How to create brand consistency and messaging in your talent acquisition team

By Jessica Miller-Merrell 

Building your employment brand is a constant effort to present the best that your organization is to the world. Often times, we focus so much on one single aspect, forgetting that there are multiple bases to cover and that most importantly, we can’t do it alone. A successful employment brand involves so many things, from your look and feel to the way you treat candidates to the places you recruit. It spans all the channels you utilize and the interactions your department has with those outside the business and is a full-time responsibility, for you and the rest of your talent acquisition team.

We, as talent acquisition leaders, are spending time building our brand and forgetting that that we can’t do it alone. We can spend weeks fine-tuning a consistent message, choosing colors, numbers, fonts and approved corporate logos that represent this, but the real struggle and challenge is creating brand consistency with everyone on the talent acquisition team.

Focus on these four strategies to get the rest of the team to care about your employment brand as much as you do.

Train your recruiters

Believe it or not, some recruiters may not even know what you mean when you say employment brand. They may think colors and logos, but chances are, they don’t understand the scope of employment branding if it’s never been a priority. I encourage every talent acquisition team to have a formal employment brand training session to discuss all the aspects of it and the expectations for support of it. You can’t blame them for not knowing, so get that barrier out of the way up front.

Focus on small wins

When you look at your team’s efforts, make note of what they are doing to enhance and promote the employment brand. Even if they aren’t fully advocating for the brand, a good team is going to have recruiters that are already working individually to present the company in the best way possible. Celebrate this! Focus on all the ways they are consistently promoting your employment brand and don’t be too picky. Consistency is attainable, perfection is not.

Create brand guidelines

Your communications or marketing department probably has a branding guide for your company to help employees understand how the company is represented to the world. Create a similar guide for recruiters, providing information about look and feel, messaging, processes and standards. It’s amazing what simply having a definitive guide will do for your efforts to be consistent.

Build content templates

To minimize the margin for human error, create content templates using messaging that your team believes best represents the company’s employment brand. You can create these templates for job postings, offer letters, follow-up emails and anything else that is sent on a regular basis. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.