Why You Need a Talent Brand & Community

As an employer, it’s vital to invest in your company’s reputation, current employees, and potential candidates for growth. 

What is an employer brand?

Your employer brand is the foundation of how you market your company to be appealing to potential job seekers and current employees. The goal is to showcase your company’s strengths and benefits in a way that will attract the right people to join. Essentially, this is your brand’s reputation. 

What companies come to mind when you think about good or bad places to work? Whether it’s negative or positive, employer branding directly affects what people associate with your company. 

But your employer brand isn’t something that you solely own. Why? It is also dependent on the experience of current employees, alumni, and prospective candidates. This is where your talent brand becomes important.

If your employer brand is what you as a company say to the world, your talent brand is the actual lived experiences of your employees and what they have to say.

No matter how you control your messaging, if it doesn’t align with what your employees think and feel, it can cause major problems as you try to attract and retain talent.

Focus on controlling what you can. 

It’s important as an employer to ensure that you’re fostering positive relationships with your current employees, alumni, potential candidates, followers on social media, and your broader community. 

Your talent brand can benefit from a community reflection.

Connecting to the community allows you to foster relationships with potential candidates outside of their resumes alone. As an employer, it’s a great way to filter out candidates and seek out specific skill sets before going through a strenuous interviewing process. 

Connecting to the community is a great opportunity for potential candidates to meet your employees, experience your talent brand and figure out if your company is a good fit. You build a good rapport with job seekers, and potential candidates connect to an employer that fits their needs – a relationship that is beneficial to both parties. 

As a case study, NEWaukee developed a new event series called Small Bites presented by Sargento to create talent brand awareness in the community, showcase opportunities, and connect to passive job seekers. 

For the first event, NEWaukee activated Sargento cheese experts to interactively teach participants how to build a perfect charcuterie board. The culinary experience highlighted the talent, culture, and people of Sargento while leaving participants with a new skill and delicious takeaway. 

Some key outcomes included over 300 new contacts, nearly 130 engaged attendees, over 20,000 social media impressions, and 6 new potential candidates who joined Sargento’s talent community.

Having a strong talent brand that’s connected to the community highlights your workplace and the impact you make. It also provides an opportunity for employees to share their experiences and connect future candidates. 

Join NEWaukee co-founder Jeremy Fojut on July 21, 2021, for a thought-provoking presentation on the intersection of talent brands & communities featuring national experts from American Airlines, Squarespace, American Family Insurance, and Rockwell Automation! Click here to RSVP!