5 Tips to Building an Employer Brand for a Lesser-Known Company

About a decade ago, I took a recruiting position at Seattle-based company called Amazon. I spent the next seven years morphing from a lead recruiter, primarily conducting closes and negotiations, to a marketing manager organizing tech events for thousands of attendees for Amazon Web Services.  

During those years, one thing started to become very clear—recruiting and marketing are incredibly similar. For example, my recruiting job had me driving candidates to apply for jobs. For marketing, I was getting people to sign up for conferences.

Same story, different job.

Here’s the deal: I was good at recruiting, but I liked marketing better. Unfortunately, I only had two years of experience in marketing, but over 15 as a recruiter. I would never make the same money in marketing as I could in recruiting.  

It was about this time that employers started to realize that they needed a strong marketable brand to find new employees. Employer branding had become a viable position in the recruiting circuit.

This was great news for me. It took my skillsets and allowed me to marry it to marketing.

Here’s the lowdown:

Brand plays a huge part in driving any traffic, whether it’s attendees to a conference or applicants to a job post.  

Of course, it’s easy if you have a brand that everyone knows, like Google or Facebook. Candidates flock to your website to apply. However, with a company that is not as well-known, you have to change your strategy to keep inbound applications flowing.  

When I left Amazon for a new challenge with a local start-up, I realized that it was the building of the employer brand I enjoy the most. At a smaller company, you have just enough freedom and creative control to do it!

Here are my top five tips to build an employer brand at a lesser-known company:

1. Simplify your application process:  No matter how effective you are in driving people to your career page, no one will apply if it is clunky, difficult-to-use or makes you jump through a million hoops to get your resume into the system. Make it easy, streamlined and user-friendly.
2. Update your career page: Work with your design team to create a page that is beautiful and tells the employee story. Create videos that highlight your office and your people. Add pictures of people working. Sure, everyone is having fun at the Friday happy hour but what about the other 40 hours of your work week? Do people look happy?
3. Partner with your PR and marketing teams: Suggest conferences for employees and execs to present at, sponsor a respectable news outlet to keep your company at the forefront of their mind. The more press your company gets, the more applicants you’ll have coming in the doors.
4. Build a relationship with your local community: Host meetups, sponsor events, attend career fairs, present at conferences, and join a board of directors. Whatever you can do to make a connection, do it! Shaking hands with someone will go a lot further than sending out a random email.
5. Make your employees your ambassadors: We all know the statistic. “Eighty-four percent of people trust referrals and recommendations from people they know (Nielsen).”  Provide your employees with content to tweet, post, share...however they can get it out there. Just get it out there! And get it out there through people they know.  This is a great opportunity for your ambassadors to shine!

Smaller, lesser-known companies will always have to work a little bit harder to fill the top of the pipeline. Of course, it goes without saying that none of these things will be effective unless you measure them and try out different options. Hopefully, by following these tips, you’ll make it easier for candidates to find you, and ultimately become your internal recruiting marketers. Marketing is recruiting, just as recruiting is marketing.

-Jenny Chynoweth, Director of Talent, RealSelf