Bolster Talent Acquisition with Employer Branding and Oracle HCM

With talent acquisition as a top concern amongst CEOs, employer branding is fast becoming a critical strategy to address current and future talent shortages. However, less than 20% of organizations have an employer branding strategy.

Is it important? Yes. When HR Dive polled 400 job candidates, 69% said an employer's brand strength is important or very important when deciding to accept or reject a job offer. A few elements tip off candidates to the employer's branding, according to the survey. Candidates named competitive compensation packages and an emphasis on work-life balance as the most important factors in a workplace with positive branding. Evidence of poor work-life balance and massive company-wide turnover greatly discourage candidates from joining.

How Much does it Cost to have Poor Employer Branding?

Companies that fail to invest in their reputation as an employer spend on average a whopping $5,000 per employee. One poll from CR Magazine and Cielo Talent showed that almost 50% of workers said they wouldn't work for a company with a bad reputation, even with a big increase in compensation. This all adds up: With a negative, or non-existent employer brand, organizations are likely spending 10% more per employee hired. That means working much harder for longer just to get quality employees through the door.

Is it Time to Improve your Employer Branding Strategy?

When more clearly defining your employer brand, it’s helpful to start by answering the following questions:

• Who are your employees?
• What kind of organization is this?
• What is the character or ethos of the organization and its people?
• What is the organization’s social and environmental purpose?
• What do your current employees think about your company? (survey them)

Answering these questions will then help you create candidate personas, define employee value propositions, and implement campaigns to support your strategy.

Social Media and Employer Branding

With the proliferation of social media, employer branding is a funny thing these days. You may even say that it’s a little out of your control. The real question you need to ask yourself is do you want to let the public build your employer brand for you, or do you want to create, cultivate, and grow your own unique employer brand that helps you attract the best talent? Social media is an essential part of developing a positive and well-known employer brand.

Potential candidates are curious about what their daily life at a potential company could be like. Social media is the perfect way to put your company's everyday activities on display. It's not just about having a picture-perfect Instagram grid, but rather about giving a realistic depiction of the day-to-day life for your employees. Not only will you capture the attention of possible applicants, but you will reduce the likelihood of receiving applications from candidates who are not a good fit for your office environment.

How Starbucks Excels at Employer Branding

A key focus of Starbucks’ employer branding-related social media posts is sharing employee success stories. These stories are highlighted across Twitter and Instagram, and Starbucks has a Jobs Playlist on its YouTube channel dedicated to success stories. One example of recent content is a video highlighting technology jobs at Starbucks. In the video, real tech employees repeat the Starbucks mission statement—to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time—and talk about how inspired they are by their jobs every day—critical in the highly competitive tech field.

Don’t Forget About Employer Branding and Current Employees

Losing top talent is expensive. Estimates of the cost to replace an employee range from one-half to two times the person’s annual salary. Let’s do the math—when an employee earning $50,000 per year resigns, a company can expect to spend between $25,000 and $100,000 to fill the position, depending on the specialization of the role.

Maintaining a positive employee experience over time is a big part of retention. That means making sure that reality lives up to the promises and branding that attracted talent to your company—the employee value proposition (EVP). That is, what tangible and intangible rewards do you offer employees in return for their commitment to achieving business goals? An example of a great EVP is at grocery store chain, Trader Joe’s.

Trader Joe’s is very transparent about each benefit they offer. For example, they’re committed to providing bi-annual reviews, with the average crew member having the potential to receive a 7%-10% pay increase each year. There is also a strong emphasis on growth opportunity—the company promotes based on performance and prioritized career development.

From the careers page: “We prioritize the development of our crew members. We don’t pigeonhole crew members into “only running the register” or “only stocking the shelves”; our crew engage in a variety of tasks and hold a range of responsibilities—running the register and stocking the shelves, of course; also merchandising, creating signs, accepting deliveries, demoing products, and engaging with customers.”

How Can you Bolster Talent Acquisition with Great Employer Branding?

After you’ve worked on strengthening your employer brand, you better control over how prospective candidates view your company. Having a strong employer brand in place will not only improve the quality of your talent pool, but it also can enhance your ability to entice candidates to accept an offer. Let’s look at how Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM), a cloud-based solution, helped one customer, Equity Residential.

Oracle Cloud HCM let Equity Residential personalize the user experience more than other providers that it considered, so that the company could make its job search site reflect its brand. For example, the company added photos and videos of employees working in the cities where it leases apartments. “We didn’t want you to go from a beautiful site for searching for an apartment, and then you search for a job and take a major step back. That was incredibly important for us to sustain a consistently high- quality user experience,” says Mark Johnson, Equity Residential director of HCM technology. Additionally, Equity Residential used the recruiting module of Oracle Cloud HCM to quickly build its new career website.

Oracle HCM and Employer Branding

Oracle HCM allows companies to:

• Enhance employer brand by providing a better candidate experience, with more personalized communications to all applicants, and ensure that each candidate is considered for positions across all locations.
  
  
• Enhance employer branding by enabling candidates to apply for various roles and keep track of their application progress through online dashboards—even from mobile devices—and by ensuring all candidates are informed of the reasons why they are not selected, through personalized communications based on a range of customized templates.
  
  
• Tackle high-volume or traditional hiring with email and social campaigns, amplifying outreach efforts and encouraging applications.
  
  
• Provide teams with a single, consumer-like experience across different modules and devices.
  
  
• Improve productivity with dynamic automation for job postings, candidate communication, screening, interviews, and offers, with a consistent employer brand across the board.

Natively built for the cloud, Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management is a complete solution connecting every human resource process from hire to retire. This provides a consistent experience across devices, enables one source of truth for HR data to improve decision-making, and empowers you with market-leading innovation to address your needs today and into the future. This one-stop solution will help you replace the dozens of disparate HCM solutions that you may have in place today.

For more information about talent acquisition and HCM, contact us or email us at infosolutions@alithya.com. Visit our blog regularly for new posts about Cloud updates and other Oracle Cloud Services such as Planning and Budgeting, Financial Consolidation, Account Reconciliation, and Enterprise Data Management.  Follow Alithya on social media for the latest information about EPM, ERP, and Analytics solutions to meet your business needs.