You aspire your company to be a picture perfect rendition of innovation, but if your employer brand doesn’t reflect that, it will be difficult to find the right employees to drive that transformation. You need people who will bring new ideas into the workplace, and help expand the idea of what you hope the company can be. You need free-thinkers, logicians, challengers, innovators… How do you attract them? By making your employer branding just as innovative as they are.
Encourage Employees to Branch Out
Innovation starts with the people who work for you. You want an employer brand that reflects a culture of innovation, but you need the innovative employees to help drive that ingenuity. Consider the employees you already have; they need to be engaged in and consistently challenged by their work. So how do you do challenge an innovative employee? By offering further education and training beyond onboarding, of course! Companies who do this, like John Wiley & Sons, saw a 90% increase in engagement.
So encourage your employees to branch out of their professional comfort zones, try new things, and train them in these arenas. As they get better with their new skills and find new avenues from which to innovate, you’ll find they’re more excited about their work. The best brand ambassadors are the team members who are most excited about their position and the company, and you need those internal people to tout your innovation. Two birds with one stone!
Sell Your Work Programs
If you need further help mixing more innovation into your employer branding, try crafting a new kind of work program you can sell to candidates. Google has its 20% time, GE has its “garages.” These programs get a lot of attention from the media, even outside of working circles, which makes them a lucrative avenue for companies to promote their employer brand.
You might already have these kinds of programs in place, maybe you let employees work on their own projects or a system in which everyone is their own boss. Whatever your special work-related program is, stick a name on it and promote it to candidates. You can use it as an essential cog when you build the company’s employer branding story.
Get Your Culture Out There
If you have a creative, innovative culture, that culture should be a part of your employer brand. But how do you know if you have such a culture? The answer isn’t simple, but you can evaluate for it. Using a method that involves examining the artifacts, espoused values, and shared basic assumptions of your business, you can specifically identify the culture your company has built, and whether it is creative, organized, or diverse enough to promote as part of your employer brandi.
If you find that you excel in one of these areas, you’ll get a lot of recruiting mileage by promoting it. Surveys show that 61% of executives say organizational culture is the most important recruiting advantage for global companies. The second most important? Employer branding, at 26%. Put the two together and you have a recipe for a robust employer brand and strategic culture.
Every organization strives for an innovative culture and an employer brand that exemplifies that ideal. When you encourage employees to grow professionally and sell the programs you’ve created to enforce such behavior, it makes it that much easier to make your unique culture known. With these few tips, you can position your employer brand to reflect your internal innovation.