For most modern recruiting teams, ‘Employer branding’ would be somewhere very close to the top in a list of crucial elements of a recruiting program. Do you know that:

Up to 86% of employees or job-searching candidates will factor in the company’s rating and review to decide whether or not to take a job offer Glassdoor

A good employer brand can tip the scale in the recruiting team’s favor. Most, if not all, recruiting teams worldwide are adopting applicant tracking systems to enhance their efforts. It’s time to learn how your employer brand can also benefit from this powerful recruiting solution.

Employer Branding and Your Recruiting Effort

Every hiring manager knows that the brand and reputation of the company they are recruiting for can make or break their recruiting program. But how exactly does the employer brand affect your recruiting result?

Reduce the Overall Cost-To-Hire

Any recruiting program will cost a specific amount in marketing operations to get the word out that you are hiring. Now imagine if your team can reduce (or even skip this bill entirely). That’s what having a good employer brand can get you. Instead of spending an excessive amount to generate awareness of your business’ s open positions, candidates can directly come to you through words of mouth and a strong reputation.

Poor Branding and Reputation Is Costly

The opposite of having a good employer brand, having a stain on your business’s reputation can be very costly:

A bad employer reputation can incur an estimated extra 10% in hiring costs.

Wade Burgess - Rev.com’s Chief Revenue Officer

This 10% is the cost for your team to compensate for the bad reputation, like increasing marketing cost . A bad reputation can also be morally costly. How would you feel if you knew that you were recruiting for a company that is infamous for one thing or another? Diminished morale is guaranteed when working under the shadow of a bad reputation.

Let us go through a case of bad brand reputation and how it can damage your business. In January 2018, H&M, a Sweden fashion retailer, faced massive backlash as it published an advertisement image of a colored child model wearing a shirt with the slogan ‘coolest monkey in the jungle.’

The child model wearing the controversial sweatshirt from H&M - Picture from Today

The public considered that image to be racially insensitive and racist. Although the company immediately removed the offending photograph, the clothing retailer was forced to close some stores in South Africa. They also lost collaboration contracts with a number of famous artists.

Giving Your Recruiting Campaign a Boost in Speed

With the Covid-19 Pandemic, social media sites play even a more prominent role in connecting people. A single Facebook share or Tweet - If it perks the interest of the right people, it can reach hundreds of thousands of individuals on the web.

Your employer’s brand identity and reputation can rapidly grow under a good marketing strategy in the digital social media environment. Most recruiters would now know how easy it would be to operate a recruitment program under a positive brand image and vice versa. Recruiting teams can ‘piggyback’ a well-received brand to get the word out that their business is hiring faster.

With how information travels on the internet, words of mouth can significantly expand your talent pool. All it takes is for a satisfied customer or candidate to tweet or spread your message on social media to gain you fresh leads.

Take Wendy’s Nugget boy case, for example. This US fast-food chain is famous for its snarky Twitter remarks towards its customers and competitors alike. On April 6, 2017, Carter Wilson tagged Wendy’s official account, asking how many retweets he would need to have free chicken nuggets for an entire year, and Wendy gave their answer - 18 million. Carter proceeds to screenshot the tweet and push it on his Twitter account.

Carter’s famous tweet

Carter managed to break the record set by Wendy and got his year-worth of nuggets. His tweet still receives retweets and likes to this day. Observe how his tweet explodes under the mention of Wendy - a brand already known for snarky remarks, use of adult humor, and language. Wendy is a very well-received brand. Knowing you are up against a challenge of a brand like Wendy can turn a lot of heads.

Expand Your Talent Pool and Facilitate Connection With the Right People

An accessible, transparent employer brand can allow candidates to picture themselves working for your company and see their potential worth. This makes connecting and communicating between two parties much more effortless.

If you are a business owner reading this article, remember that nothing ever disappears entirely on the internet. A mishap in your digital branding strategy can leave unwashable stains on your company’s reputation.

To wrap up this section, have a look at this informative infographic - created by the talented folks over at LinkHumans on more reasons why employer branding is so important in recruiting:

How Can an ATS Solution Boost Your Employer Branding?

78% of employers using an ATS in recruitment reported a significant improvement in finding suitable candidates, according to G2! Let us see how an ATS can give your employer brand a much-needed boost.

By Ensure Consistent Branding Across Different Campaigns

Your employer brand can be present on almost every element within your recruiting program. Language, page design, and image style can all convey your business’s personality. As the team manages multiple brand elements, keep in mind that all aspects must follow the same guideline to avoid brand mismatch.

Straying from your established design guideline can make it incredibly difficult for customers and candidates to tell your business apart. Knowing this plight, savvy recruiters use employer branding-focused ATS solutions to help their team maintain a unified brand identity AND deploy your brand strategy with style.

A brand-focused solution, like Rakuna ATS, allows users to create, customize and manage your branding strategy on a single platform. A unified platform eliminates the need to migrate information, ensuring no brand elements will be out of line. With so little time and so many things to do, recruiters can have a tough time adapting to new tools.

Create an Eye-Catching Career Site

When hunting for jobs, the first thing most candidates would do is to check out the business’s website or career site. Don’t believe us? According to LinkedIn:

52% of candidates will first find and access the company’s site, then social media to research more about their future employers.

LinkedIn - The Ultimate List of Employer Brand Statistic

The same report revealed that up to 69% of responded SMBs plan to extend and optimize their employer brand first on their company website.

A company website, and more importantly - their career site, is effectively the face of that business. As one of the first sites candidates will access, a career site must be able to showcase the brand identity in its best form.

Features Tailored for Career Site Building

To this end, an employer branding-focused ATS recruitment solution such as Rakuna’s applicant tracking system can help its users create a fully customized career page with minimal effort:

• Build with blocks: Without the need for previous product experience, users can drag and drop customizable blocks to build a career site, intuitive and fun, not unlike a game of LEGO.

• Optimized for any device: A recent report on Statista reveals that up to 95% of US citizens in the 18-29 age group own a smartphone. Our ATS recruitment solution will ensure that viewers from any device can experience your spectacular career site in its best form.

• Flexible design: With our ATS recruitment solution, users never have to worry about their tools limiting the ability to express their unique ideas. You can design your career page on a blank sheet of paper or have a pick out of hundreds of beautiful pre-built templates.

• Go ‘global’: Make your design global and synonymous across all your on job boards and social sites like Indeed, Monster, and LinkedIn to quickly establish a unified brand identity in the eyes of the public.

Don’t settle for the next best thing when it comes to your employer branding. A Branding-focused recruitment ATS makes things easier for your recruiters by pushing your content to reach many suitable candidates.

Boosting Candidates’ Experience and Team Members’ Morale

As we have mentioned, recruiting under a positive brand can be a very speedy and exhilarating experience. Are you ready to take another step with the support of a brand-focused applicant tracking system?

Give your candidates options to choose: Not all candidates are the same. Some candidates might like to jump directly into the action and chat live with a recruiter. Others prefer the well-paced speed of email or SMS exchange. A well-designed recruitment ATS will have multiple options to contact its users.

Live chat - Provides a speedy and flexible experience for candidates: Any good recruitment ATS can help you insert a chat pop-up in your marketing elements like career sites. Easy and fast access to the recruiters means saving your candidates a period of feeling confused. Candidates only need to hit the chat button and communicate their concerns with the recruiter - a seamless experience.

Make your candidates feel special with automated, customizable SMS and email campaigns: with many recruitment ATS, users can customize different SMS or email touches to provide a personalized experience to multiple groups of candidates.

Cutting your team some slack with task automation: a well-developed ATS recruitment solution will have the option to automate tedious tasks like sending SMS or email touches or task reminders. A savvy user would make the most out of automation features to free up valuable time for their team members. More free time means more chances to work with your team leader or establish solid relationships with candidates. The ultimate conclusion is always a significant boost in the team’s morale.

High team morale can work wonders for your employer brand. If your members are happy with their company, they are more likely to refer open positions and become brand ambassadors. Positive employee testimonies make for excellent branding materials.

Enable Customization in Your Communication to Make Candidates Feel Special

In the current social and job landscape, individualism is one of the chief concerns and focuses on many activities. Imagine when you receive a Star Buck coffee with your name written on it. It is nice knowing the staff have your name and are actively using it. Recruiters can achieve the same thing with candidate communication with the help of an ATS.

An applicant tracking system helps your team store and utilize data of candidates within your talent pools. A good ATS recruitment solution enables users to track both static data like candidates’ information and active data like communication history. With accessible communication logs, multiple recruiters can resume a conversation without missing a beat.

Having your ATS provide different options to contact recruiters can also make candidates feel special. With many ATS, users can customize multiple SMS or email touches to offer a personalized experience to numerous candidates. Allowing your candidates to pick their preferred communication mode can also lead to a positive experience!

Conclusion

With employer branding playing such a central role in the success of a recruitment program, one would be wise to have it featured prominently in every element. And what better way to optimize and rocket-boost your brand than to employ the help of a brand-focused applicant tracking system in recruitment, like Rakuna’s ATS solution?