Top Employer Branding Challenges with Remote Hiring

Employer branding is how you present your company to potential employees, how they perceive your company, and how this perception makes them feel. Just as your customer brand serves to differentiate your business from competitors, win advocacy and loyalty and resonate with your target audiences, employer branding does much the same — just for the talented employees you’d like to attract and retain.

Adjusting branding post Covid

Since the beginning of 2020, when remote working became a necessity and companies were forced to rethink their working policies, there has been a shift in what workers now look for from their employers. Benefits that support health and work-life balance have risen to the top of many people’s agendas, with factors such as permanent remote or hybrid working, paid sick leave, flexible working hours and better parental leave becoming more important. 

Many organisations have successfully adapted to these new sets of expectations from existing employees and potential candidates. However, this has brought up some new employer branding challenges as well.

Top four ‘employer branding’ challenges

Here we explore the top four challenges faced by employers when crafting their branding to attract new staff:

1. Revising employee value proposition

For businesses to succeed and secure the best talent in this post-Covid world, they need to align their branding with the expectations of their candidates. In this new world of work, if you don’t use your ‘employer branding’ to showcase how you support your colleagues and share their values, then your company might be overlooked by new, talented potential employees. Your branding needs to feel authentic and must permeate through your business, allowing prospective employees attending an interview or corresponding with your team to feel that your branding is more than just words on a website or text on a LinkedIn post. 

To succeed, businesses should revise their employee value proposition. This means assessing what they offer that makes them attractive to potential employees. A good place to start is with remote working, as 57% of British workers say they now want to work from home (YouGov). Remote working is playing a huge role in what candidates are looking for from their employers, so make value propositions reflect this. If remote working was a new concept to your business and only facilitated as a response to the pandemic, you might have been hoping to return to the traditional ways of office working. Even if you prefer to see your employees working in front of your eyes and believe that collaboration and comradery work best face to face, you might want to consider changes to your working practices. 

2. Onboarding new employees

The pandemic has shown how possible and productive flexible working can be, which has made employees evaluate their lifestyle choices and previous decision-making drivers. 

How you onboard your new employees can have a huge impact on how your brand is experienced and perceived. If you get it wrong and have an onboarding process that isn’t fit for purpose, it’s possible that your new hire will spread the word about how disappointed they are by your bad processes. It can also lead to new employees feeling disengaged to the point that they leave the business almost as soon as they started, leading to a high turnover rate that can be damaging to your employer brand. Focus on delivering a great onboarding experience and you should see better retention rates across the business, better reviews and recommendations from your employees, and a more positive overall brand perception. 

3. Lack of employee engagement

If your employees aren’t engaged, it can cause real issues for your employer branding. This can translate into a lack of online reviews, or a barrage of negative or lacklustre ones, on websites such as Glassdoor. It can also manifest as a lack of likes or shares of employer brand social media content by current employees. If you are making a big deal about your value proposition and the reasons why you’re a great place to work, you risk the message falling flat if no one at your company seems to agree.

It’s not just externally that disengaged employees are a risk. Internally, they can be less productive, less committed, less inspired, and less likely to stick around over time. Negativity and disenchantment can also spread through the workplace like wildfire, which can have a big impact on our 4th point below.

4. Difficulties sourcing employee advocacy for branding

Employer branding works best when it is fuelled by real-life, genuine employee advocates. Nothing says “come and work here” like the excited, happy and loyal faces of your biggest fans — your employees. Their testimonials and involvement in your branding serve as proof that everything your branding claims to be true is actually true and that your business is a great place to work. However, with remote or hybrid working becoming more common, it is becoming increasingly difficult to source the marketing material for employer branding strategy. Therefore, organisations need to become more creative with how they reach out to their remote employees to foster their stories.

Why not use Seenit Employee-Generated Videos to promote your employer brand? With Seenit for employer branding, you can,

• Invite employees to film and share their stories
• Store and manage the content from a cloud-based platform
• Shortlist and edit from the same platform
• Publish your content across all channels