Branding

What’s a Brand Story and How Does it Help With Employee Recruitment?

Your business has a story to tell.

Philosophies like StoryBrand are transforming the marketing industry by leveraging the power of story to connect with customers in meaningful and more profitable ways. Positioning your customer as the hero and your business as the empathetic and authoritative guide is a proven strategy that works. So why not use the same concept for employee recruitment?

Every business leader understands the power of storytelling for marketing purposes but some may not have considered that you can also use your brand story to engage an audience of prospective employees as well as customers. This article connects the brand story concept with recruitment marketing and offers ideas on how to combine these tactics to help you find the right people for your team.

What is a Brand Story?

Generally speaking, a brand story casts a vision for how your ideal customer will use your product or service to solve their problems and win the day. This strategy relies heavily on persona development, including a deep understanding of your customer’s practical and philosophical pain points.

With this information in mind, you craft a brand story that guides potential customers to see how the products and services you offer will make them be the hero of their own story. Businesses that position themselves as the empathetic and authoritative guide rather than the hero of the story find that customers are more likely to trust their messages and choose their products or services.

What some business owners may not have considered is that you can actually use these same principles to position your business in front of prospective employees, too.

Read More: Make Your Brand Story Epic with this Straightforward Approach

Tips for Using Your Brand Story For Employee Recruitment

Your brand story is more than just words. Crafting the message is step one, next you need strong visuals, high-quality photos, and compelling videos to reinforce that message across multiple channels. The good news is that you probably already have a lot of this in place, you may just need help rethinking and retrofitting your marketing collaterals to make sense for marketing recruitment.

1. Maintain Visual Brand Consistency

In today’s competitive job market, it’s more important than ever to have a strong visual brand identity. When a job candidate visits your website or social media page, you want them to think to themselves: “Wow, that looks like a place where I want to work!”

Does your company value a flexible work environment? Are there job-site perks or day-to-day benefits of office life, like free coffee and snacks? If so, create visuals that communicate the office atmosphere in the recruitment materials you publish.

Whether you’re actively recruiting candidates in person at a job fair or on social media sites like LinkedIn, be sure that every potential touchpoint between your company and job candidates carries a consistent visual brand identity.

At a high level, your visual brand should be:

• Consistent across all channels and materials
• Relevant, eye-catching and memorable
• Honest and truly reflective of who you are as a company

If you’re having trouble with employee recruitment, it may be an indication that you need to update your branding to be more attractive to potential workers. You may be unintentionally turning people off because your look is outdated or disjointed from what you do.

Another way your visual brand may be turning people away is if you only use stock photos or other cringe-worthy imagery that comes off as generic or cliché. If you create a visual brand that truly reflects your company values, climate, and culture, you will attract more of the right kind of people who will best fit your open positions.

2. Use Your Website Strategically

You can leverage your website to communicate more than just the basic duties and qualifications of job openings. Demonstrate how your employees fit into the bigger picture of your brand story. Dig beyond the details of the job and show the goals and outcomes of work done well. This can help to cast a vision for how the right person will fit into the mission, vision, and purpose of your organization.

As stated above, it is crucial that all of your marketing materials are consistent in look and feel. This is of paramount importance on your website as this is the first place prospective employees will go to evaluate whether or not your company is a good fit for them.

Our recommendation for companies actively engaging in large-scale employee recruitment campaigns is to create website content specifically for this purpose. Think beyond the general employment or job posting web page and get creative with the content you include here. This is the spot to weave in employee testimonials and more social proof of what it’s like to work for you.

In addition to the standard job posting content, consider creating a video showing candidates the job they’ll be doing for you. Ask current employees to share about the role they play in your brand story and how potential candidates can make a real impact on the audiences you serve.  Interview people who are doing similar work in your company as the open position and share their experiences in video format.

Read More: 6 Ways Digital Marketing Can Help You Recruit New Talent and Employees

3. Be Intentional With Social Media

Use your social media channels to tell your brand story to potential employees as well as customers. Social media may be the most powerful tool in the recruitment toolbox because you have such a variety of opportunities to create content that connects with people. For example, you can use social media to show prospective job candidates:

• Videos, highlights, and reels of company culture
• Your leadership in the industry
• The impact your work has on the community
• How you praise and reward employees for doing excellent work

Social media is also a great way to build excitement about your company’s mission, vision, and purpose. You can create an entire culture online that is attractive to customers and employees alike. In fact, loyal customers can become some of your most valuable employees because they supported and believed in your brand long before ever thinking of working for you.

If there is one theme in this post it is consistency. Brand consistency must be present across all social media channels. It’s equally important to ensure that the image you portray on social media aligns consistently with who you are in real life.

If you put forth one image on social media, but the in-real-life experience of working at your company is totally different, that kind of inconsistency will do incredible damage to your employer branding efforts.

We would also go as far as to say that you should encourage any current employees actively engaged on LinkedIn to adhere to a social media policy and understand brand standards so that they don’t unintentionally post things that would cause inconsistencies.

We Can Help With Recruitment Marketing!

The bottom line is that a well-crafted brand story can help you attract top talent to your business. So don’t be afraid to get creative with your recruitment efforts – after all, the success of your company depends on it!

We are helping our clients use digital marketing to tell better stories and recruit quality employees. If you have questions or need help with employee recruitment please send us a message. We would love to help you reach your recruitment goals and find the best people for your open positions!