Brand building

How to Build Your Employer Brand on LinkedIn

On the topic of employer branding, Srajan Mishra, CEO of TSI Apparel, said, “Employer branding impacts business success by increasing revenue. Any company/customer would like to do business with a company that has a strong employer brand. If a company is known to be fair and just to their employees, it would directly result in a greater likelihood of customers willing to purchase from you. It would also result in a better chance of finding people who really want to give their best efforts to your company – which also translates to more revenue.” 

So why aren’t more marketers devoting time to building their companies’ employer brands?

Using the same solutions you already employ on LinkedIn for building your consumer brand, you can also build and strengthen your employer brand. Potential candidates follow the same type of journey as your customers, from awareness to engagement to consideration, and finally to hire (instead of purchase). A full funnel recruitment marketing approach enables you to move people through that funnel. Getting the right people through that funnel, using strong employer brand messaging, ultimately drives success for your business overall.

What does this look like on LinkedIn? Let me walk you through four solutions that work in harmony to attract the right talent to your organization.

Awareness + Engagement

Three different solutions work together to build awareness of your employer brand and engage your organization’s ideal talent. 

LinkedIn Career Pages

A Career Page is an extension of your organization’s LinkedIn Page. A Career Page enables you to showcase your company story, employee testimonials, photos, diversity, and more. Think of a Career Page as your employer brand hub on LinkedIn. It’s the place where talent can go to get a sense of what life is like for employees at your company and the available career opportunities.

You might be thinking, “Why do I need a Career Page if my company already has a career website?” You need a Career Page, because most people are passive candidates, meaning they’re happily employed and not looking for a new job. These people won’t ever go to your company’s career site, so it’s critical to reach them on the platform they’re already using, LinkedIn. 

Recruitment Ads

Recruitment Ads, which you may be familiar with as Dynamic Ads, allow you to build awareness among target candidates through personalized ads. It can be challenging for companies to consistently stay top of mind amongst target talent and keep a steady flow of warm candidates. With Recruitment Ads, you can target the specific types of people your company needs to hire and generate awareness of your employer brand and open job opportunities. With a number of ad types available with various calls to action, you can direct people to view your company’s jobs, follow your company, visit a career page, and more. And with something like the customizable Spotlight Ad, your message doesn’t need to be specifically tied to open jobs or company culture. You could choose to highlight thought leadership or innovation, helping both your consumer and employer brands. All of this ultimately strengthens your brand and enables your talent acquisition partners to drive stronger recruiting results with increased efficiency.

Sponsored Content

If you’re reading this blog, my guess is that you’re familiar with LinkedIn Sponsored Content – the native ads that run in the LinkedIn feed across devices. But, you may not be as familiar with using them for employer branding. Sponsored Content is the best way to engage your target talent on LinkedIn. The flexibility of Sponsored Content lets you showcase your company culture through videos, employee testimonials, articles, and more. You can tell an authentic story about what life is like at your company and entice candidates to explore your opportunities and eventually respond to outreach from a recruiter.

Sponsored Content is both a short and long-term play for warming candidates up to your employer brand. LinkedIn’s unmatched targeting capabilities let you reach exactly the people your company needs to hire today, or maintain an “always-on” brand presence to nurture those relationships. Sejal Patel, spoke about the value she found from Sponsored Content when she was a Global Talent Acquisition Social Media Strategist at Intel: “Sponsored Updates gives us a way to extend our reach beyond our company followers and share relevant content with LinkedIn users who have the skills and expertise that we’re looking for, today, and in the future.”

Consideration

Once your target talent is aware and engaged with your employer brand, how do you drive consideration and leads? That’s where LinkedIn Pipeline Builder comes in – a solution that helps your talent acquisition team build a pipeline of interested candidates.

Pipeline Builder

Pipeline Builder is similar to a Lead Gen Form in that it’s a great way to collect leads from your Ads or Sponsored Content on LinkedIn, but in the case of Pipeline Builder, the leads are sent directly to your recruiting team in LinkedIn Recruiter. Pipeline Builder is a landing page with rich media and tailored content relevant to your audience that brings specific roles at the company to life. If a potential candidate’s interest is peaked after seeing the page, she can easily express interest with the click of a button. Either Recruitment Ads or Sponsored Updates can direct people to a Pipeline Builder page. 

LinkedIn Career Pages, Recruitment Ads, Sponsored Content, and Pipeline Builder all work together as a full funnel recruitment marketing strategy. The awareness you build at the top of the funnel boosts leads, applications, and InMail response rates at the bottom of the funnel, meaning your company is getting more qualified talent into roles faster. At the end of the day, that means your company as a whole is able to be more successful. 

When marketing and talent acquisition join forces, the company reaps the benefits. LinkedIn research found that companies with an integrated approach to their consumer and employer branding were much more successful from a sales growth perspective relative to companies that only do one or the other well – to the tune of a 35% increase in sales. 

So, what are you waiting for? Go meet your employer branding counterparts and get started! And learn more about employer branding by visiting this page
 

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