How to Use Linkedin to Build an Effective Employer Brand
How can your organization harness the world’s largest professional network to attract talent? The answer lies in employer branding, or talent branding as the folks at LinkedIn prefer to call it. Chris Brown, Director of UK Talent Solutions at the world’s largest professional network explains how to use LinkedIn to boost your employer branding.
What are the top 5 factors that contribute to a positive employer brand?
There’s lots of research out there already externally and from us explaining the power of a positive employer brand and how that can affect positively the way organisations attract talent and retain talent. But this research we did to highlight how a negative brand might impact, so what we did, we researched loads of people in the UK and asked them what convinces them to work at a company when they’re looking for a job. And the five things which came up as positive factors were about job security, around development opportunities, the way they can work with new teams and also companies sharing their own values. That much is there, that kind of purpose, and also just positive perceptions about the company which they’ve heard in other places.
Increased job security
Increased professional development opportunities
The opportunity to work with a better team
A company sharing their own personal values
Positive impressions of the company from past and present employees
What are the top 5 factors that are most likely to put professionals off taking jobs?
I’ve seen so many of the exact opposite, so concerns about job security is one. Poor leadership, bad teams or dysfunctional teams, and then negative impressions that they have or perceptions they’ve heard elsewhere, and a bad reputation among that industry. So they’re the five things that put us off those types of employers.
Concerns about job security
Dysfunctional teams
Poor leadership
Negative impressions of the company from past and present employees
A company having a poor reputation among its industry peers
How can you calculate the cost of a bad reputation for a company?
We tried to put a figure on it, and we worked out that the cost of attrition, if you like, or the percentage additional that companies would have to pay is 10% to find and attract talent to replace those people that were leaving. And we worked out, for a company of 10,000 employees, that can add up to more than £4 million a year. So we’ve actually put a figure on the cost of a bad reputation.