improving retention rates through employer branding

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Employer Branding: 4 Brilliant Ways to Boost Your Retention Strategy

August 5, 2022

Tima Rassool

Tima Rassool

Content Writer

Are high turnover rates raising your concern? Do you feel like you’re investing a ton of time, energy, and headspace into hiring star employees – but you’re not able to retain them? We might know what the problem is. Your employer branding isn’t strong enough. When your employer branding is lackluster and just thrown together to for the sake of having one – you’ll be doing more harm than good. While every business is unique but they all have one thing in common: they all want to retain their best employees and nurture their employer branding.

In this blog post, we’ll cover the key ways strong employer branding can ultimately improve your retention strategy.

Foster more flexible working arrangements

a recruiter boosting employer branding

The 9-5 is dead. If you’re looking for a seamless way to engage and retain your top employees, then you need to be more flexible. Since the wake of Covid19, flexible working hours and arrangements became the new norm. In fact, almost every employee anticipates this from their company. If their jobs can be done from home or a hybrid work environment – you need to give them that option. In fact, studies have shown that remote work can significantly boost employee engagement. Plus, they’ll tend to spread more positive word of mouth and share only the greatest things about the company. Not only will this help you improve your retention rates, but it also helps you boost their productivity and efficiency. When you provide employees with more flexible working arrangements, they’ll also feel more valued at your company – and happy enough to be your own brand ambassadors. So when you become an employer that gives their employees the convenience to work where and how they see fit, you’ll be taking big strides in retaining them. So if you have a Sales Manager who remotely manages a team in a different time zone, let them choose the most suitable working hours. If your Back-end developer is a night-owl and can more efficiently code at night – let them. Moral of the story: be attentive to your employee’s needs, desired working arrangements, and preferred style of work. Only then will you be able to increase retention and satisfaction rates monumentally.

Create clearer career paths for employees

A candidate impressed with a company's employer branding

When you make employees feel like their jobs are like a transaction, they’ll be demotivated and less excited to work. As an employer, it’s your core job to make your employees feel like they can grow, develop, and thrive in their careers. Otherwise, you’ll risk having your star employees debilitated and less enticed to unleash their full potential. By helping your team seamlessly meet their professional and personal goals – you’ll be simultaneously boosting your employer branding and retention strategy. It’s like hitting two birds with one stone. To help your employees establish a clearer career path, opt to schedule one-on-one meetings with them and listen to what they have to say. Ask them about their goals, experience, and where they see themselves in the near future. These meetings shouldn’t resemble performance reviews but actually encourage a transparent two-way communication process. This will help you pinpoint what areas the designated employee needs to develop, and what skillsets have developed. You can also recommend career path options based on your assessment. At the end of the day, if your employer branding doesn’t support career progression, your employee won’t be enticed enough to stay. Especially if their plans, goals, and aspirations are not coming to fruition at your company.

Build a better workplace culture

a recruiter using an ATS on her laptop

When it comes to working, culture is everything. If you’re not a raging fan of your work culture, you won’t be encouraged enough to stay. When employees feel like they are underappreciated at the workplace, they’ll tend to be less productive with their work. They’ll produce halfhearted work and the bare minimum needed just to get by. But when your employer branding recognizes performance and appraises hard work – it becomes a different ballgame altogether. Remember the employee who crushed their KPIs last week? Make sure you tell them that. Did your recruiting team do a great job at hiring top talent? Praise their hard work and dedication. If you want to retain your star employees, you need to recognize and appreciate their hard work. Or else, you’ll be compromising your employer branding and retention rates exponentially. All in all, you want to build a culture where everyone is happy, motivated, and on top of the moon. You can’t want a work environment filled with toxicity and lack of appreciation. Your employer branding should make everyone feel like they are valued and an important asset to the company. Otherwise, you could potentially lose your top performers to the competition!

Solicit and give ongoing feedback to keep improving

improving employer branding by giving employees feedback

Yes, perks, free food, and words of affirmation are great. But they don’t always mean better work performance or an engaged workforce. As an employer, the happiness of your employees is the most important investment that you can possibly make. Simply because if your employees are not happy, they won’t feel driven enough to produce great quality of work. This essentially leads to lower business performance which jeopardizes your employer branding. Want to avoid this from spiraling into a full-blown setback? You’ve got to get and give feedback! If your employees don’t know what they’re doing wrong, or what more they need to do to crush their KPIs – you need to guide them in the right direction. Encourage them to give their feedback and voice their concerns. Let them find a safe and open space to tell you how they feel. This will help you pinpoint blind spots or gaps in your company that must have slipped your notice. Perhaps you’re overworking your employees, or giving them unreasonable goals and unattainable KPIs. Whichever the case, listen attentively to their feedback and use it wisely to improve your retention strategy. Not only that, but your employer branding can play a crucial role in helping your employees grow. For example, if you care about your employees nurturing and cultivating new skills, you can always give them fruitful feedback. Put them in the right direction, recommend online courses, and help them address any performance gaps.

Final thoughts

If you have a team of masterminds that are helping your company reach new heights – you need to make sure you retain them. With a stellar employer branding strategy, you can incredibly create a culture of high performance, keep your employees happy, attract top talent, and most importantly, boost your retention strategy. Need a little hand with that? See how EVA-REC can help! EVA-REC is a multi-award-winning ATS that helps small businesses to enterprises build skillful workforces and hire top talent at scale. It makes it far easier for recruiters to find, attract, and hire the right people, every time. With world-class integrations and AI features, EVA-REC creates a rich and immersive hiring experience for HR teams and candidates alike. Request a free demo and see EVA-REC in action today!

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Author

Tima Rassool

Tima Rassool

A wordsmith, storyteller, and content strategist – Tima is an MBA graduate with 6+ years of experience in the world of HR. With over 2,000 blogs under her belt, Tima's expertise and insights have helped businesses across the globe take their recruitment to the next level and stay ahead of the curve.

Turn top talent to employees fast

Hire, assess, onboard and manage top talent for every job. See how Elevatus streamlines everything; from acquire to new hire.

Request a demo