62% of companies consider employer branding as a business priority, according to the study 2020 Outlook: The Future Of Employer Branding Universum, in which 2,500 professionals from 18 countries took part.
Making the company a ‘desired’ place for the human capital is essential to attract and retain talent, improving the organisation's competitiveness and performance. Hence, building an employer brand image has moved to the daily agenda of HR departments. In fact, employer branding has become a daily agenda for HR departments, Almost six out of ten organisations say they spent more money on this strategy last year, according to the report.
This term emerged in the 1960s in the United States, although it only in this century has its importance become established in the business sector.. If companies are sparing no effort to reach out to consumers, why not do the same to attract labour talent?
Employer branding is a marketing technique aimed at conveying within and outside the organisation the values and characteristics that define it as an employer. and allows you to differentiate yourself from other companies and gain a competitive advantage in the race to recruit the best professionals.
In this regard, we should not forget the recruitment problems that organisations are currently facing. According to the study Global Skills Index 2016 of Hays, the business sector has serious difficulties in recruiting and retaining skilled workers, despite the high unemployment figures recorded in recent decades. “As the global economy slowly recovers, companies are still struggling to find the talent they need,” the report stresses.
As Dr John Sullivan points out in “The 8 Elements of a Successful Employment Brand, employer branding is “a long-term strategy aimed at managing the knowledge and perceptions of employees - current and potential - about a particular company.”.
Thus, according to Francisco Blasco, Susana Fernández Lores and Almudena Rodríguez Tarodo in Employer branding: a multinational study on employer branding, Employer branding is based on the application of marketing concepts to highlight the positioning of a company as an employer. Its intention is the same as that of a commercial brand: to attract new customers while maintaining existing ones. The difference lies in the “customer”, which here is the “employee, current and/or potential”.
The main objective of employer branding is to attract the best profiles to the company, but in addition, if we put this technique into practice, the company will also benefit from the following advantages:
Ultimately, employer branding will result in a remarkable improving business performance, to such an extent that, according to the report The secret sauce of top companies: Aligning your consumer brand and your talent brand, In the case of Linkedin and Lippincott, the share value of the companies studied soared by 36% with the right strategy.
