Since your people’s expertise and time is your “product,” your firm’s success depends on your ability to put highly qualified people on any given project. The right talent, at the right time, doing the right things, drives higher value.

In this post, we want to explore how an employer brand can benefit your firm. We’ll look at what an employer brand is, how to build an employer branding strategy, and how it helps you meet critical challenges faced by professional services firms everywhere.

Employer Branding Defined

Your employer brand is simply your reputation as a place to work. It can have general elements (for example, “a great place to work”) and very specific attributes (“they have a very high-pressure culture” or “they have the most family-friendly benefits in the state”).

Employer brands also vary by the level of visibility they have within certain groups of potential employees and referral sources. For example, one firm’s employer brand may be well known at one university and virtually unknown at another.

Employer branding strategy is the way — usually formally documented — your firm wants to be viewed in the competitive talent marketplace and how this reputation will be built and maintained. A typical employer branding strategy describes how your firm is different from competitive employers, why employees would want to work for your firm and how your employer brand will be strengthened over time.

The Employer Branding Process is the step-by-step procedure of clarifying, shaping and amplifying an employer brand for one or more target audiences.

Employer branding is sometimes confused with the more general firm brand. That’s not surprising as the two are closely related.

Firm Brand vs. Employer Brand

Your overall firm brand is the combination of your reputation and visibility among potential clients and referral sources. It is typically optimized for attracting new clients and growing the firm.

Your employer brand is your reputation and visibility among potential employees and talent referral sources. Its purpose is to attract, retain and motivate the desired talent to support growth. Your employer brand is a subset of your overall firm brand, so it should be consistent with the overall brand.

The firm attributes that are of interest to potential clients are likely different than those of potential new hires or current employees. That said, there are also likely to be areas of overlapping interest to potential clients and employees. For example, a firm that has a reputation for specialized expertise in a particular industry is likely to be of interest to both potential clients and new hires.

Importance of Employer Branding

Employer branding is a topic that is very much on the radar of the corporate executives. A recent survey found that 41% of companies have formal employer branding initiatives. The figure is even higher in larger firms. Further, 94% of firms plan to maintain or increase their investment.

This commitment to the importance of employer branding is not surprising given that it has been shown to produce so many positive impacts.

Recruiting and Your Employer Brand

Recruiting is the area where you would expect to see the largest impact of your employer brand. A strong brand should increase both the quality and quantity of applicants. Having a larger pool of more qualified applicants certainly makes the process easier. But there are related implications, as well.

Because you have a bigger and better applicant pool, you should be able to attract better candidates and hire good people faster. These benefits are extremely helpful when you are looking for specialized skills and experience.

In addition, the shorter process and larger pool can also reduce the costs of hiring. While many firms are not simply looking for the lowest cost, saving money on recruiting does free up scarce resources.

Talent Retention and Your Employer Brand

Retaining your best employees is an ongoing challenge for professional services firms. This is where a strong employer brand really pays off. Your competitors are only too happy to hire your best employees.

Offering more money is a time-honored strategy for luring away top professionals. But it is not all about money. A strong employer brand can be a powerful incentive to stay with a firm. There is even research that suggests that many employees value a great workplace (and brand) over higher pay.

Employees want to feel good about where they work. Accepting a position at a workplace with a poor reputation is rarely a wise move.

Culture and Your Employer Brand

One of the most important considerations for a potential hire is your firm’s culture. And indeed, how your culture is perceived can be important in recruiting and retention. But there is another reason culture is important.

Your firm’s culture sets expectations about what behavior is valued and what is not. It affects how you interact with your peers and how you treat your clients. Do you have high-quality standards? How important is developing professional expertise?

In professional services firms, where so many employees operate autonomously, the firm culture can be a tremendous asset or a crippling liability. Thinking about the culture you want to develop and using your employer brand to promote it make a lot of sense. 

Financial Performance and Your Employer Brand

If your employer branding strategy is well conceived, you would expect it to benefit your firm financially. And in fact, that is exactly what many employers report.

There are two ways an employer brand can improve a firm’s finances. The first is cost reduction. As we discussed in the recruiting section, the costs of hiring well-qualified team members are often lower over the long run. Your employer brand will produce a higher quantity of quality applicants. These reduced costs should increase profitability.

The second financial impact can be much larger. Having top talent and retaining them over time should also help improve revenue growth. Add to this the benefit of a well-conceived and clearly communicated firm culture and you clearly have a very large financial upside.

Next, let’s turn to how you can develop such a winning employer brand strategy.

Employer Branding Strategy Best Practices

At the heart of any employer brand process is an employer branding strategy. To be successful this brand strategy must take into account marketplace realities. Here are five things you’ll want to consider as you develop your own strategy.

1. Your employer brand must support your overall business strategy.

It’s easy to see talent as a strategic advantage. But all talent is not equal. Different business models require different profiles of their workforce.

To be profitable, some business models have to acquire talent at the lowest possible cost. Other models require hiring talent of the highest caliber. Clearly, these two scenarios demand very different employer branding strategies.

Failure to take the business model into account can have devastating effects. When the strategies are out of alignment, it can be difficult to get the management support you need to build a meaningful employer brand. And even if you are able to launch a new employer brand, your business imperatives will likely lead to its early demise.

2. Your strategy must be transparent and visible.

If your employer brand strategy is not transparent and easily understood it is unlikely to be effective. All of your important audiences, both internal and external, should be able to articulate its key features.

If it’s too complex or opaque, your team will have trouble carrying it out. In the absence of a clear strategy, each manager and each employee will feel free to implement whatever “brand” they prefer. Unfortunately, this situation is all too common in the professional services firms.

Turning to the outside world, you face another set of challenges. If a prospective employee doesn’t know you exist or cannot understand your employer brand, he or she will end up working somewhere else. The same is true of referral sources. They won’t be equipped to refer people who would be the best fit with your firm.

As if that wasn’t enough, there is another downside of failing to be transparent. The lack of transparency, in and of itself, raises concerns among many candidates: “Why don’t they want to talk about their culture and strategy? Do they have something to hide?” Candidates with options will look elsewhere.

3. It must be consistent with how you treat clients.

It’s hard to live a lie. Unfortunately, that is how employees can feel if your employer brand strategy is at odds with your overall firm brand. Suppose you have an approach to clients that emphasizes high levels of technical expertise. You expect employees to reflect this value in their client interactions.

Does your employer brand support this? Does it value and support the continuing development of expertise? Or does it value utilization instead? Unless you can align these two experiences, there will be conflict and disappointing results.

4. Build your brand on reality.

An employer brand can be somewhat aspirational. But as with your overall firm brand, it should not be founded on guesses and wishful thinking. In the absence of sound research, however, that is exactly what is likely to happen.

Our studies into professional services firms show that those that conduct research on their target audiences grow faster and are more profitable. When you understand how your firm is perceived in the marketplace — and your audiences’ priorities — you have a market advantage than can produce higher performance. Ignorance introduces risk. Research reduces risk.

In your research, be sure to sample current employees, referral sources and prospective employees. Understanding what is important to them, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of your current reputation, can be pivotal in developing a winning employer brand strategy.

5. Monitoring and optimizing performance produce the results.

You will be making a substantial investment in your employer branding initiative. To enjoy the full benefit of this investment, however, you will need to track its performance.

This will allow you to determine what is working so that you can make necessary adjustments to your strategy and implementation plan. In the absence of ongoing measurement, you will be faced with the prospect of making program adjustments based on anecdotes and hunches.

We describe the monitoring and optimization process below. It does not need to be expensive or time-consuming, but it should cover both program implementation (did we follow the plan?) and success (did the plan produce the expected results?).

The Employer Branding Process

The employer branding process closely parallels the process used to brand the firm as a whole. In fact, they can be conducted in parallel. So if you are planning to rebrand your whole firm, take that opportunity to update your employer brand, too.

Of course, the employer branding process can also be undertaken as a freestanding initiative. Here are the key steps in the process.

1. Consider your firm’s overall growth strategy

Start the process by understanding your firm’s overall strategy for growth. This insight will be essential for aligning your employer brand with the overall business needs of your firm. If you are competing on the basis of having the best talent, for instance, your brand requirements will be very different than those of a firm who competes on the basis of the lowest price.

What if your firm does not have a solid growth strategy? Competing for talent may provide the impetus for developing one. It’s hard to envision how an employer branding process could be sustained if it did not support a firm’s overall business goals. 

2. Research your prospects and competitors

Researching your target audiences is a proven way to reduce risk and improve the likelihood that your brand will resonate with those you want to impress. Most firms target three primary audiences in their recruiting strategy: potential new recruits, recent hires, and talent referral sources. Each of these groups has a unique perspective and important information to add to your understanding.

It is not uncommon to also interview longer-term employees and recent departures to add important perspective for retention and firm culture.

Here are some of the key points you will likely want to cover in your research:

• What attracts prospects?
• Who are your talent competitors?
• How is your firm viewed in the marketplace?
• What sets you apart from competitors?
• How do people learn about your firm?
• What are important decision-making criteria?
• What tips the scale?
• What is the employee experience at your firm?
• What is the current culture like?
• What drives turnover?

Now, not all of these questions are relevant to each audience. It’s also a best practice to have an independent entity that can guarantee confidentiality and objectivity conduct the research. People will not be forthcoming if they believe their comments might be misused. 

3. Develop your employer brand strategy

Your brand strategy has three key components: 1) your differentiators, 2) your positioning statement, and 3) your employer brand promotional plan.

Your differentiators are the attributes that set you apart from your competitors in the eyes of the relevant target audience. Now, you need to be careful here because what is important to one target audience may be irrelevant to another.

To be effective, a differentiator must pass three tests.

1. It must be relevant to the target audience. If not, it will not work.
2. It must be true. If not, employees will not stay.
3. It must be provable. If there is no way to demonstrate that it is true, most people will simply discount it as empty promotional propaganda.

Once you have identified your differentiators (no small task) it is time to develop your second key component of your employer brand strategy. Your positioning statement is a brief description of how your firm is positioned in the competitive marketplace of employers.

Your employer positioning statement is sometimes referred to as an employer value proposition. It describes the key characteristics of the employees you are seeking and why they would choose your firm over a competitor’s. In contrast to a position description, which describes requirements for a specific job position, the positioning statement applies to all employees and the culture of the firm as a whole.

Your employer brand promotional plan is a section of the employer brand strategy document that explains how you will increase the strength and visibility of your employer brand in the marketplace of potential employees, talent referral sources and current staff.

This promotional plan is often related to your overall marketing plan, but there are key differences. Your marketing plan targets potential clients, while the employer brand promotional plan focuses on how to attract potential new hires and retain current employees.

4. Build the tools to communicate the brand

How do you turn your overall strategy into results? It starts with developing the right tools that convey the right messages.

Your single most important tool is your website. It communicates both your overall firm brand and your employer brand. It is the place that almost everyone who wants to work for your firm will visit. It is also a place where potential talent can rule out your firm — without even talking to you first.

The careers section of your website is usually the place potential recruits will go first. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that’s where it ends. Serious prospects will scrutinize your site to learn what kind of work you do, whom you do it for and what it might be like to work at your firm. They may also try to understand who their colleagues will be and what opportunities may be available to them.

But your website is only one of your tools. Your social media company pages (and your activity on them) are also key areas motivated recruits will explore. And of course, employer rating sites such as Glassdoor can make a strong impression on prospective employees.

Other tools may include recruiting collateral, such as videos, brochures and recruiting tour materials.

5. Launch the new brand

When you have your strategy set and have assembled and updated all the tools you need to communicate your employer brand, you are ready for the brand launch. A successful launch involves not only implementing a promotional plan aimed at your external audiences, but addresses your internal audiences, as well.

In fact, an employer brand launch is a firm-wide effort that involves recruiting, human resources, marketing and senior management. Remember, an effective employer brand must reflect your real firm, not a contrived fantasy. Living the brand is an all day, every day effort.

6. Optimize for visibility and impact

As with any complex, firm-wide endeavor, you will not get everything right in the beginning. That is why monitoring the performance of the program and optimizing it over time is so important.

You will want to monitor two kinds of variables. The first is implementation. Is the program being rolled out as planned? Are activities happening on schedule? Are employees participating? If the program is not being fully implemented, don’t expect to see great results.

The second set of variables is impact. Is the program producing the desired results? Are you getting the right kind of referrals in sufficient quantity? Are candidates responding in the right numbers? Are your hiring goals being met? Is retention where it needs to be?

With adequate data you will be able to identify where the branding program is succeeding and where there are trouble spots. Before you optimize, however, check on implementation. Are things actually happening?

If implementation is on track you can then focus on identifying alternative strategies that were not part of the original plan. Make sure that these alternative approaches are consistent with the overall firm brand as well as the employee brand.

The next step is to test the new approaches to see if they produce better results. This testing and ongoing monitoring is important. In the absence of systematic testing, it is easy to lose your way and hop from one shiny object to another — and never see the results you need.

The six-step process outlined above works. We’ve used it. Our clients have used it. And it consistently produces good results. The key is to follow all of the steps. If you cut corners and skip the research, your risk of failure will increase dramatically. Launch without a strategy and you are unlikely to have the success you seek.

The post Employer Branding Strategy for Professional Services Firms appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

The word sparks feelings of joy as it evokes the beginning of something new. A new teammate, a powerful fresh start and a clean slate. However, with great power (and joy) comes great responsibility. You’ve just deemed this person worthy of joining your team and company. Now it’s your job to ensure they feel welcome, know what they’re doing and settle in nicely. 

Below, I outlined four steps to make this tall order seem much more manageable in a virtual world.

1. Give them the tools they need

Connect with your new employee before their first day to discuss how they’ll receive their computer and other office equipment. Whether you’ll be mailing it or doing a contactless handoff, it’s important to make sure your new hire has the physical tools they need to make their early days a success. Make sure that all applications they need are loaded on their computer and that their email, chat and other key services are set up and running. You may want to attach a sticky note with their login credentials. You may even want to send their equipment in advance, giving them an opportunity to familiarize themselves with it before day one.

2. Plan the first week

Try to imagine what your new hire’s first days should be like. That first week is a crucial—setting the tone for the weeks and months to come. Plans can of course change, but having an idea of how your new teammate should spend their time will ease anxiety all around. Think about shadowing opportunities for your new hire so that they can get real-world experiences under their belt. Your new employee will be bright eyed and bushy tailed this first week. Capitalize on this by throwing them in the deep end and exposing them to meetings right away. Ask for feedback. Or give them an assignment, such as “observe this meeting and share your thoughts with me”. It’s a great, low-risk way to get them actively engaged in your business.

Remember that your new employee likely came from knowing everything about their job to starting over at ground zero. Simple exercises like the one above will give them a sense of pride and accomplishment right off the bat. It may even give you some fresh insights into your processes and meetings. 

Here are some other meetings you might want to include in their plan:

• HR/finance meet and greet/paperwork finalization
  • Send paperwork to your new hire ahead of time so they can come to the meeting prepared and ready to ask questions.
• Technology check in and troubleshooting
  • Server overview and shared drive orientation
• Meet and greet with:
  • Manager
  • Core team
  • Office buddies

Of course, in these modern times, all of these meetings are likely to be virtual.

3. Over Communicate

Open communication is important in a normal office setting. In today’s COVID world, it’s critical. Don’t assume that your new hire knows what they are doing. Check in multiple times and encourage their peers to do the same. Encourage your new staff member to ask questions, no matter how basic. They have to feel safe and motivated to adapt to their new, largely abstract, environment. If you’re not getting any questions, you should absolutely probe for them.

You can also set new hires up for success by assigning them office buddies. Select the three to four people in your office who “know it all.” This way, if you’re stuck and can’t help, you have back up. The last thing you’d want is for your new teammate to suffer alone when they don’t know the answer to something. 

4. Set short- and long-term goals

You hired this person because they would bring something of value to your organization, so don’t lose sight of that fact in the onboarding process. Before they even start, identify specific achievable goals and expectations for them—tasks and metrics you can review together  on a 30, 60 and 90 day basis. It’s important for the new employee to know where they can turn for support, so make sure those are identified, as well. These can be things like FAQ docs, process documents, teammates, consultants and other resources that will help your new hire be successful.

Long-term goals will help your new hire understand what success looks like. Include attainable KPI’s and metrics so that you can measure success. Seek input from your new hire, as well, so that you’re both aligned and headed in the same direction. Check in on these goals on a regular basis—at least monthly, and perhaps more frequently at first. These meetings will be your opportunity to course correct and offer ongoing guidance.

A thoughtful onboarding process will make your new employee feel excited to get started in their new role. Your job is to set them up for success by providing a strong foundation. Ensuring that your new hire understands company basics and has a strong support system is a surefire way to guarantee their success. Structured onboarding provides valuable experience for all and makes it far more likely a new employee will stick around for the long haul. Happy planning! 

The post 4 Tips for Onboarding New Employees in a Virtual World appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

The professional services marketplace is changing fast. Buyers are changing the way they purchase services, our organizations are adapting to a radical shift toward remote work, and more specific skills are needed from our marketing and business development teams to help firms be found, build trust, and close deals.

Meanwhile, on the HR front, a quiet war for top talent continues.

A Timely Second Study

For a second time, the Hinge Research Institute has conducted its Employer Branding Study. The largest of its kind, the study fielded responses from 1,034 talent recruiters and job seekers across 10 industry groups around the world. Respondents were segmented by industry, career stage, and job search status—non-seekers, passive seekers, and active seekers. You can download the Executive Summary for free today.

The study was conducted as businesses around the world grappled with the past four months’ health, economic, and political crises. So now more than ever, it is essential that leaders of professional services firms understand and adapt to the changing recruiting and employee retention landscape if they are to thrive in an evolving world. So what did we learn?

In today’s crisis environment, potential hires are taking a hard look at whether prospective employers’ values are aligned with theirs, while recruiters and talent evaluators are putting a premium on maintaining a healthy workplace culture. Companies should pay as much attention to their employer brand as they do to their financials. Their reputation as a workplace is crucial to attract and keep the people they need to deliver on their brand promise and get through any disruption.

Career Stage Matters

Study participants categorized themselves in one of three career stages: entry level, mid-career, and senior level/leadership. When it comes to selecting a firm to work for, salary was the most important factor across all three levels, but company culture came in second for mid-career and senior-level employees, and tied for third place among entry-level candidates. Culture is an enduring theme across the employment process.

Crisis and Merger and Acquisition Response

Responses to questions on how their firms handled major disruptions show participants’ heightened concern about company culture, as well as culture’s impact on turnover.

When it comes to the pandemic, most employees gave their firms passing grades. Only 17% were dissatisfied, giving their firm a score of 6 or lower on a 10-point scale. The most common reason respondents gave a poor rating was their firm’s lack of a plan or slow response to the crisis.

The pandemic is not the only way in which firms have experienced radical change. Mergers and acquisitions present a unique disruption on the employer branding front. When asked what respondents would change about how their firm handled a merger or acquisition, 69% cited having a formal integration strategy and a plan for employees to prepare and adjust.

Key Insights

The study throws three key insights into relief:

1. Cultivating a strong employer brand is a strategic imperative, as it plays a crucial role in recruiting and keeping talent
2. Businesses should tailor employer brand messaging according to a candidate’s career stage, industry, position, and talent profile
3. As job seekers make decisions based increasingly on information that they find online, companies should close the gap between what they do and what they say they do

The post The Employer Brand Under Pressure: Insights from a New Study appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

The report, which captures the perspectives of 217 employees from over 200 professional services firms between March 20th-31st, 2020, reveals that 53.4% of respondents are dissatisfied with their employers’ crisis response.

Respondents rated their current employer’s response to COVID-19 on a scale of 1 to 10.  Those who indicated at least some degree of dissatisfaction cited their firm’s not having a plan (56%) and poor communication (25%) as areas to avoid. As one respondent explained, “It took a while for the firm to comment on the situation internally… They were very slow to allow the work from home option until someone tested positive.”

Among respondents with positive sentiments toward their firm’s crisis response, 36% indicated their remote working capability prepared their firm for large-scale telework in response to stay-at-home orders; 23% lauded their firm’s proactive, decisive measures; and 15% said that their employers clearly communicated plans to team members. One respondent from an engineering firm wrote, “[M]y company acted early and was able to get ahead… [they have] taken the stance of preparing for the worst.”

“Our research over the last several years has consistently shown that a growing number of professional service firm employees want flextime and telework options to achieve better work-life balance,” said Lee Frederiksen, Managing Partner of Hinge. “The professional services are built on people marshaling their expertise wherever their clients are. Firms that offered telework perks before the pandemic have been quicker to scale up remote working in response to shutdowns. However, firms that haven’t prepared a crisis response plan are going to be slower to adapt to emergencies like this one, even if they already offer a  telework option.”

At this time, the COVID-19 situation remains prevalent. With no clear end in sight, professional services firms will need to find ways to navigate the days ahead in a way that prioritizes their people.

Do you want to add your perspective to the conversation? You can participate in the Employer Branding Study here.

The post New Report Reveals Professional Service Firm Employees Criticize Employers’ Response to COVID-19 as Insufficient appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

As a professional services provider, you sell expertise. And there are people behind that expertise which means that one of your top priorities is attracting top talent. How do you do that? It’s all about developing your employer brand, which is really your reputation as a place to work.

TRANSCRIPTION:

As a professional services provider, you sell expertise. And there are people behind that expertise which means that one of your top priorities is attracting top talent. How do you do that? It’s all about developing your employer brand, which is really your reputation as a place to work. Now, there are really six steps that I want to take you through to think about when you’re developing your employer brand.

The very first step to take is to think about your overall growth strategy. Are you primed to grow organically? Are you primed for acquisition or are you thinking about a blend? Understanding your path to growth is going to impact the way you position yourself as an employer and the type of talent you need to attract.

Step two is to research your prospects and your competitors. Why not research your candidates? Well, understanding how your prospects are responding to the marketplace, how they’re making decisions, and how your competitors are selling the same types of services and expertise that you are, helps you in turn understand how you need to be positioned to attract the top talent to set you apart.

The third step, then, armed with an understanding of your overall pathway to growth and how your prospective audience is going to respond and who your competitors are, you’re ready to develop your strategy. This is all about knowing how you need to be positioned as a firm, and as an employer, to attract the right talent that’s going to get you to that growth path.

Step four is to build the tools to then communicate that brand strategy that you have just built. It’s going to be part infrastructure, like a website, like templates. It’s going to be part marketing techniques and part strategies. Building all of that together in your toolkit is what will help you communicate this employer brand that you’ve just built.

Step five – you’re ready to launch the brand. Now this is not about a press release that says you’ve got a new website and you’re ready to be the employer that your strategy says you’re going to be. Launching the brand is actually something that happens over time. And this is about proving and living that employer brand that you’ve just developed through things like a thought leadership strategy, allowing your prospective employees to experience the expertise that you’ve build your brand around.

Now you’re ready to take the last step in building your employer brand. This is about optimizing for visibility as well as impact. So think about getting your reputation out there, the word of who you are as an employer through thought leadership, through guest publishing, through social media posts. All of these things will help you get more visibility around your brand and be more impactful for the folks you need to attract.

Now if you’d like to learn more about building your employer brand, I encourage you to go to hingeuniversity.com/courses. We’d love to see you there!

The post The 6-Step Employer Branding Process [VIDEO] appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

Figure 1. Google Trends report for the term “employer branding.”

Very likely, much of this recent attention is driven by a highly competitive jobs market — and it is especially relevant to the professional services, where talent acquisition has been a perennial challenge and is only getting tougher as the pool of available labor gets smaller.

Download The Employer Brand Study

Whether your firm already has a formal employer branding program or you are considering starting one for the first time, you want to be sure you are investing your marketing dollars in the most effective techniques. But that begs a question: how do you know what works?

What the Research Tells Us

In our 2017 study of over 800 employee candidates and talent evaluators, we set out to find answers. What we discovered was that many employers are investing in marketing channels that don’t produce great results. In fact, a third of firms have failed to recognize the one channel used by more than 86% of job seekers.

Figure 2 shows the five employer marketing tactics in our research that are more popular with employers than with the job seekers they are trying to reach. In other words, firms are spending a lot of money in places prospective employees rarely look. This includes placing traditional job advertisements and participating in job fairs — two old-school techniques, perhaps, whose time has passed (but more on this in a moment).

Figure 2. Marketing channels that are overutilized by employers.

Even Facebook, the digital home to over a billion people, underperforms. Apparently, when it comes to finding their next job, professionals don’t think of Facebook as a serious resource. Twitter, Instagram and other second-tier social media brands also fail to captivate professional services job seekers.

So what are your better options? Where should you be investing your employer branding dollars? Additional data, shown in Figure 3, provide a path forward.

Figure 3. Marketing channels that are underutilized by employers.

The most important takeaway from this chart is that LinkedIn is the single most important marketing channel for recruiting, relied on even more often than networking and personal recommendations. LinkedIn is used by 86% of job seekers, but only 66% of firms are actively looking at LinkedIn for job candidates, a 20 percentage point gap. Clearly, LinkedIn has not only become the networking platform of choice, it’s where job candidates go first when they are ready to find a new position.

Another insight that firms would be wise to heed is the importance of their website as a recruiting tool. A third of job candidates were likely to use firm websites during their job search (frankly, we thought this number would be even higher). But fewer than half of firms actively use their website to attract employees — another large gap.

We can also see that job seekers use staffing firms, job-listing websites and specialized job boards more often than hiring firms do.

The largest gap of all can be seen in the role that published articles play in the recruiting process. According to our study, three quarters of job seekers are looking for a firm that has a good reputation in the marketplace. So it is not surprising that a significant percentage (26%) see published articles as an indicator of market leadership. The vast majority of firms, however, aren’t thinking about their thought leadership as an asset in their employer brand.

A Generational Perspective

Market research is rarely neat and tidy. Often, one set of data appears to contradict another set in the same study — until you unravel it. Our research was no different.

When we looked at the appeal of different channels to different age groups, we found many similarities, but also some stark differences. One of the most surprising differences are job fairs, which I suggested earlier may be of declining relevance. But when we teased apart the data by generation, we were surprised at first to find that Millennials, the youngest cohort in our study, were 4-5 times more likely to attend job fairs than their Gen-X and Baby Boomer peers (see Figure 4.)

Figure 4. Generational differences in marketing channel preference.

We soon theorized, however, that job fairs are probably more suited to candidates earlier in their careers. Most executive-level positions, for instance, are being filled through different channels.

So, are job fairs still a viable recruiting channel? The answer may very well depend on the level of person you are hiring. That said, the numbers don’t support putting a great deal of resources into this technique.

Download The Employer Brand Study

The other results in this data set are not all that surprising: Millennials are more comfortable using digital platforms, including online job listing sites and web-based search.

What This Means for Your Employer Brand

What implications do these research findings have on your employer brand? Here are a few suggestions:

• Don’t underestimate the power of LinkedIn. Job seekers are using LinkedIn more than any other platform to find job opportunities and research firms.
• Consider engaging a professional recruiter to leverage LinkedIn. Many recruiters today are using LinkedIn to contact promising candidates, whether or not they are actively looking for a new position — and with great success.
• Create an appealing employer brand on your website. Devote a page — or even better, several pages — to describe your workplace, culture and benefits. The more you use photos, employee testimonials and specific examples of why working at your firm is a better experience, the more persuasive your brand will be. And don’t forget to talk about the important work you do, your firm’s awards and other factors that demonstrate your leadership and importance to the industry.
• Don’t think of Facebook as your recruiting homepage. Facebook is a perfectly appropriate place to post staff photos and fun memes, but it’s not where job hunters are going first to look for job openings or to learn about your firm.
• Spread the word. When you have a job opening, let people in your network know. Job seekers are asking their friends and colleagues to learn about opportunities.
• Post on niche and general online job sites. Today’s candidates are looking online for job opportunities. Traditional print ads, not so much.
• Become thought leaders. This is at least as important to your client-facing brand as your employer brand. Either way, Visible Expertise is a major win.

If you’ve been building or maintaining an employer brand — or if you are just looking for new ideas to attract the talent you need — these insights should make better use of your limited time and budget. Feel free to share your employer branding challenges and ideas in the comments section below.

Additional Resources:

• Our Rebranding Guide gives you the tools and knowledge you need to lead your firm through a rebranding.
• Get strategies, tips, and tools for developing your firm’s brand with Hinge’s Brand Building Guide for Professional Services Firms.
• Join Hinge University and take the in-depth courses and read the step-by-step How-Tos to take your brand to a new level of sophistication and engagement.

How Hinge Can Help:

Hinge’s Branding Program equips your firm to stand out in a crowded marketplace and build a distinguished brand that drives sustained growth. From strategy to implementation, we take your firm through the rebranding process — painlessly and with exceptional results.

The post Is Your Employer Brand Focused on the Wrong Things? appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

What is an employer brand?

A firm’s employer brand is simply a firm’s reputation as a place to work. It can have general elements (for example, “a great place to work”) and very specific attributes (“an entrepreneurial culture” or “the most family-friendly benefits in the state.”)

An employer brand should emphasize a firm’s strong attributes and provide a window into an organization. It should show candidates what it would be like to be part of the firm culture.

Download The Employer Brand Study

Just like a client-facing brand, an employer brand performs many of the same functions, like differentiating a career at your firm from a career with a competitor.

Firms that focus on strengthening their employer brand are able to position them- selves not only to attract talented professionals, but also to attract a very important audience: the future leaders of their firm.

That’s where Millennials come into the picture. An excellent Tableau data visualization from Emsi uses Pew Research Center labor statistics to analyze various occupations by generation.

According to this data, Millennials make up roughly 25% of the professional services work force. The Millennial shares of the top occupations in professional services are shown in the table below.

The sample in our study was very similar. Nearly 27% of employee-candidates studied were Millennials.

Where to reach Millennials

We asked candidates where they would search for career opportunities if they were looking today. Nearly 90% of Millennials indicated they would search on LinkedIn, highlighting the importance of a firm’s visibility on this particular social channel.

More than 70% would visit a firm’s website directly — a practice used more by Millennials than older generations. These young professionals were also more likely to use job-listing websites like Monster, Indeed and CareerBuilder.

What criteria Millennials use to evaluate opportunities

When Millennials are looking for a career opportunity in professional services, the top criteria they use to evaluate firms fits the mold of older generations.

85% would evaluate firms based on their culture, work-life balance, and salary. 70% would evaluate firms based on their reputation in the marketplace and office location/commute distance. These candidates are looking to answer questions like these:

• How do I fit into the firm’s culture?
• Will I have work-life balance and flexibility?
• How competitive is the salary?
• What is the firm’s reputation in the marketplace?
• Where is the office located?

[bctt tweet=”85% of Millennials evaluate firms based on their culture, work-life balance, and salary” username=”HingeMarketing”]

What Millennials really care about

Knowing what criteria these candidates use to evaluate employers is a good starting place. But how do they compare in terms of relative importance? To find out, we asked candidates to rate certain relevant scenarios to evaluating career opportunities.

What we found took us by surprise. Our data suggest that working with a growing firm and building a personal brand in their industry were more important to Millennials than earning a top salary.

Furthermore, having the option to work remotely or telecommute was just as important as a top salary.

While not as prominent as the scenarios mentioned above, making a socially meaningful contribution was also important to Millennials. This can be accomplished in many different ways. For example, Hinge recently volunteered at Cornerstones in Reston, a local shelter in our community providing those in need with food, shelter, affordable housing and childcare.

Just as organizations are looking for candidates that fit their organization, young professionals are looking for career opportunities that fit their particular situation.

Putting it all together

If you want to attract Millennial professionals, it is important to communicate your firm’s employer brand online. Posting job ads on LinkedIn and having a Careers page on your website are great places to start, they are only the tip of the iceberg.

A strong employer brand will offer a value proposition that resonates with your ideal candidate. It will address the criteria candidates use to evaluate career opportunities and it will reach these individuals in the right places.

The way you communicate your employer value proposition is also critical. According to LinkedIn, candidates are 3X more likely to trust company information from employees than from the CEO. In other words, your current employees are your most trusted employer brand ambassadors.

Download The Employer Brand Study

Communicating your employer value proposition through current employees can be done a number of ways. Below are a few examples:

• Employee reviews on websites like Glassdoor, Monster and Indeed
• Video or written employee testimonials on your website
• Pairing photographs of employees with block quotes on a particular aspect of firm culture
• Employee engagement on social media

If you invest in your employer brand architecture and strengthening it with the voice of your own employees, you will have an authentic, powerful message that can be used in job advertisements, content marketing, social media (particularly LinkedIn) and on your firm’s website.

To learn more about employer branding strategies, check out this post.

Additional Resources:

• Our Rebranding Guide gives you the tools and knowledge you need to lead your firm through a rebranding.
• Get strategies, tips, and tools for developing your firm’s brand with Hinge’s Brand Building Guide for Professional Services Firms.
• Join Hinge University and take the in-depth courses and read the step-by-step How-Tos to take your brand to a new level of sophistication and engagement.

How Hinge Can Help:

Hinge’s Branding Program equips your firm to stand out in a crowded marketplace and build a distinguished brand that drives sustained growth. From strategy to implementation, we take your firm through the rebranding process — painlessly and with exceptional results.

The post Strong Employer Brands Attract Talented Millennials in Professional Services appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

This video blog discuses three ways an employer brand is beneficial to those in government services.

Video Transcription

Hi, I’m Liz Harr, and I’m really looking forward to this particular post because I get to share some recent research that we just uncovered, and that is on employer brand.

What I’m gonna be talking about today is how an employer brand is relevant to those in government services. Now, in government services, there are certainly the circumstances where those firms have several 1099s and contractors who make up their employee body. But they also have, if not a majority, many folks who are full time employees. And in order to attract that top talent, firms need to think about their employer brand.

Employer brand is pretty simple. All it is, is your firms reputation for what it’s like to work there. And talent is using your employer brand as a gauge to figure out if your firm is the right fit. Is it a high pressure place? Is it a place where high quality is top priority? Do you do what you say you do? Are you best of breed or are you entrepreneurially minded. All of these things are hints to the outside world and to future recruits about what it might be like to work for you.

Download the Employer Brand Study and learn how to attract new talent and create a higher-performing workforce

So let’s talk about some of the benefits of having a strong employer brand. First and foremost, it makes it easier and more cost effective to attract talent. Think about it, if your firm brand is off kilter, you start spending all this time and money on the wrong types of leads and the wrong types of business. Same thing with when your employer brand is off kilter. Anytime spent interviewing the wrong type of candidate costs time and money that none of us can afford.

Secondly, another benefit is employees stay longer. A strong employer brand especially one that espouses the benefits to work-life balance, culture, leadership style, these all make it less likely that your employees will jump ship.

And thirdly, a strong employer brand and developing that brand forces firms to develop this culture. In fact, we here time and gain from future recruits, culture is king. When you’re developing your employer brand by default, you’re thinking about your culture and you’re getting disciplined around how you talk about your culture, how you live out your culture.

So the bottom line here is that when you craft a strong employer brand, you’re really putting yourself ahead of the competition in terms of being able to attract the best talent out there.

Good luck.

The post Employer Brand for Government Contractors [VIDEO] appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

We surveyed over 800 employers and job seekers to better understand how an employer brand can benefit firms. Download the free study and learn all about today’s complex recruiting environment.

Video Transcription

Hi, I am Lee Frederiksen. Today I am very excited to talk to you about the release of our new Employer Branding Research. This is very exciting.

What we did was as far as we know the first time anyone’s ever done this for professional services, we looked at both sides of the equation at the same time. We looked at the employer’s side, what employers are thinking about employer branding and we looked at the job candidate’s side, how job candidates look at it. This study had over 700 participants on both sides of it together, and we saw what’s the difference.

Download the free study today and discover what a strong employer brand can do for your firm

For example, we looked at how do job seekers evaluate potential employers in the professional services areas? What do they look for? There are some surprises there. Some of the things they look for are not necessarily what you would have expected to be at number one.

Also, how can your employers make the firms more valuable to top talent? What does top talent look for in terms of joining a firm and staying at a firm? And what kinds of candidates are in high demand? What are you competitors looking for? And what sort of competition are you gonna face in the marketplace? The research is free, download your copy today.

The post Employer Brand Study Released [VIDEO] appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

Think of your brand from your potential recruit’s point of view, what makes your firm special to work with? How does your brand relate to them? Learn how to attract top talent to deliver your services.

Video Transcription

Hi, I’m Karl Feldman, and today we’re gonna talk about a hot topic, Employer Branding For AEC. Now, this is a question I get a lot, and in our latest research, this is an audience that is getting just as close in importance as new prospects, new business.

So, when we talk about this, we’re talking about this in context with all the other audiences we’re branding for, like clients and prospects, partner opportunities like JV and subcontractors, influencers. But today we’re gonna focus on building your A-team.

The war for talent is really worth winning. If we’re doing a good job with everything else and we’re attracting the new business, we need the best teams to deliver our services. So that really is very logical why this is so important, right behind generating new business and leads.

We can think of this as sharing a lot of the same pieces as your overall brand, but it focuses down to the next level. Okay, so many of those elements are universal, but a more personal story has got to be told. So thinking of it from your potential recruit’s point of view, what makes your firm special to work with? How does that brand relate to them and why do they care on a day to day basis? Are there ways to tell the story from some of your star experts and employees of how great of a community you’ve created in the workplace?

Download the Talent Acquisition & Retention Guide

Also, don’t forget about generational consideration. You know, if we’re building up strength for the future, we’ve got to think about the new generations coming in, millennials, and think about what is important to them. In some cases, it’s a little bit different than older generations that might be aging out of your firm.

Also, think about different promotional channels. Some of the ones that apply for your prospects and leads, may or may not apply for the recruiting or they may be other platforms you need to look at. You know, GlassDoor, some other platforms that are more important, Facebook, for recruits that you’re gonna look for to get a feel of the personality and how it is to actually work at your firm. So, I hope that’s helpful, and I look forward to talking to you next time.

The post Employer Brand in AEC: Attracting The A-Team [VIDEO] appeared first on Hinge Marketing.