Richard Mosley

Building an engaged network on Twitter can have a huge positive impact on your employer brand’s recruiting efforts, particularly if you’re recruiting in fields such as knowledge workers, who tend to flock to Twitter. It’s an open platform, meaning anyone can see any content without necessarily following the account, so tweets have the potential of reaching a wider audience.

When you have a clear idea of the look, feel, and function of your employer brand and career website, you’re ready to turn your attention to the most important component of any website — content. As you gather and create content for your website, follow these guidelines: Align your content with your employer value proposition.

Once you’ve made an offer and it’s been accepted, you may think that you can take your foot off the employer brand marketing pedal. Nothing could be further from the truth. Onboarding talent in the right way is just as important as recruiting the right talent. If you succeed, high expectations will fast-forward into high engagement and high performance.

Customer experience is an important part of employer branding. People often take for granted the planning and discipline required to deliver an excellent customer experience. When companies get this right, it often feels easy and natural, much like a great athletic performance, but it generally takes considerable effort to deliver a quality experience on a consistent basis.

Your employer brand can’t afford to neglect Facebook. Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla of the social media world, and because the platform is so powerful and influential, your company needs to be on Facebook. After all, about 20 percent of the world’s population is on Facebook, providing you with an incredible opportunity and tool to build your employer brand.

LinkedIn is typically the first tool in most organizations’ employer branding portfolios. It’s certainly no stranger to recruiting, with more than 90 percent of recruiters using the platform to find talent.If you want step-by-step instruction on how to use LinkedIn, consult LinkedIn’s online help system or check out LinkedIn For Dummies, 4th Edition, by Joel Elad (Wiley).

When you need to raise the search engine ranking for your employer brand in a hurry or you’re looking for a way to more effectively target certain talent, consider paying for a higher search engine ranking.With SEM, such as Google AdWords, you can target or exclude geographical areas, set your daily budget and how much you’re willing to pay per click, create your own ad(s), and specify the keywords and phrases you want to trigger your ad(s) appearing in the search results.

The employer brand forms one branch of the overall brand tree. The trunk of this tree is the corporate brand, which includes those elements (including core values and identity guidelines) that should ideally be reflected in every branch of brand communication (to current and future employees, customers, investors, business partners, and other key stakeholder groups).

Traditionally, recruitment advertising was the primary means by which organizations built their employer brands, but this approach is quickly becoming less effective as demand for a richer, more diverse range of marketing content grows. If you’re looking for reasons to ditch old-school recruitment advertising to free up resources for generating more engaging content, you’ll find plenty.