Employer Brand Audit: Candidate Experience, Reviews and Ratings
Simply Hired Staff
The first phase of your employer brand health audit focused on how prospective job candidates experience your company website, career pages and mobile presentation. The second phase takes into account the quality and authenticity of your company’s digital relationship with current and former employees, word of mouth and overall Internet presence.
People place more trust in peers than in leadership and current employees, so monitoring and influencing your company’s Internet presence will have a powerful effect on your recruiting efforts. Understanding the story that customers and employees are telling about your company can help you influence how that story moves forward with potential employees, press, vendors and community leaders.
Here are three areas of employer brand health that you should factor into your next audit:
Does our social presence accurately reflect our brand?
The purpose of social media is to share a side of your company that you don’t share elsewhere: its personality and its unique approach to business. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It needs to present an authentic view of what your company values and how you do business.
When you audit your company’s social media presence, use listening tools such as Klout, Social Mention, and TrendsMap to understand where your brand or industry fits into the global social landscape. Then take a look at your actual social media channels. Do you post with a consistent frequency? Do your customers and prospective customers engage with what you post? Are you posting about your brand or about your industry? (Keep in mind that the right mix is 80-20.) If the answer to each of these questions isn’t positive, you’ll want to invest some time in building and maintaining your social presence.
How does our candidate experience measure up?
Because company culture is so closely connected to human resources leadership, it can be uncomfortable to take an honest look at your current candidate experience. But honest feedback is incredibly valuable. Facilitating honest feedback can increase employee morale in the short-term and reveal unexpected insights that provide long-term returns.
Use your current employees’ varied backgrounds to source honest feedback about how their current situation compares to past experiences. Create a short survey for employees to complete during the workday and submit anonymously. Ask candidates to rate different factors about the company compared with their experience at other similar companies, including the physical workplace environment, the quality of the work, customer relationships and how their interview experience measured up to actually working at the company.
Do our reviews and ratings accurately reflect our company culture?
Bad reviews aren’t all bad news. You can use them to benefit your brand by interpreting them as constructive criticism. Taking into account the bias that can occur among employees who were let go and company defenders, aggregating that information can reveal hidden perspectives you might otherwise not consider as you evaluate your employer brand.
After reviewing your company’s current online reviews, make a plan for how to address them. If the results of your review indicate that your company culture is accurately represented online, you may simply want to continue doing what you’re doing. If the results indicate that your culture is not accurately represented, you’ll want to consider implementing a strategy to make up that difference. This may include addressing bad reviews with prospective job candidates or taking preventive measures to help employees honestly voice their opinions while employed or in exit interviews.
Closely analyzing your employer brand health can be uncomfortable. However, it offers exponential potential for growth. Invest time in an employer brand health audit to identify areas for growth that can impact your recruiting efforts.
