How Activating Your Internal Employer Branding Can Attract New Talent

Internal employer branding, often overshadowed by its external counterpart, is the secret to transforming your employees into enthusiastic brand ambassadors. It’s the process of cultivating a positive workplace culture, engaging your workforce, and empowering them to advocate for your organization. This, in turn, not only boosts employee satisfaction and retention but also enhances your recruitment efforts. Discover how a thriving internal brand can elevate your company’s image, making it a magnet for top-tier talent and ensuring your organization’s continued growth and prosperity.

What is Internal Employer Branding?

You are probably familiar with the concept of employer branding. When we talk about your employer brand, we usually mean how your organization is marketed to potential talent outside the business. External branding is all about creating a compelling company image within your industry and the broader job market designed to attract new talent.

But this is only one aspect of your employer brand. Equally important is your internal employer branding. That is, how you use your brand and Employer Value Proposition (EVP), to continually engage your current employees.

The difference between the two lies in the target audience and communication focus. Internal employer branding is tailored toward your employees and existing talent pool, emphasizing engagement, retention, and advocacy within your organization.

Key Benefits of Building a Strong Internal Employer Brand

So, why invest in your internal branding? Well, it has several business benefits such as:

Greater Employee Retention

When individuals identify with their organization’s values and culture, they are more likely to stay loyal to the company, reducing turnover rates and associated costs.

Improved Productivity

Engaged employees are inherently more motivated and committed to their work. They take pride in their roles, are more productive, and contribute positively to the company’s bottom line.

Better Recruitment Outcomes

Engaged and content employees often serve as brand ambassadors, advocating for their organization to potential candidates. They convey an authentic and compelling message, which is up to 3x more trustworthy and attractive to prospective hires than external branding efforts alone.

If you’re looking for an effective way to access these benefits, Pierpoint can help. Our RPO experts can strengthen your employer brand, ensure your recruitment processes reflect your culture and values and support you in reaching high-quality talent through a range of channels including talent networks, online platforms, and industry-specific strategies.

5 Strategies for Activating Your Internal Employer Branding

Many organizations think about employee engagement; the only problem is that they never “turn on” their strategy. Here are five ways you can activate your internal employer branding for improved engagement:

1. Know Who You Are!

Before you can communicate your organizational messaging to your employees you must be able to define it. Spend time pinpointing your company’s vision, values, and mission. Once this is defined clearly, make sure that your internal communications convey them consistently. This means that internal processes, emails, meetings, and websites should be written with your values and mission in mind.

2. Encourage Involvement

Getting your employees actively involved in building your culture can go a long way to helping strengthen it and solidify your internal employer brand. The first step is to encourage employees to share their experiences, good and bad. By listening to employee voices, you show that you value their opinion, and you can use their feedback to identify areas for improvement.

To take things to the next level you can create employee advocacy programs where employees are incentivized and given the tools to act as brand advocates, both internally and externally. By contributing personal success stories, insights and challenges they’ve overcome to channels employees participate in sharing the company’s culture and values, not just with colleagues but also with potential candidates and external stakeholders.

3. Recognize and Reward Commitment

Recognizing and rewarding employee successes not only makes those individuals feel valued but improves company morale, inspires pride, and encourages others to strive for excellence. Acknowledging success can go beyond awarding bonuses for performance metrics such as sales numbers or project completion and can extend to celebrating employee milestones like work anniversaries, promotions, certifications and more. Sharing stories of individual achievements, projects accomplished, or personal growth journeys humanizes the workplace, creates a sense of belonging and leads to a more motivates and enthusiastic team.

4. Invest in Your Workforce

When you invest in enhancing the collective skills of your teams by providing opportunities for growth and learning you not only improve their ability to do their jobs, but you also signal that you care about their personal and professional development. This commitment not only motivates employees but also helps attract top talent seeking environments where they can thrive.

Don’t forget to provide your leadership teams with some skill building love too. They will be instrumental in helping you develop a sense of community, gathering feedback effectively and rewarding employee successes. So, it’s crucial they have the empathy, active listening, and team-building skills to do this successfully.

5. Build a Community

We spend over a third of our lives at work. Which means we spend a significant amount of time with our co-workers. Having a community of people at work can provide us with support, a place to share ideas and a sense of connection all of which can be a positive part of your internal employer branding.

Create spaces for employees to connect with each other both on work and non-work-related topics. Digital platforms can help teams in different teams and locations build relationships. Regular newsletters or updates can highlight employee stories, achievements, and company milestones. Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) and similar forums provide spaces where employees with shared interests or backgrounds can connect and collaborate.

Pierpoint’s full service RPO solution can help you with everything from building a strong employer brand to reaching new talent pools. Talk to an expert today to discuss your talent needs.