How To Ruin Your Employer Brand

By Irina Nagy

I’ve already talked about the importance of building a strong employer brand and how essential it is to carefully nurture the relationship with job seekers and employees in one of my previous blog posts. And I hope all businesses, no matter how big or small they are, are aware of the importance of investing time and money into building a great and attractive employer brand.

Building a robust, trusted employer brand can be a time consuming, expensive process but should be viewed as an essential ingredient in any talent attraction strategy in order to attract, retain top talent and drive profit and innovation within a business. If it’s not well taken care of, it can bring more damage than benefits…

I’ve heard this quote many times and I tend to believe it’s very true: “It can take years to build a brand and only five minutes to destroy it”.

So, here they are, 3 simple ways to completely destroy your employer brand:

• Offering a poor applicant experience. The truth is that, unfortunately, many companies aren’t going above and beyond with their hiring process. Candidates usually put a great deal of effort into CVs, cover letters, application forms, company research or interview preparation. But, over the past few years, it has become acceptable for companies to ignore these applicants, the very people that they have spent all that money and energy generating. Moreover, lots of businesses are starting to create very long application processes, they sometimes oversell a vacancy, don’t read the candidate’s application or post job specifications that are unclear. The candidate experience is important to both job seekers and employers as employers who regularly provide bad candidate experience don’t go unnoticed.
  
  
• Avoiding giving feedback or performance reviews. Employees crave feedback and performance reviews and these are among the most valuable resources for an employer. Ideally, regular conversations between employers and employees should take place throughout the year as performance problems can be easily resolved when they are promptly brought up and good performance can be enhanced if employees are given positive feedback. In addition to regular feedback, a more formal annual performance review should also be given. But delivering it can be time consuming so many employers choose to avoid and maybe forget about this, taking away the employees chance to reflect, reset and re-focus on achieving new goals and professional growth.
  
  
• Failing to match promises. There’s nothing worse than failing to match the reality of what a new employee was promised. All employees are expecting the company to deliver on its promises, to be honest and open in all communications, to invest in them and treat them fairly. Therefore, each company should make sure everything they promised will be delivered once the employee joins the business. This is a sure way to find greater success in talent attraction and retention strategies.

With social media, globalization and businesses becoming increasingly transparent, word can get around very quickly therefore all employers should be aware that an employer brand can provide them with a strong competitive advantage. And I will talk about this and ways to build a strong employer brand in a future blog post.