Employer branding is something that isn’t clearly stated in a recruiting process but holds an important position. 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
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 benefit from this powerful recruiting solution.
The Value of Employer Branding
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?
The Benefits of a Good Branding
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 word of mouth and a strong reputation.
Poor Branding and Reputation Is Costly
Having a stain on your business’s reputation can be very costly:
A bad employer reputation can incur an estimated 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.
To wrap up this section, have a look at this informative infographic - created by the talented folks over at LinkHumans for more reasons why employer branding is so important in recruiting:
How Can an ATS Solution Boost Your Employer Branding?
Now that you know the values of good employer branding, how can you then use an ATS to push it to another level?
(Don’t know what an ATS is? Check out this post to get a quick headstart)
Employer Branding at each feature of an ATS
You have identified the hiring needs, prepared the job description, and got the word out on job boards. As candidates start to research your company and the position, here is how a recruitment ATS helps to sell your brand.
Creating an Eye-Catching Career Site
When hunting for jobs, most candidates would first 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 Statistics
The same report revealed that up to 69% of SMBs plan to extend and optimize their employer brand first on their company website.
Website is the company’s online face to the client. Similarly, a career site is the company’s online face to prospective employees. The journey must be smooth to win soundly.
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.
Supporting Candidates in Company Research with an ATS
An accessible, transparent employer brand can allow candidates to picture themselves working for your company and see their potential worth.
Giving candidates the ability to ask questions and research more about a company’s culture and working environment can significantly sway the odds toward recruiters during the pre-interview stage. But how can a recruitment ATS help?
Aside from many options to contact recruiters to voice their opinions, an applicant tracking system can also draft a send mass surveys to different candidate pools. Recruiters no longer have to second-guess candidates’ feelings about their brand.
In their 2021 NA Research Report, Talent Board discovered that:
North American candidates requested more content related to the company’s culture and D&I aspects throughout 2021 from existing employees and multi-lingual career sites.
This is the golden chance for recruiters to establish connections with targeted candidates. You can start sending brand materials like guides, testimonies, and surveys. With the ability to attach and track files and attachments, the ATS will handle the jobs with a preset and give your recruiters peace of mind on the automatic process.
Enhancing Social Media Branding and Respond Cohesion
With the Covid-19 Pandemic, social media sites play a more prominent role in connecting people. Your employer’s brand identity and reputation can rapidly grow under a good strategy in the digital social media environment. Here is how an ATS can enhance further.
An ATS Make Quick Work of Social Posting
If you are chasing candidates across different social media sites, sign-on saves tons of time. You can draft and manage multiple job descriptions - each customized toward a specific talent pool on your ATS. Managing overall brand perception across various channels is now easier with a unified platform where all interactions and applications flow, regardless of social media site.
An ATS Can Tell Where Your Brand Is Working
Having a singular platform where all applications pour in means you can track which channel or description net you the most candidates. An ATS allows its users to perform a lot of interesting comparisons.
Do you want to know whether job boards or social media sites are better in getting responses? Use the same job description with identical posting frequency on both sites and start A-B testing. Better yet, users can also test how different writings perform across multiple websites. Information is power. With performance results from your ATS, recruiters can start modifying their strategy or branding approach to better suit the targeted demographic.
Your team as Brand Ambassador
Each recruiter is the embodiment of employer branding. How your team performs can seriously impact candidates’ brand perception. A recruitment ATS will enable this potential of your team to the highest by automation on different aspects of the recruiting process:
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.
Increasing Team’s Cohesion With Collaboration Features
Without the means to keep your members updated with the team’s progress, recruitment can be tedious. The team is more likely to encounter unnecessary frictions. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that a conflicted team cannot produce good results.
Enter recruitment ATS. You will find that most applicant tracking systems on the market will come with a suite of collaboration features to support a recruitment team. Want to keep your team in the loop? Simply assign individual tasks and let the ATS keep track of progress and deadlines.
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. But it doesn’t stop there. Check out how ATS software can boost diversity and inclusion amongst your team and candidates!
Now that your recruiters have sufficient time to plan and devote themselves to a cohesive communication plan, see how an ATS transforms the way you interact with your candidates:
Giving Recruiters and 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. Allowing your candidates to pick their preferred communication mode can also lead to a positive experience!
Any good 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.
Another approach you can take is to customize different SMS or email touches to provide a personalized experience to multiple groups of candidates. Depending on the nature of the job you are looking to fill, the traditional communication method can be ineffective.
For example, when a construction company targets candidates who are constantly doing fieldwork and with limited access to a computer, a customized SMS campaign is more likely to create connections.
Enhance 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 receiving 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 using communication options provided by an ATS.
It is common knowledge that communication can make or break the onboarding process. Out of 150 companies worldwide that participated in Talent Board’s “2021 Candidate Experience (CandE) Global Research Reports,”
83% said investing in communication and engagement during pre-onboarding drastically improved their candidates’ experience.
With the increasing demand for communication between recruiters and candidates, a recruitment ATS enables recruiters to respond in a more hands-on fashion. They can seamlessly exchange forms and company branding materials.
Conclusion
Employer branding can be presented via visual elements, recruiting process, as well as the human component - the recruiters whose voice represents the company. ATS is one of the current best solutions in HR tech to allow companies to achieve these goals
If you are recruiting for a small-to-medium-sized company, check out a tailored guide in getting the most out of your applicant tracking system!
If you are eager to boost your employer brand with the proper ATS, why don’t you start with a free demo?
Related Posts
