How to boost your employer brand with Employee Advocacy?

In a time of skills competition, a strong employer branding strategy has become essential for every company.

This approach, which consists of managing and influencing your reputation as an employer, includes everything you do to position yourself as a company of choice!

1. The challenges of the employer brand

For the record, employer branding is the image and reputation of a company as an employer among its current and future employees.

The issues are multiple and can have a significant impact on a company’s ability to attract and retain qualified talent. Some of the key challenges include:

Attracting the best talents

To achieve this, the company must develop a strong and attractive employer brand that attracts the most qualified candidates. How do you attract them?

First of all, with competitive advantages such as competitive salaries, benefits, flexible working hours, training and professional development opportunities, a pleasant working environment, a strong corporate culture and a clear vision.

A company’s values and goals are also two elements that help attract candidates who share these aspects and help increase the chances of long-term success for the company and its employees.

Retaining employees

High staff turnover can have a negative impact on the company’s reputation as an employer. If employees have a bad work experience or leave the company quickly, it can negatively affect the company’s employer brand.

A strong employer brand can help to create a positive and motivating work environment for current employees, which can contribute to their retention by creating a sense of belonging and strengthening their attachment to the company.

Staying competitive in the workplace

The employment environment is constantly changing, especially in terms of recruitment and talent management. Companies need to be able to adapt to these changes and remain competitive in the marketplace to attract the best talent.

Unsurprisingly, in 2023, competition for skilled talent is increasing, particularly in sectors such as technology, marketing and innovation. Potential candidates often have several job offers to choose from, so they are likely to gravitate towards companies that offer the best benefits and working conditions.

Thus, to remain competitive in the marketplace, companies must strive to offer attractive benefits and career development opportunities, while creating a strong company culture and an enjoyable work experience.

Building a strong brand image

The fourth key challenge of employer branding is building a strong brand image that contributes to its business reputation and brand awareness (attractive, responsible and committed employer).

Customers and business partners are often sensitive to a company’s brand image. Indeed, a company with a strong employer brand can be perceived as being more reliable, competent and concerned about the quality of its work.

Furthermore, by communicating its values, the company can help to strengthen business relationships with like-minded customers and partners.

Finally, by enhancing the company’s image as a key player in its industry, the company will attract new customers and business partners.

2. The benefits of employer branding

Increase in the number of candidates

Well-known companies attract more unsolicited applications and have more applicants for their vacancies, offering a better final choice.

By highlighting the benefits and opportunities it offers, and how it invests in the development of its employees, the company creates a positive image in the minds of potential candidates. This can result in an increase in the number of applications, as candidates are more likely to apply for a company they perceive as a good employer.

Reducing the cost of recruitment

On the one hand, there is a reduction in the cost of recruiting and training new employees by satisfying current employees: those who are satisfied with their work, feel valued and are proud of their company are more likely to stay with the company in the long term.

Then there is the same cost reduction by attracting candidates organically (who are already interested in the company), rather than using expensive recruitment channels (advertising, headhunters) to attract qualified candidates.

Strengthening employee engagement

When employees perceive that their company has a strong employer brand, it can increase their sense of belonging to the company.

Proud and engaged, employees who are more aware of the company’s news take part in the external promotion of their company (via word of mouth to their entourage but also via their social networks). They are then more involved and productive.

Finally, by creating common values and communicating these values effectively, it will help to strengthen team cohesion and employee commitment to the company.

Improvement of the brand image

Good word of mouth from employees who are proud to work for their employer is a key lever for improving brand awareness.

Employees who are satisfied with their work and the environment in which they work are more likely to share positive experiences with their network of business and personal contacts, which can strengthen your brand and attract new, qualified talent.

A positive company culture, constructive feedback and a referral programme are just a few examples of how to encourage word of mouth from your employees to enhance your brand.

3. The difficulties of creating a strong employer brand

The main obstacle to the implementation of a strong employer brand is the difficulty in engaging employees, which can be explained by various reasons:

Lack of strategic understanding

Insufficient or ineffective internal communication can make it difficult to mobilise employees to support the employer brand.

Employees will not feel involved if they are not aware of the company’s employer brand strategy and their role in it.

Lack of alignment between stated and lived values

Many companies display values in their communication that employees do not always live in their daily lives, which creates a perverse effect.

Values may be displayed on paper, but if they are not integrated into the company’s policies and practices, employees may perceive a lack of consistency between what is said and what is done.

Le défaut d’encadrement et de management

A lack of communication, unclear expectations or strained relationships will directly impact on employees’ commitment to their company.

Ineffective management leaves employees uncertain about their operational role in the strategy.

Lack of recognition

Employees may not be motivated to engage with a strong employer brand strategy if they do not feel recognised or valued for their contribution.

To encourage employee engagement, it is essential to involve them early in the employer brand process, communicate regularly with them about progress and successes, recognise their contribution and create a corporate culture that encourages participation and collaboration.

4. How to respond to these challenges?

👉 Make the General Management aware of the challenge

A “Sponsor” present on the Management Board must take responsibility for communicating this challenge to the entire management.

👉 Name a project manager

Defining a person who will be responsible for the operational implementation of employer branding actions and for direct communication with employees will ensure their involvement and understanding of the project.

👉 Define objectives and allocate resources

The creation of an action plan with concrete projects to be implemented (definition of values, manager’s kit, communication tools) and a timetable for implementation will result in an organised and efficient approach.

👉 Involve all levels of the company

All levels of the company should be involved to ensure that the strategy is understood and adopted throughout the organisation. Local contacts can be identified and involved.

👉 Set up a reporting system

Monitoring the progress of actions and sharing this information with management and staff will help to maintain transparency and communication on progress.

Employee Advocacy to boost your employer brand

Inviting employees to become part of the communication, by spreading company content on their own social networks, by creating engagement and by getting involved in the creation of content, is the fundamental principle of an Employee Advocacy approach.

“Who better to talk about the company’s values and the conditions it offers than those who live them on a daily basis?”

The benefits of such a programme are multiple:

• Trust: according to the Edelman trust barometer, employees are the most trusted and influential source of information about the company.
• Audience: the cumulative audience of employees on social networks is 10x that of the company (Cisco study).
• Engagement: posts made by an individual generate 8x more engagement than those made by a brand (LinkedIn study).
• Employee experience: making employees actors in the organisation’s communication strengthens the feeling of belonging to the company and pride in being part of it.
• Cost reduction: companies where employees are recognised and where the employer brand is strong see their cost per hire decrease by 43% (LinkedIn study).

Key steps in deploying an Employee Advocacy strategy for employer branding

1. The different steps

• Identify challenges and goals
• Audit the existing situation
• Build the action plan
• Allocate human, technical and financial resources
• Create employer brand content
• Define performance monitoring KPIs
• Promote and highlight the employer brand

2. The ambassadors

• Identify employees who are already active on social networks
• Set up a “pilot” group
• Adopt a dedicated tool
• Train and support the pilot
• Deploy on a large scale
• Measure and adapt in continuous improvement mode

3. The editorial strategy

• Don’t just talk about the company and its products
• Spread the company’s values
• Share the company culture
• Information on the sector of activity, innovation…
• Suggesting job offers to be relayed

Make it easy to manage your employer brand strategy with Limber

The Limber platform facilitates the implementation of your employer branding strategy by gathering your company’s content and your monitoring in one place (company news, market watch articles, job offers, social posts…). This centralisation encourages your collaborators, employees and partners to share relevant, recent and verified content on their social networks such as LinkedIn or Twitter.

The advantages of an Employee Advocacy platform like Limber are multiple:

• Real-time monitoring of the performance of the process
• Automation of recurring publication actions
• Features to generate engagement (gamification)
• Implementation of employee contribution processes
• Multi-access: web, mobile, platforms and newsletter

💡 Discover the key steps to build a strong employer brand in this article.

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Limber has been designed to deploy your Leader / Employee Advocacy, Employer Brand and Social Selling strategies with ease. By encouraging your employees to share your content on their social networks, you can increase the size of your organic audience by up to 10 times and get up to 8 times the engagement rate.

Ready to get started?

💡 Discover the 5 key steps that will allow you to prepare, set up and optimise your Ambassador Collaborator programme over time.

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