Want to learn about Inbound recruiting to keep you 10 steps ahead of your competition? Don't miss the 2016 Top Talent Summit, a one-stop recruitment conference coming up in Toronto where we'll cover this topic inside out: http://www.toptalentsummit.com

1. HOWEMPLOYEESARETHEGREATESTASSETFOR
BUILDINGYOURTALENTBRAND

2. The role of a human resources specialist has evolved. In
addition to recruiting and retaining top talent, you are also
responsible for growing your organization’s brand equity
to support market perception.
This means collaborating with marketing to create content
for inbound recruiting as well as providing guidance on
how employees can share the brand message and in turn
grow their own personal brand. Many organizations are
catching on and have already gotten on board.

3. According to global law firm Proskauer’s "Social
Media in the Workplace: Around the World 3.0"
survey, 90% of companies now use social media for
business purposes—up 30% from a year ago.
Employees are stewards of the brands they work for.
This is true whether or not companies choose to
recognize it. The question is do you work for one of
the organizations that leverages employees as brand
stewards or one that ignores this fact?

4. A recent Fast Company blog shared that “employees are talking about
your brand on social media—in fact, 50% of employees share about their
company without any prompting. In addition, according to the Bureau of
Labor Statistics, “there are nearly 120 million full-time employees in the
U.S. alone, meaning 60 million full-time employees choose to talk about
their employer online.” Thankfully, employees have mostly positive things
to say about their employers. However, businesses are not doing a great
job of harnessing positive conversation to help bolster the strength of
the brand.
The challenge is that business executives are often uncomfortable about
asking employees to collaborate to attract talent and new customers on
social media. They are still apprehensive about what employees might
share with the world. This is a missed opportunity. Employee-generated
stories can have a massive impact on your organization brand AND
support your organization’s ability to attract the top talent in the market.
It’s your job to empower your colleagues to step into brand stewardship
and support them in their investment in their own personal brands by
extension. This is a win win opportunity for companies.

5. How to Empower Employees to
Share Content
Employees can’t be ignored when developing an
inbound recruiting strategy. Relying on marketing
and sales alone to represent the brand to external
candidates without leveraging employees is a
rookie mistake. However, employees require
guidance and training to represent a brand well.
It’s important that human resources specialists
partner with other stakeholders to design
guidelines on the dos and don’ts of representing
your organization’s brand externally.
Guidance plus education will be key to shaping
how your brand is perceived in the market to
potential candidates. Here are some tips to
transform regular employees to brand advocates:

6. Having a cross functional team connection ensures
that you’ll have support and partnership to design and
implement compelling talent branding content. It also
ensures that the content will be communicated and
shared with employees with appropriate guidance. As
a human resources connector, you can provide input
to to ensure that marketing and branding campaign
planning are in alignment with recruiting strategy.
1. Human Resources, Marketing and Learning and
Development Working Together

7. Social media is a part of life and that includes
work. Many employees now identify the
company they work for on their social profile.
This can be a great thing or a bad thing
depending on whether your organization has
clear social media guidelines. No one wants to
feel like big brother company is looking at their
tweets and posts. Having policies in place
provides guardrails while allowing your
employees space to be free and engage with on
social media. Don’t make the guidelines a list of
NOs. Design a policy based on employee
discretion, openness and trust. Give examples of
what can be shared on social what should stay
offline.
2. Have a Clear Social Media Policy

8. Companies can invest in employee growth by having
classes to train their “brand ambassadors” on social
media. You might consider holding online courses and
making this a part of standard employee onboarding.
In addition, social media experts within the business
can informally or formally mentor less socially savvy
employees.
This guidance, new hire orientations and blog posts
can be an easier alternative than creating a full blown
onboarding course. This can make a real difference
with employees stepping into brand advocacy.
3. Offer Social Media Training

9. Why not provide your colleagues with branded content to
share on social media. You can offer them a list of content
from the brand’s own editorial schedule and have them
share at their own discretion.
With ready to go, pre-approved ideas you’re likely to gain
traction and adoption with your internal brand advocates.
Don’t forget to share the social media hashtag they should
be using.
4. Team With Marketing to Design Content for
Employees to Share

10. Developing a Talent Brand Plan
Now that we’ve covered the positive impact of
unlocking your colleague’s potential to become
brand advocates for your organization, we turn to an
equally important topic: how to make sure that you
are delivering a measurable talent branding plan
that will truly empower your colleagues to be in
action on talent branding. This won’t happen by
itself! You’ll need to provide leadership.

11. Before setting out on your journey, it is important to
know where you are before you chart your course
forward. First, ensure that your talent brand is
connected to the overall objectives of the business -
with company growth goals and strategy. Next, invest
in getting a clear picture of where your brand sits. Are
potential candidates indifferent, in like or in love with
your talent brand?
This relationship with your brand is the engine
required to build equity and deliver an edge over the
competition in the market for top talent. Knowing
where you are with your candidates and being
insightfully truthful about it is the first step to figuring
out how to grow your brand into one that candidates
can’t stop talking about. Use these questions to get
connected with your talent brand plan, the answers
will help you start to frame everything you need!

12. The 10 questions to ask yourself are:
Who are the key stakeholders that can help you approve
and implement your plan?
What are our business objectives and growth objectives?
What are the strategy and tactics to achieve this?
Where are we now with talent brand perception?
Why do our candidates currently perceive us this way?
Where do we want to be in the minds of potential
candidates?
How can we get there?
What do we need to do to get ready?
By when do we want to achieve our talent branding goal?
What does success look like and how will we measure
talent branding success?

13. Once you’re clear on the foundation for your talent brand - where
you are and where you want to go, the process for setting up a
talent brand on a professional social network is a simple
marketing model, as outlined in a LinkedIn report:
A Simple Marketing Model for Building Your
Talent Brand Within Your Organization
Segment: Determine the target personas that fit the
available jobs.
Target: Prioritize and pursue high-priority candidates.
This is where you can develop a system to score
candidates based on criteria that helps you focus on the
characteristics of top performers.

14. Position: Develop a narrative that amplifies your
company’s talent brand. Encourage employees to write
about the topics that make you unique. Use storytelling
to showcase how your values are reflected in company
culture. Also, celebrate stellar employees that are
making a difference in your business and in the
industry. This writing enables potential candidates to
see what it might be like to go through the hiring
process. It also allows them determine whether they
would be a good fit within your organization.
Placement: How do you reach high potential
candidates? Go where they are. Publish in online and
offline publications, forums and platforms your ideal
employee reads and respects. This is about building
credibility against other companies they may be
applying to. In addition, it builds brand awareness with
other potential candidates who happen to find the
article organically.

15. Product and price: Tell the story of what it’s
like to work for your company. Outline the
salary and benefits. Here are some ideas for
types of content that can help prospective
employees learn more about your company:
Include a mission statement reflecting on how
your company matters in the lives of its
customers.
Communicate your purpose.
Describe the different departments, how they
collaborate, and how they make an impact.
Don’t forget your current talent. Involve them in
showing off their team so that potential
candidates see the environment they will be
joining.
Highlight your onboarding practices and
processes.

16. Promotion: Build relationships with talent communities,
social and digital content marketing. Empower
employees to share blog posts, articles and other
content pieces about company culture with their
networks. It helps to have them share content about
your company from a third-party site, rather than the
career page of the site.
Collaborate with marketing to create videos where
employees and executives discuss issues important to the
company and industry, and showcase how employees
make the difference. It comes down to growing into a
thought leader. Write, post, and share articles about your
industry as a whole, highlighting the issues your potential
candidates care about.

17. A strong talent brand plan will help you get your
organization in sync on the strategy and tactics
required for you to achieve your recruiting goals.
This is how you will get more candidates to apply
over time. The plan is a unifying document in that
it connects functions across the business such as
your executive team, learning and development,
marketing and sales.
The next step is on you! With this thinking as a
foundation, you can evangelize your plan and
request support from business stakeholders to
support your recruiting initiatives.
You and colleagues can always refer back to the
document to get grounded in the approach and
remain on track while pursuing a whole new realm
in your talent brand strategy.

18. Thank You!
REGISTER NOW!