By Tracie M. Davis, MBA

There are lots of organizations that invest a lot of time and money into developing a strong employer brand to attract top talent. Leaders understand the power employer branding has in sparking the interest of talented professionals.

Now, what happens when your employer branding efforts don't match the reality?

You finally attracted your ideal candidate for this hard to fill role. After a few months on the job, your new employee emails you a resignation letter because they found another job opportunity. As a leader, you are very disappointed because you believed that this new employee was a game changer.

What happens if your company can attract lots of top talent but unable to retain them?

Or worse, what if you put offers out to your ideal candidates, but they don’t accept the offer.

Many companies skip a vital step when creating their employer branding strategy. They forget to engage their current staff to gain needed insight into their company’s culture. Engaging your employees and aligning your culture with your employer brand will help you to retain new and current talent.

Here are some tips on how to incorporate your employees into your employer branding efforts.

1. Employee Surveys- Strategically draft surveys to help you get the data needed to analyze what your employees feel about your organization and its culture.
2. Make Critical Changes- Based on the information that your company has received from the survey, make critical changes to the areas that don’t live up to the employer brand you are seeking.
3. Internal Top Talent- Identify who the top talent is in your organization and ask them pinpointed questions about what they enjoy about working for your organization.
4. Analyze forward facing data- Review your online employee reviews and pay attention to both the good, the bad, and the ugly. Respond to the negative comments online. Make sure when responding that it’s apologetic. Also, inform them that the company will look into the problem. Responding to online feedback is not just important for internal employees, but candidates review these ratings as well so don’t respond in an offensive way. Likewise, if there are positive comments respond to that as well. This small step can go a long way.
5. Employee referrals- Are you getting lots of employee referrals from your employees? Your employees are your walking billboards. If they are not singing your company’s praises, then who will? If your organization is not getting lots of referrals from your employee's, then you need to understand why. Hold meetings with department managers in addition to analyzing, employee surveys and figure out what the morale is like for each department. Make necessary changes as problems are identified.

Strong employer branding and internal culture is the key to attracting and keeping top talent. Take a quick look at your recruiting efforts and turnover rate to see if it’s time to realign your employer brand. Aligning your employer brand with your internal culture is your key to not only attracting top talent but retaining them as well.

Tracie M. Davis is the Founder and CEO of Operation HR. From her corporate HR experiences, Tracie recognized that companies often struggle with identifying and retaining talent, as well as establishing HR and business practices that are interrelated. From this identified gap, Operation HR was formed.