retain employees who are happy at work. It also helps you communicate with employees about how your company is doing and how it fits into their lives.
In short, it’s an answer to “What’s in it for me” that’s on every candidate’s mind.
When deciding what to include in your EVP, it is important to think about what might be most important to target employee segments. This also needs to align with what your business is best placed to deliver.
You may ask, why do you need an EVP?
If you have to holistically describe to someone the DNA of your organization, how you are unique or what is the give-get relationship between the organization – employee, this is the mechanism to do that. It is your opportunity to tell your authentic story to the talent.
Here are six elements any good EVP should cover:
A tip before you get started: ask your current employees what makes the organization unique. Have a talent persona in mind when writing your EVP.
- Reputation – do employees take pride in working for your company? Do they share your values?
- Financial Benefits – includes salary, benefits, allowances, and other benefits awarded to employees
- Growth – opportunities for career advancement, growth, upskilling, technology, training, change tracks, and guidance.
- Work experience – how is the work environment, space, work-life balance, autonomy, flexibility, tech savvy, investment in tools etc
- Culture – leadership and working style, hierarchy or flat structure, quality of leadership and peers
- Wellbeing & benefits – other benefits like travel, health and dental insurance, car lease, moving assistance? Focus on diversity, equity and inclusion? Paid time off policies around sickness, pregnancy? Steps taken to encourage mental wellness, prevent burnout, compensatory off.
Some great examples of EVP:
- Apple – Join us. Be you.
- Netflix -What makes Netflix special is how much we:
- Encourage decision-making by employees
- Share information openly, broadly and deliberately
- Communicate candidly and directly
- Keep only our highly effective people
- Avoid rules
- Zappos – Our service is not average, and we don’t want our people to be average. For all our emphasis on customer service, our #1 priority is company culture. It’s what makes us successful. And in our culture, we celebrate and embrace our diversity and each person’s individuality.
- Adobe – careers page covers people, purpose and pride aspects well with a sneak peek into what it is like to work there.
2. Invest in Retaining Talent
Did you know it costs $100,000 to replace an employee? Often more than that.
When an unhappy employee leaves: they take other employees with them, other employees are frustrated because of the additional workload, and customers leave because the work gets interrupted.
The question is:
what are you doing to engage and retain talent?
how do you build a culture where people want to stay?
what it is that makes people want to work for your company?
It’s easy to create an employee experience that attracts talent, but how do you build a talent-centric culture that retains employees? Here are five ways:
1. Invest in training programs – great upskilling opportunities or training programs will help people understand their role better and make them feel confident in their abilities to do their job well.
2. Sponsor their certifications – this shows employees that you care about their growth potential which makes them feel valued and appreciated.
3. Create opportunities for advancement. If one of your employees has great customer service skills but isn’t good at public speaking or networking, then help her develop those skills so she can find a position at sales if she is keen.
4. Create an atmosphere where people want to come into work on Mondays (and Fridays).
5. How is the culture of the workplace? Does it allow people to be themselves and feel comfortable with their colleagues and bosses? When employees feel like they can be themselves, it’s easier for them to be productive at work.
6. Make it easy for employees to get what they need from you. “If you have an employee who needs something from you — whether it’s a new computer or software license like Adobe Photoshop — ensure you have an easy way for them to get in touch with you,” says Ben Waber, co-founder and CEO of People Analytics at Humanyze Inc.
Ideally, this should be someone other than the person who manages them directly so they can get information when they need it most — not just when it happens to be convenient for their boss or admin team. This include stationery and whatever makes their environment convenient.
3. Identify a Talent Brand Custodian
The CEO is the custodian of an employer brand. But, in the case of talent brand, every employee , past and present, contributes to the narrative.
Identifying a talent branding strategy owner or custodian will ensure there is consistency in the narrative and social media communication with the sole objective of strengthening your brand perception in the talent community.
Some of the core tasks of the talent brand custodian should be:
- to create a content calendar with leadership content, stories of people, life at the company, and growth
- work with the marketing team to convert these stories into creative content
- distribute the content on social channels like LinkedIn, Glassdoor, AmbitionBox, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter etc
- conduct surveys to research what talent actually thinks and identify gaps
- implement recruitment marketing campaigns in collaboration with the TA team
- be the custodian for all employee communication initiatives
- encourage employees to use social media to talk about the company
- maintain the career site and promote the organization
- identify key metrics to track periodically
4. Audit your Talent Brand
How to audit your talent brand outlines the steps to do it yourself.
A snapshot of the steps involved:
- How do you audit your talent brand?
- Listen: Do employees love working at your company as much as you think they do?
- Audit your existing materials
- Checklist of channels for your audit
- Measure your talent brand (where you stand) today
5. Define your talent brand positioning
LinkedIn distinguishes employer brand and talent brand as follows:
The question is can you define your talent brand positioning? Maybe not. The truth is every company has a talent brand – whether you like it or not. Because it is what talent actually perceives, thinks, and feels. It is a reality check of your employer brand positioning. What you can do is to audit your talent brand to see if there is a gap with your employer brand positioning and where the gap is.
This includes everything form website, social pages to recruitment materials, exit interviews and Glassdoor reviews.
6. Visualize your talent persona
Personas are a powerful way to translate internal data about your talent into something that’s useful and actionable for your teams.
However, they aren’t right for every situation. If you have a lot of turnover or if your company is very large, personas may not be as useful.
It’s important to remember that personas are only one tool in your HR armoury – they’re not meant to replace everything else you do!
Here are basic steps to build your talent persona:
- Define clearly what you are looking for in talent. The skills, competencies, and attributes you look for in talent differs for every company.
- Experience and skills
- Attitude for culture fit
- What drives them
- Career goals
- Demographics
2. Data is your best friend when it comes to the talent you want to attract.
Personas are based on real people, so it’s important to start with real data about real people. Collecting this information can take some time but it’s worth it because it opens up a whole new world of possibilities when it comes to learning about your talent base. You might be surprised by how much information is already available in your HR systems – all you need to do is look!
It is important because this helps determine what makes someone successful in a particular role or team. It also helps identify gaps in your organization such as where there might be high turnover rates or low rankings on performance reviews.
Ask questions like:
What qualities do our best performing employees possess?
What skills do they have?
What kind of experience do they have?
What kind of education?
How long have they been with the company?
What’s their tenure at different levels or departments?
How much turnover has there been among their peers or colleagues?
Do they stay with the company for long periods of time or move on quickly?
Are there any patterns among these individuals that might give clues about what makes them successful in their roles or teams?
3. Analyse your data
Once you’ve collected your data, analyse it against the characteristics that define success in the relevant role, team and context. This will help you identify any gaps between what people say they are and what they need.
4. Put your talent personas to test for a role and measure the success
It’s still a gray area or a theory until you have gone through the entire hiring process with a talent persona in mind.
Track how it helped you in filtering candidates, what was the talent-role fit, was the hire a success?
Do course correction after a few hires.
7. Map Your Talent's Lifecycle Journey
The talent lifecycle is a journey, and it’s important to have a strategy in place that helps you guide them through the journey of candidates to alumni.
Talent goes through five critical life stages in their association with a company:
Candidate: attraction, recruitment
Employee : onboarding, retention
Alumni: separation
The tools and channels you use to actively engage with talent in this journey from a candidate to alumni forms the basis of talent branding.
For instance, getting your current employees to talk about culture on social platforms gives candidates a window into the culture of the organization. Being active on LinkedIn, Glassdoor reviews, participating in conferences, and conducting events/hackathons are tactics to attract talent.
Internal communication and employee engagement is crucial in the development and retention of existing employees – do you sense the vibe of they belong?
Similarly, keeping the communication channels open with alumni who have parted for progression / studies or have stated they would be open to coming back in the future is a way to nurture valuable relationships.
8. Distribute on two-three channels to begin with
Now, let’s look at the distribution strategy after the discovery process.
We’ll address how to do talent branding on social media, as well as tips for a successful social media recruitment strategy.
- Audience: The audience is the talent you are trying to attract and retain.
- Channels: To begin with, focus on one or two channels. You don’t have time to post on all social media platforms at once, so choose two or three that are right for your audience and stick with them. For example, if most of your audience is on LinkedIn and Twitter, then focus on those two platforms alone. You can also use paid social advertising to reach more people outside your regular audience base.
- Messaging: Your tone should be consistent across all channels, whether that means having fun on Twitter or being serious on LinkedIn. You want to provide consistent messaging across channels so that people feel like they know who you are as soon as they see any mention of your company name or logo online or offline (or both).
Here are some tips for building a successful social media branding strategy:
- Focus on one or two channels.
- Create a consistent tone
- Use visual content
- Share quality content
- Get creative with GIFs and memes
- Connect with top talent in your industry
9. Stay Consistent With a Content Calendar
The most effective way to use a content calendar is by making sure it aligns with your company’s overall talent branding messaging. Here are some tactics we’ve seen work on how to stay consistent with a content calendar:
- Draw a quarterly content plan. Have a monthly theme with certain number of posts for employee stories, for thought leadership, day in the life of employees, work policies, work culture etc.
- Use scheduling tools to plan and automate publishing of content. Some tools you can use are Hootsuite, Buffer for multiple channels. This will ensure consistency.
- Use a mix of content so the workload of generating content does not rest solely on the talent branding custodian.
- Use employee stories the way user generated content is used by brands. People love stories — especially when those stories are about them! Create an employee advocacy program where employees can share content freely on social media channels, blogs or even LinkedIn Pulse — as long as it’s related to your industry or business.
- Repurpose content. Break down a blog into bite sized posts for Twitter & LinkedIn. Similarly you can reused videos on Youtube & LinkedIn.
- Apart from employee stories, you can plan on producing thought leadership content. This helps potential candidates see how your company’s leadership perceives about certain issues in the industry and an insight into the work environment they can expect if they join your team.
- Create an internal newsletter where you share employee stories on a regular basis.
Tip: Make it easy for employees to share their stories. They are your biggest advocates. Many companies have policies that prevent employees from speaking publicly about their work or the company they work for. But if you want to build a talent brand, you need to make it easy for people to tell their stories within the brand guidelines — and encourage them to use their voice.
10. Leverage Your Talent Brand for Recruitment Marketing
A great way to attract top talent is to leverage your company’s online presence and let the world know what it’s like to work at your firm.
Here are two simple ways:
- Encourage employees to post reviews on Glassdoor and AmbitionBox. Both sites allow employees of any company — big or small — to rate their employer and share their experience. This may be a handy article: Can You Trace, Remove, and Improve Your Glassdoor Reviews? (Strategy Inside)
- Create an employee referral program that rewards employees for referring members who are looking for work at your company.
In addition, stand out the way your career site is designed and the job descriptions are published. Have you looked at our career page?
11. Measure & Monitor Key Metrics Periodically
This is the most difficult step of all. Unless your talent branding efforts are making a business impact, it will be extremely difficult to get an executive buy-in for a long time.
How do you justify the efforts?
Measure these key metrics before you start on your talent branding journey. continue measuring them periodically to analyse what is working and what is not so that you can make adjustments to the strategy.
Results of any branding strategy takes time. so we would advise to give it at least six months of focused effort before you see the needle moving on your objective.
11. Measure & Monitor Key Metrics Periodically
This is the most difficult step of all. Unless your talent branding efforts are making a business impact, it will be extremely difficult to get an executive buy-in for a long time.
How do you justify the efforts?
Measure these key metrics before you start on your talent branding journey. continue measuring them periodically to analyse what is working and what is not so that you can make adjustments to the strategy.
Results of any branding strategy takes time. so we would advise to give it at least six months of focused effort before you see the needle moving on your objective.
