How To Creatively

And Effectively

Communicate Your

Employer Brand

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CONTENTS

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Introduction

Crafting your employer brand throughout your employee lifecycle

Understanding your employer brand

Evaluating your efforts

Conduct an employer brand audit

Moving forward

Employee experience is a key

element of your employer brand

Internal communications uphold your

employer brand

Recruiting is significantly impacted by

your employer brand

Employee experience is a key

element of your employer brand

Internal communications uphold your

employer brand

Recruiting is significantly impacted by

your employer brand

Talent acquisition

Onboarding

Growth/retention

Offboarding

Research your talent competitors

Identify your competitive advantage

Identify your employee value

proposition

Review your design system

About us

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1Introduction

We believe that earning “great place to work” awards and getting on “best of” lists are admirable goals, but you don’t have to focus on win-

ning in order to build a positive em-ployer brand that stands out from the competition.

By highlighting your organization’s distinguishing characteristics

-- every company has its own “special sauce” --

and telling personal stories about the people on your team, you can develop a strong employer brand that will help you recruit and retain the best people.

In this guide, we’ll look at the many creative ways you can communi-cate your employer brand. If you’re in marketing or HR, we made this guide for you.

That’s right! In our current job-seek-er economy, marketing and HR de-partments are more likely than ever to collaborate on employer brand-ing, or what startup mentor and CEO Yoav Vilner calls “culture optimiza-tion initiatives and the public-facing messaging surrounding them.”

With your powers combined, the company culture initiatives that your HR team champions and the corre-sponding communications that your marketing team develops will shape how the public views your company as an employer.

From an HR perspective, how the public perceives your company as an employer is central to your ability to recruit, hire, and retain quality employees. From a marketing per-spective, your company’s employer brand can either take the credit or get the blame for its public percep-tion.

By combining your employer brand projects, your HR and marketing teams can exchange specific indus-try knowledge and identify opportu-nities for interdepartmental collab-oration. With a singular focus, you can streamline your workload and start measuring results.

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Your company’s employer brand will always be influ-enced by factors outside your control, which is reason enough to kickstart your HR and marketing teams’ joint efforts now.

If your company’s employer brand is unfavorable, use this guide to help you get back on track. If your compa-ny has a neutral or favorable employer brand, this guide will help you optimize what’s working and fuel inspira-tion for new initiatives.

Either way, the sooner you define your employer brand strategy, the sooner you can get started on the fun

stuff!

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In the current job market, job seekers are in the metaphorical driver’s seat. Whenever someone expresses interest in working for your organization, it’s your organization’s responsibility to demonstrate what that individual can expect as an employee. The key here is that you should only promise an exceptional experience if your company is committed to and capable of delivering on that promise.

According to analysis in the Randstad US 2018 Salary Guides, salaries in-creased an average of three percent across industries over 2017, with many companies “finding that aligning pay with the overall market is no longer enough to attract top talent.” Money is a powerful extrinsic motivator, but people need intrinsic motivators, like autonomy, mastery, and purpose, to help them feel engaged at work.

Employees from every generation want meaningful work, so how can your organization distinguish itself from the crowd? By telling the truth and en-suring that your employees drive off the lot with the car they test drove, so to speak.

If your company promises one employee experience and delivers a different one, then its employer brand is flawed. Luckily, you’re in the perfect posi-tion to improve it.

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22Understand-ing your employer brand

The value of your employer brand lies in your company’s ability to attract, engage, and retain stel-lar talent and win loyal customers.

When your company can promise and deliver a high caliber of experi-ences to job candidates, employees, alumnus, vendors, customers, then your employer brand has firepower.

Don’t fall prey to the common mistake of focusing your employer branding efforts solely on talent acquisition. You might improve your recruitment and onboarding processes, but you won’t have a considerable impact on your company culture or business performance.

With the combined brainpower of HR and marketing, you can ensure that your employer brand positively influences your teammates at every stage of the employee lifecycle. Let’s look at three of the factors within your control that have a significant impact on your employer brand: employee experience, internal communications, and recruiting.

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Employee experience is a key element of your employer brand

On the topic of employee experi-ence, employer brand expert Denise Lee Yohn says:

“You can’t expect your employees to deliver to customers what they don’t experience themselves.”

One company that is repeatedly head and shoulders above the employer brand competition is REI. If you’ve ever been to an REI store, you’ve probably noticed that their employees genuinely love the outdoors and possess an above-average knowledge of the gear and experiences they’re sell-ing. Their engagement is due in no small part to the “Opt outside” brand promise that REI makes to its customers and its employees.

The outdoor outfitter offers its em-ployees “gear rentals and discounts and learning activity classes and two annual ‘Yay Days,’ which are PTO days to spend outside and use the outdoor gear they sell for such activities as hiking, biking, climbing, camping and skiing.” In addition, the company offers a generous leave of absence policy and adoption assis-tance.

The result? REI employees consis-tently report feeling that they can live their full lives without worrying about taking too much time off or spending time with their families.

In an interview with Bloomberg about how REI’s focus on wellness attracts similarly minded individuals, REI’s senior vice president of HR Raquel Karls says simply: “All those things tend to blend into being part of who you are and part of what you do.”

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Internal communications uphold your employer brand

If official or unofficial communi-cations from your company were shared publicly, would you be proud of their contents? Hopefully, your answer is ‘Yes.’ Internal communica-tions from your company’s leaders should be in keeping with the voice and tone of your brand. As with so many things in business, internal communications are a matter of trust.

You may have heard about the Mi-crosoft University recruiter who

emailed a cohort of interns promis-ing that there would be “hella noms, lots of dranks, the best beats” and a beer pong table at a company event. The email was widely shared (and laughed at) online, eventually prompting a Microsoft spokesper-son to tell Business Insider that “the email was poorly worded and not in keeping with our values as a compa-ny.”

Whether they go viral on social media or remain shielded from public view, your company’s internal communications influence your employer brand.

In the wake of Wells Fargo’s fraud scandal in 2016, former employees re-vealed that the company’s internal publications, including its code of ethics and team handbook, were widely circulated but effectively ignored. Practic-es like “gaming,” which the company frowned on in the Wells Fargo Code of Ethics, were actually carried out quite frequently.

“Management made it clear that no employee was allowed to complain about the unethical practices that were going on within the branch,” ex-plained one former personal banker at a Wells Fargo branch. The compa-ny’s singular focus on sales targets and profit margins contributed to its management’s willful ignorance of malpractice.

Your company’s internal communications can uphold your employer brand or render it meaningless. Do everything in your power to ensure that it’s the former.

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Recruiting is significantly impacted by your employer brand

Companies worldwide are experiencing the biggest talent shortage in over 10 years. Because job seekers are in the driver’s seat, they can demand far more than competitive salaries.

Experience, breadth, depth, development, and growth opportunities are among the chief demands that mod-ern job seekers have in mind when they’re looking for jobs. Whether your company can deliver on some, most, or all of those demands, the messaging should be trans-parent from the very start.

Recruiting is competitive and expensive, but if your company’s employer brand is negative, they’ll have to pay candidates at least 10% more in order to hire them.

As a result, “organizations must make talent strategy a key priority and take steps now to educate, train, and upskill their existing workforces,” says Yannick Binvel of Korn Ferry, an international management consulting firm.

Think of your company’s employer brand as an account-ability measure: it’s your company’s promise to act and react in a certain way, the yardstick your company chooses to be measured by. If you’re honest with peo-ple before they start working for you and then deliver on your promises, they’ll be more likely to trust you.

Now that you understand a few of the factors that con-tribute to every company’s employer brand, it’s time to assess your company’s employer brand.

“ Think of your company’s employer brand as an accountability measure: it’s your company’s promise to act and react in a certain way, the yardstick your company chooses to be measured by.”

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33Conduct an employer brand audit

Transparency in employer branding is crucial, especially because popular sites like Glassdoor provide a public forum for job candidates, employees, and alumni to speak candidly about their experience with employers.

If your company doesn’t already have a Glassdoor ac-count, make one now so you can track new reviews and customize your company’s profile. By updating your company’s Glassdoor page, you can quickly and easily signal to job seekers that your company is proactive about hiring.

While you’re there, check out your talent competitors’ Glassdoor profiles. Your talent competitors are any com-panies filling the same types of positions that you are. If your company has a brick and mortar office in Amster-dam, then your talent competitors are other employers in the city that are hiring for similar roles. If your compa-ny is a startup and offers remote work options, you’ll be competing with a larger number of talent competitors in a larger pool of talent.

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Research your talent competitors

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Identify your competitive advantage

“Employment branding isn’t just another HR phrase or word—it’s the only way for companies in the digi-tal age to provide the transparency required by job seekers and portray their brands accurately in the market to potential employees,” writes John Wilson, CEO of WilsonHCG.

Whether or not you have formal tools to measure your findings, we recommend treating your employer brand audit like design research. Adopting a design research mindset can give you the mental flexibility to view your employer brand from an outside perspective and approach it as an iterative and collaborative process.

Check out InVision’s Quick Guide to Design Research if you want to learn more about design research before getting started.

Your first order of business is to identify your company’s compet-itive advantage as an employer. Consider doing one or more of the following in order learn what

people inside and outside your organization think about it:

Survey your employees regularly with

feedback tools like OfficeVibe

Conduct one-on-one research

interviews with current and exiting

employees

Solicit anonymous onboarding and

offboarding feedback

If your company’s employer brand weaknesses are glaringly obvious, chances are good that everyone already knows what they are. But identifying what’s common knowl-edge isn’t enough. Your research efforts can shine light on areas that merit attention but don’t necessarily stand out as obvious opportunities to make an impactful change.

Recognition programs like Bonusly can help you zero in on the company values people are being recognized for most frequently.

Whether you find out by asking directly or by reading Glassdoor reviews, you need to determine what you do and don’t offer to meet your employees’ needs. During your research, be on the lookout for any mention of the three factors the Harvard Business Review identifies as having the greatest impact on an employer’s reputation:

1. Stability

2. Opportunities for career growth

3. The ability to work with a top-notch team

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Stability

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Your coworkers want to know that their jobs are stable. If your compa-ny is transparent about its financial situation, even if that situation is rocky, then you won’t have anything to hide.

This goes back to the importance of internal communications that we mentioned earlier.

If your leaders aren’t open and honest about how the business is doing, rumors will spread and your company’s employer brand will suffer. Just keep Winston Churchill’s adage in mind: “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

Is your company’s employer brand what you want it to be? If you aren’t proud of the truth, take the necessary steps to change it.

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Opportunities for career growth

Does your company support everyone’s personal and professional development? Do managers mentor, train, and promote entry-level employees, or do people typically have to leave your organization in order to advance?

Your teammates will feel more engaged and motivated if they can see clear paths for career growth at your company. Whether your organization offers a professional development stipend, builds an accessible resource library, or hosts frequent knowledge-shar-ing events, you can champion your coworkers’ professional goals and help your employer follow through on its commitments to them.

If your company has a track record of keeping its promises to its peo-ple, communicating your employer brand will be a much simpler task.

“Your teammates will feel more engaged and motivated if they can see clear paths for career growth at your company.”

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Ability to work with a top-notch team

Modern employees want to be part of top-notch teams. They want their employers to treat their employees with respect and hire leaders in their fields, people they can learn from and grow with.

In tech, companies that make lop-sided or hasty investments in their teams are easy to spot: they sing the praises of their engineers and developers but seem to consider their sales and customer support reps a dime a dozen. Companies with robust, well-rounded employer brands invest time and money in

every department and encourage their leaders to be vocal champions, making sure that every team knows how valuable they are and how in-valuable every other team is, as well.

“When you take the time to hire slow,” writes employer brand expert Laurel Mintz, “the process can be arduous for both you and your slate of candidates. However, by slowing things down, you can see which can-didates stay right alongside you the whole time, showing their dedica-tion and desire for the job you have available.”

If hiring slowly hasn’t been a part of your company culture, consider engaging your entire team in the hiring process. You’ll help them feel ownership of your company culture

and distribute the responsibilities so that hiring isn’t such a burdensome process.

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Identify your employee value proposition

It can be hard to distinguish em-ployee value proposition (EVP) from employer brand, so let’s compare them here:

An organization’s employee val-ue proposition is the collection of values and benefits it offers to its employees in return for their work. An organization’s employer brand is how it communicates and markets its EVP and workplace culture, both internally and externally, to hire and retain what exaqueo calls “best-fit talent.”

In his piece for Forbes, author Rodd Wagner points out that the term “employee value proposition” puts the burden on companies to develop the value proposition, not the other way around. With a little planning, you can transform this burden into an opportunity.

To identify your EVP, evaluate the data you gathered during your employer brand audit, including OfficeVibe surveys and employee interviews.

Once you’ve compiled a representa-tive group of responses, you’ll have a better sense of your EVP. If there are negative components to your findings, don’t worry! It’s great that you singled them out now and not further down the line. You’re ready to head in the right direction and this guide will help you get there.

Look for answers to the following questions:

How do your employees perceive your company’s mission? What do they have to say about how their day-to-day

work is influenced by your company’s values, and vice versa? What do you offer your employees that sets you apart as an employer?

For more on developing your EVP, check out this LinkHumans case study on L’Oreal.

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Review your design system

It’s important to have a strong de-sign system before you undertake any new employer branding.

If you’re coming at this from a mar-keting perspective, you’re probably familiar with your organization’s design system. The Piktochart tem-plates we offer throughout this guide are customizable, so you can adapt them to suit your brand guidelines.

If you’re not familiar or comfortable with your organization’s design system, link up with a coworker who is and include them as a stakeholder in your project! Employer branding efforts are stronger when they in-clude multiple perspectives, so don’t be wary of asking for help!

Here are few design system ele-ments you’ll want to have:

Once you have all these elements at your disposal, it’s time for the cre-ative work to start!

Your brand’s typeface and font

usage guidelines

Your brand’s hex codes

Your brand’s logo

Your brand’s photography and

illustration guidelines

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44Crafting your employer brand throughout your employee lifecycle

There are many touch points throughout the employee

lifecycle that are prime opportunities to get creative with your employer brand. In this section, we’ll help you evaluate these opportunities and decide where to allo-cate your resources.

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Talent acquisition

Recruitment and talent acquisition are important focus areas for any employer brand efforts.

Job postings and recruitment material are often a candidate’s first interaction with your organization. However, your employer brand only makes sense when you have buy-in from your current employees.

Check out this Twitter thread from Cap Watkins, former VP of Design at Buzzfeed:

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Watkins points out how difficult it is for organizations to update their internal recruiting practices.

“It requires a reset of values, incentives, etc. for any and every team/person involved,” he writes.

What follows are a few ways to start updating your company’s recruiting practices:

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Revisit your careers site and “about us” page

You want to make a good impres-sion on customers visiting your website, right? The same should be true for potential employees!

The quality of your careers site and your “about us” page signals how serious you are about finding new talent, which is why they should communicate everything prospec-tive candidates need to know about working at your company.

Your website is just one of the realms where HR and strategic business objectives coexist. When companies refer to their online job

listings as a “careers site,” not a “jobs site,” the underlying message is always: You can grow and build your career at this company.

Check out these four companies’ careers pages and note what sticks out to you:

Did you notice the strong mission statement on KIPP LA’s site? It’s not a text-heavy page, but they make every word count: “Across Los Angeles, KIPP LA is proving that demographics do not deter-mine destiny and that students from our most underserved communities can and will achieve at the highest levels.”

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How about the welcoming message on Chobani’s page?

“Come as you are, and become the best you,” is a pretty inspiring way to start your job search experience with this innovative food company.

ZipRecruiter gets right to the point with the tagline “Let’s get to work,” and lets visitors know exactly what the company’s EVP is before even mention-ing what positions are open.

Did you respond to the simple statement and graphic imagery on Inter-com’s jobs site? It’s in keeping with the visual and written communications elsewhere on their site, but even for first-time visitors, “Be you at Inter-com,” clearly communicates that this is a forward-thinking company that welcomes all kinds of people.

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After looking to other companies for inspiration, consider what sets your company apart as an employer. If those qualities aren’t highlighted on your careers site and “about us” page, then you know where to start.

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Involve your employees in your social media recruitment strategy

Whether you’re hosting your job openings on your own site or posting them on Indeed, AngelList, ZipRecruiter, or another third-party jobs site, social media can be a great way to amplify job postings. Betterteam reports that “94% of professional recruiters network on social media and use it to post jobs.

What’s more, “59% of employees say a company’s social media presence was part of the reason they chose their workplace.”

Post job listings from your company’s accounts and let your employees know how to share them from their personal accounts. FastCompany explains that content shared by employees gets eight times more engagement than content shared by brand channels and. It gets reshared 25 times more often, too.

We’ve put together this job recruitment template to make it easier for your team to share:

of professional recruiters

network on social media94%

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TRY THIS TEMPLATE

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Make your employees the heroes of your content efforts

The credibility of regular employees has increased dramatically, ahead of the CEO. According to the 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer, “employees are the most credible voices on multiple topics, including the company’s work environment, integrity, innovation and business practices.”

Center your employees in your employer brand storytelling. For example, if your business goals require growing your design team five fold, then start telling the stories of your design team. What about your organization appealed to your current designers? Let them describe what drew them to and keeps them with your company.

When you produce employee stories, which you can easily do with our employee story template, you’re highlighting your company’s pride in its employees. Tell your coworkers’ stories well and they’ll want to share those stories with their friends, family, and acquaintances.

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Craft your CEO’s story

Harvard Business Review found that 60% of CEOs and 40% of marketers believe the primary responsibility for employer brand lies with the CEO.

They play a major role in defining your company culture, serving as your “company’s mascot, head cheerleader, and the face of your employer brand.”

If you haven’t already, it’s time to craft your CEO’s story. If they’re a founder, their story should answer the ‘why’ of your company, i.e., what problem was your CEO trying to solve or what need were they trying to meet?

Their story should include a vision for the company and offer a sneak peek into the company’s future. Check out this blog post from Piktochart’s CEO for an example.

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60%

40%

Marketers

CEOs

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Lead with your company values

Think critically about your minimum requirements

List out work perks

Be transparent about your interview process

Include a section about your company culture, including photos, social feeds, Glassdoor links

Use Textio to avoid bias and encourage diverse groups to apply to your company

Tell stories with your job postings

Your job postings are a strategic opportunity to communicate your employer brand. Intercom’s career page tells a compelling story about the who, what, and why of their company, which humanizes the brand through relationships.

Don’t miss your chance to tell your story.

ERE recommends helping candidates feel what it’s like to work at your company.

To do that, describe what their workplace experience would be like, how they’d personally benefit from working at your company, and what

kind of impact they could have.

Here are a few simple things MaRS recommends including in your job postings:

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Build an intentional candidate experience

Candidate experience doesn’t just matter for the people you’ll eventually hire. When people look at your careers page or apply to work at your company, what they see and read will influence how they feel about your company.

If you’re a B2C business, they might already be your customers. You certainly don’t want to lose their business if you decide not to hire them.

In 2014, Virgin Media surveyed its rejected candidates and found that 18% were their customers. As a di-rect result of the company’s poor candidate experience, 6% of all ap-plicants, or 7,500 people, canceled their memberships. The company’s weak employer brand cost them roughly $6.2 million in lost revenue, almost as much as their annual re-cruiting budget, J.T. O’Donnell re-ports in Fast Company.

To remedy its candidate experi-ence, Virgin started working with Ph Creative, an employer branding and candidate experience firm. They

offered free and accessible resourc-es designed for job seekers, even if those job seekers weren’t applying to positions at Virgin.

“Ultimately,” O’Donnell writes, “the candidate experience is a form of customer service. The better you are at delighting candidates – in-cluding the ones you turn away – the more money you stand to make.”

Glossier, a direct-to-consumer beauty line, built its unique employer brand by treating job candidates as customers:

When founder and CEO Emily Weiss started Into the Gloss, a beauty and skincare blog, she focused on building a community for its enthusiastic readers. The readers who were active in the comments section were the first people she interviewed when she started developing Glossier products.

Then, they became employees: “Most Glossier employees started

out as customers. Which is why the team naturally takes a customer-minded approach to the work each and every day.”

Are your recruiting communica-tions consistent with your company values? If you tout “kindness” as a company value but send curt follow-up emails to interview candidates, they’ll notice your shift in tone.

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Encourage employee and customer referrals

Make it easy for your employees and your customers to refer people to work at your company.

Make it rewarding, too!

Public recognition of employees who make successful referrals can be motivating and show everyone how much you’re invested in finding the right people to work for you.

Here are a few ideas that are relatively easy to execute and track:

List open positions in your company’s internal newsletter and include information about your employee referral program if you have one

Hang posters in common areas that highlight how employees can influence your company’s culture by referring qualified friends and family

Include a link to your careers page in marketing emails

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Attend career fairs

Career fairs are a great place to test out your employer brand strategy, particularly if you’re looking to fill entry-level positions. Job seekers will be there, and you’ll have multi-ple opportunities to hone your com-munications.

If you decide to attend career fairs, here are a few templates you can use to produce visuals so your table or booth looks sharp:

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TRY THESE TEMPLATES

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Onboarding

Employer branding doesn’t stop at hiring. In fact, it’s critical for market-ing, HR, and operations to facilitate new employees as they transition from candidates to coworkers.

Depending on your company’s hiring process, maintaining open lines of communication might be a department lead’s responsibility, but HR and marketing can support those efforts and ensure that some things are standardized for every new em-ployee.

Make sure your new employees get a chance to connect with your company’s leaders in their first weeks. Block a recurring half hour on your CEO’s/department head’s schedule every week for a new hire meeting or work a coffee chat with the CEO into each employee’s onboarding schedule. It’s important for your CEO as the employer brand cheerleader to be involved in help-ing new employees feel welcome.

Here are a few other things you can do to orient your new employees:

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Establish consistency across all communications

Communicate your company’s values

Pair new hires with employees

Weave your employer brand into your employee handbook

Announce new hires and help them feel welcome

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Establish consistency across all communications

All departments have their communication differences. Your Customer Success team might take an entirely different approach than your Product team, for instance. That’s natural!

But it’s no excuse for one employee getting invites to every service they’ll need on their first day and another employee having to ask for it. Produce an onboarding checklist and company introduction infographic that every manager can reference and share with their new hires.

Communicate operations-specific information (eg health insurance, 401k, building info, benefits packages) in a style that’s in keeping with the overall company brand. Chobani’s employee brochures are an inspiring example of a company carrying its consumer brand over into its employer branding.

Try updating your operations manual with these ideas in mind.

Here are two templates to help you get started:

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Communicate your company’s values

Let’s say your company values are Trust, Curiosity, Teamwork, and Kindness. Those are great values but simply stating them isn’t enough.

Here are a few initiatives to consider depending on the resources you have at your disposal:

Establish a recognition system that ties recognition to your company values. It can be a great resource for employees to learn about what these values look like in action.

Make posters with pictures of your employees exhibiting these values. The pictures can be posed or candid. To illustrate kindness, for instance, you could feature an image of your team on their most recent volunteer outing.

Use social media to share examples of your company values. Your Instagram account could be dedicated to images that illustrate trust, curiosity, teamwork, and kindness.

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Do you have an onboarding mentorship or buddy program?

Even an informal system for new employees to spend an hour or two with veteran employees who are enthusiastic employer brand advocates could have a major impact.

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Pair new hires with employees

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Your employee handbook is a great opportunity to communicate your company culture.

Check out Intercom’s employee handbook, which they designed to look and feel like a children’s book. It’s playful and values-driven, which reflects their culture really well.

Netflix’s now-famous Culture Deck was originally designed as an internal document. It’s now been viewed over 18 million times on SlideShare. (The company has since updated the Culture Deck, which you can view here.)

Include information about your company values, and emphasize the reasoning behind your signature policies.

If your company encourages everyone to take a minimum of three weeks paid vacation each year, explain why!

By approaching it as an employer branding exercise, you can ensure everyone understands that your employee handbook isn’t lip service.

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Weave your employer brand into your employee handbook

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Announce new hires and help them feel welcome

Announce new hires verbally at the lunch table or in a company-wide email.

If you want to get a little more creative, ask your incoming employees to write a little blurb about themselves so that your team can get to know them and even formulate some questions to ask them on their first day!

Here’s a few questions you can start with:

Including a blurb from the person who hired them about why they hired them is also a nice touch.

At Piktochart, every new employee creates a Piktochart presentation about themselves that includes their likes/dislikes, hobbies, and also (most interestingly) a timeline of their ups and downs, which really showcases their personal journeys. They present it company-wide during their first week.

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Where are you coming

from?

Why did you choose to work here?

What’s a passion of yours that you hope to bring to work?

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Growth/retention Recognize team members who live your company values

In the growth and retention phase of the employee lifecycle, you can nur-ture mutual goodwill between your employer and employees.

By communicating your company’s values via recognition and encouraging your employees to be public advocates for your company, you can experience and experiment with your employer brand.

Employees who feel valued are more present, productive, and innovative. The difference between weekly and daily recognition increases the number of satisfied employees from 85 to 94%.

By linking employee recognition to your company’s values, you can increase the incidence of desirable behaviors and have a direct impact on your company’s overall culture, strengthening your employer brand by encouraging behavior that upholds it.

Employees want to know that their leaders value them but two-thirds of employees don’t believe that their leaders support recognition programs. The positive feedback loop recognition programs create will help your teammates understand that your company invests and believes in them.

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Ask for employee reviews on sites like Glassdoor

Encourage employees to become your employer brand advocates

You can solicit employee reviews on Glassdoor and add your own information.

If you haven’t already, start actively soliciting requests for employer reviews and have your CEO respond personally to negative and positive feedback. Make your profile more engaging by posting high-quality images and meaningful updates on company activities and community involvement.

When in doubt, always go back to

your employee value proposition and company values. Those should be your guiding principles when you’re deciding what stories to tell and how to tell them.

Help your employees talk about your brand.

Fast Company recommends that companies “lay out guidelines for how employees should talk about the company on their accounts.”

You can come up with suggested captions for posts or run internal campaigns with hashtags — check

out #lifeatexpedia on Instagram, which has over 22,000 posts, and #careersathilton for inspiration.

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Offboarding

Offboarding can be fraught. Whether your employer brand is strong or weak, it will be made clear during this time.

Cap Watkins shared this piece on Medium about his reasoning for leaving Buzzfeed. In it, he sings the praises of Buzzfeed’s management strategy and wishes the company nothing but the best in the future. He makes it clear that the company set him up for success and that the departure was one that made sense for everyone.

Not every departing employee will write something as detailed and commending as Cap did, which is why you should set up an exit survey to capture their impressions, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Check out this exit survey template by SurveyMonkey.

If you provide support for employees who are moving on and have shown from day one that their professional development is of paramount importance, they can leave your company and continue to be a great source for referrals and even continue to act as employer brand advocates.

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5Evaluating your efforts

The value of your employer brand lies in its power to attract, engage, and retain talent.

To measure the effectiveness of your company’s employer brand, track employee engagement, employee retention, number of applicants, time to hire, and cost per hire.

You can learn a lot from qualitative data points, too. Use this survey template by Typeform to ask job candidates about their experience during the hiring process, and turn it into a beautiful Piktochart infographic with this template.

You can also conduct periodic employee pulse surveys to see how your employer brand permeates throughout your company.

Even asking “would you encourage your friends to work here?” can give you a quick sense of where you stand.

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66Moving forward

Creatively and effectively communicating your employer brand isn’t a small project, but you’ve taken a huge step forward by reading this guide.

Take a few days to reflect on what you’ve read. See which ideas from this guide stick with you and consider tackling those initiatives first. Starting small will help you be bolstered by your successes and take your missteps in stride.

Track your progress and evaluate your efforts with the metrics we mentioned in the last section and you’ll start to see how understanding and communicating your employer brand has the power to impact all of

your business objectives.

Don’t be a stranger! Please let us know what you’re working on and be sure to share your creative employer branding ideas with us if there’s something we overlooked!

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About us

BonuslyWhen our co-founder and CEO Raphael Crawford-Marks was working as an engineer at a New York tech company, he felt like he and his coworkers didn’t receive recognition often enough. It wasn’t that he wanted to be told he was doing a good job; he wanted to be able to frequently recognize his coworkers in a meaningful way.

Our co-founder John Quinn realized that as a manager, he wasn’t able to witness and recognize all the contributions his team members were making. Together, Raphael and John envisioned and began building Bonusly.

Today, thousands of companies around the world use Bonusly every day to stay connected and celebrate wins of all sizes. We want to help everyone love their work, starting with making recognition fun. For us and our customers, the people-first vision of the Bonusly product shows prominently in countless other practices and intentional enhancements throughout the employee experience.

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About us

Piktochart“No more Monday blues.” Written down on a piece of a paper back in 2011, little did our co-founders Ai Ching Goh and Andrea Zaggia know that those four words would mark the beginning of an incredibly exciting and rewarding journey. All they knew was that they wanted to work in a place where two things mattered: people and communication.

The initial idea of helping a select few clients communicate with greater (visual) impact soon paves the way for a bigger mission: to put visual prowess in everyone’s hands – which led to the birth of our first do-it-yourself infographics maker, Piktochart.

Its mission: To empower people around the globe to tell powerful visual stories that matter.

Fast-forward to today, Piktochart has blossomed into a wonderful bunch of more than 50 curious people who passionately work toward that same mission to help more than 12 million users around the globe to tell amaz-ing visual stories.

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Piktochart is a simple, intuitive tool that helps you tell your story with the visual impact it deserves – serving more than 12 million users worldwide.

Get started with a free Piktochart PRO Plan for 30 days! Use the code “BRANDING30” here.*valid until Jan 31st, 2019

Looking to collaborate with your team? Try Piktochart for Teams for free here.

Bonusly is a fun, personal recognition and rewards platform that enriches your company culture and improves employee engagement. With Bonusly, you can build a scalable culture of recognition by empowering everyone to recognize their peers, direct

reports, and managers.

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Try Bonusly with your team free for the first 60 days! Just use the code “BRANDING60” when you sign up here.

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