" alt="">21.07.2015
How Important is your Company Brand to Recruitment
With Glassdoor’s Employees’ Choice Award winners revealed, we ask what value brand plays when it comes to recruitment.
Glassdoor recently revealed the results of its annual CEO Employees’ Choice Awards.
If you’re an employer who isn’t familiar with this website, you really should take a look. It shows hundreds of thousands of anonymously posted company reviews, all made by employees; many of which may even be your own.
For some this will be quite an alarming notion, but it’s one that got me thinking about how important a company’s brand really is when it comes to recruiting new talent.
Now I’m sure this won’t come as too much of a surprise when I tell you Larry Page was voted ‘best CEO to work for’, with Google also recently crowned ‘best place to work’ in the UK.
When Google wins any employment prize, unless you’re also running a top multinational, it’s become all too easy to simply dismiss the survey as uncontestable, but consider this: would you work for someone who finished near the bottom of the same survey? That’s what I thought.
With the emergence of websites like Glassdoor and social media firmly rooted in the fabric of our everyday lives, it’s never been easier for people to share their thoughts about your business – good or bad – and this can have huge implications on your company’s reputation and, in turn, ability to recruit.
It’s often said that strong brand equity leads to profit and it’s equally true that great people make great businesses. It’s also no coincidence that top company’s like Google, Apple and Nike have an abundance of both.
Top brands stand out in their marketplace as trusted leaders. They have simple, clearly defined visions and goals, meaning they can sell their organisation’s aspiration to potential employees much easier than most. But this doesn’t happen by accident.
The best businesses work extremely hard to get their organisational culture right. They reinforce it with each member of their staff over and over, taking every opportunity they can to make sure their company values are represented in all that they do.
If you often struggle to attract good quality job applicants, consider how hard you honestly work at this within your business.
Is your company vision clear? Are your brand values rooted throughout the very DNA of the organisation? Because this is what you need to try and achieve if you’re going to create long lasting relationships with employees that are built on trust.
I’ve been working in the recruitment industry for more than 15 years, supporting accountancy practices in their search to find and integrate the best talent into their organisations.
Being in the service sector myself, I know only too well the importance the right people play in being able to differentiate yourself against your competitors.
If you have a strong proposition and good, honest values, then the more consistent you can be across all aspects of your business, the more people will warm to you.
After all, the employees you want to recruit the most are also in high demand by your competitors.
If you want an army of passionate, engaged employees, then recruitment doesn’t start the day they see your job advertisement. It begins long before that, when they first read about you in a magazine like this one, or heard about the experience their friend had meeting one of your staff.
If you haven’t already realised, the time has come to accept that, big or small, all businesses are being judged in the same way; and it’s public.
It often feels like there are too many potential ‘touch points’ to manage them all, but by addressing them one by one, you will begin to build your reputation and gain the trust of those that matter most, including your future employees.
