The Savvy HR Team’s Employer Brand Checklist
Simply Hired Staff
Have you implemented all of our employer brand tips over the past month? Of course not. The minute you finished reading, a hundred things around the office popped up and took precedence.
Fortunately, you don’t have to read through all of the articles again to remember your favorite points and get started with your new brand-building habits. Here’s a handy checklist with all of our best ideas to help you take control of your employer brand and organize your to-dos.
Do you feel confident in your ability to monitor and respond to negative news and online reviews? And does your company website accurately reflect the values and benefits your company brings to the table as an employer? There’s no way to be sure unless you’re proactively monitoring and updating your web presence and website with the following best practices:
Online Reputation
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Perform a simple web search such as “your company + hiring,” “your company + new job,” “your company + rating,” “your company + online review,” “your company + employee review” and analyze the search return the way a prospective hire would.
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Prepare a well-framed response to negative reviews for prospective candidates.
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Set up a Google Alert for different variations of your brand’s name.
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Use a social media planning tool such as HubSpot, HootSuite or BufferApp to schedule your posts, monitor your engagement and “listen” for particular words or hashtags that are pertinent to your industry.
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Use a platform like Social Mention, Tagboard and Tweetreach to gather data about a specific product, service, keyword or job opening.
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Tune into a social intelligence service such as SocialRest, Datasift or TrueVoice to analyze sentiment across the web and tie your social and content efforts directly to the value of prospective job candidates.
Company Website
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Optimize your website for jobseekers by including conversation points such as recent press mentions, awards, acquisitions and goals.
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Develop in-depth career pages that offer honest and accurate insight into your company culture.
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Add photos of employees working and enjoying themselves.
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Include historic infographics, team biographies and detailed benefits that build a clear vision of your company.
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Use tools such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider and Page Authority Checker to zero in on ways to improve your SEO quality and attract more jobseekers.
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Use HubSpot’s Marketing Grader to analyze what kind of information Google and prospective job candidates get from your site.
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Complete a website evaluation checklist for three or four of your competitors and then use it to evaluate your website.
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Use Google’s Webmaster Tools to review your mobile website analytics and identify missed opportunities for jobseekers and prospective employees.
While your employer brand has the most direct impact on prospective hires, you can do a lot of preventative maintenance by investing in your reputation with current employees. Here are our best recommendations for starting the conversation within your organization and using the results to better your Employer Brand.
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Use a free online survey tool such as SurveyMonkey, Zoomerang or SurveyGizmo to create and automate surveys that will take the internal temperature of employee sentiment at your company.
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Update your exit interview strategy to specifically include opportunities for employees to vent their grievances in person rather than taking their negative feelings with them when they go.
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If you’re not getting a lot of negative feedback in your exit interviews, consider asking the employee to opt into an anonymous group survey from you 30 days after they leave the company to extract more honest (and actionable) information when the employee has some distance from the position.
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Establish an atmosphere of constant feedback and conversation between HR, new employees and existing employees to create a company culture that’s harder to complain about.
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Educate and communicate with your team about what to do when employees hear or see something that might affect the company’s employer brand.
As you implement these changes, you’ll want to track specific metrics that can help you understand how your employer brand is changing over time. Here are seven metrics you should track to monitor the impact of your efforts.
Employee retention rate
The more you work on the pillars of your employer brand, such as attracting the right candidates and living out the company’s belief system, the higher your retention rate should climb.
Cost-per-hire
The more accurate and positive your company’s hiring pages and the better your word-of-mouth reputation become, the lower this metric should sink.
Employee referrals
The more authentic your workplace becomes and the more you hire employees who match it, the more referrals you should see coming from those employees.
Simply Hired’s Employer Brand Index
Simply Hired’s Employer Brand Index allows you to see how other brands perform over time in the top 25 Trending Now scores. You can track your own progress on the index to see how your employer brand is translating into more clicks and views for your company’s open positions.
Mentions per month, quarter and year
Monitor your Google Alerts for press mentions, employee reviews and other mentions for your brand. Track how many mentions you receive each month, quarter and year to catch identifiable trends as they develop.
Social media “scores”
If your organization generates a good deal of content, use its social media “score” from platforms such as Klout to track general reach and progress. These scores are not directly tied to your employer brand, but they can be a good measure of your brand’s authority and market saturation within its industry.
Ongoing surveys
As you continue to deliver internal surveys to your employees, track the results over time to see how the changes you implement and the work you do affects your employees’ perceptions and sentiments.
