Does Business Branding Matter When Searching for the Ideal Candidate?

It may not seem like your corporate brand would play a role in attracting candidates, but the two have more to do with each other than you may realize. If you want an ongoing line-up of qualified candidates for positions within your company, you need to focus on building your brand. Why does branding really matter?

How Business Branding Matters in Recruitment

Many employers are realizing the importance of corporate branding. They are even working to improve their branding strategy in this light or have already done so. The question you should be asking is how to implement this for your own organization.

One way to see the impact of branding on your pull for qualified talent is to look at a survey conducted by LinkedIn. In a report called The State of Employer Brand, employees stated that they are concerned about their employer’s brand. In fact, 83 percent of employers believed that a good brand was important to luring in qualified candidates. What other figures should you know?

• You may be able to reduce recruitment costs, according to the report, by building your brand, even as much as 50 percent.
• More than half of those employers in the survey stated they took active steps to improve their brand directly because of hiring needs.
• In 61 percent of the cases, the decision to invest in an updated brand was due, at least in part, on recruitment efforts.

The Link Between Human Resources and Branding

Though you may let your marketing department handle most of the branding efforts in your organization, do not leave out the human resource department. This team is just as important to your branding efforts.

What Should Your Corporate Brand Be?

Keeping this in mind, you need to focus on building a brand that attracts attention by candidates. There are three areas to focus on:

• Your business plan shows where you want your business to grow. It shows the company’s mission statement and goals.
• Your workforce plan helps to show the skillsets and candidate background that you need from employees to achieve goals. This will help you to focus on a brand that will appeal to your ideal candidate.
• The employer branding plan needs to combine the first two elements above to create an overall plan that meshes together recruitment and marketing.

Finding the balance can be a challenge. Yet, by ensuring your employees are at least a component of your branding efforts, you’ll attract better candidates.