You get it. Employer Branding is not just an option anymore. It is a must-have. Just as one should have a Facebook account, otherwise risk the weird stares and comments. You try. You really do. You look at what Apple is doing, what Spotify has on its career page… and before you go to one more, creating your own is beginning to feel more and more like doing up a Ph.D. thesis. It is easy to edit a bad copy but impossible to edit a blank one. The challenge here is to gather enough data to put up a good copy that will attract talent (in hope to convert them). It’s easy when you have the budget to hire marketers or to outsource to an employer branding agency. But if the purse string is tight, these are going to be a problem. But it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Here are some quick and easy tricks to getting your first copy in no time and with minimal effort:
1. Get feedback from existing staff
At this stage, all you need are ideas and data. If you suffer from writer’s block, crowdsource the solution. Set up a survey to find out from your existing staff what they like about the organisation. In fact, incentivise them to encourage quick reply (how much could a Starbucks card cost?) This isn’t about improvements to the organisation, so skip the stuff they dislike.
Cost: $0
2. Don’t forget your ex-staff
If you have been doing exit interviews, it is time to put that information to good use. One typical question asked would be what you like about the organisation. You could get a lot of gems there since this feedback is given when they are leaving. They have nothing to gain by giving fake opinions. Put these together and you have another set of data on hand.
Cost: $0
3. Check out reviews of competition
Sometimes even the best of us find it difficult to express what we feel. We just need triggers to remind us things that we probably have taken for granted. What you could do here is check out the reviews and comments of your competitors. You could easily find them on sites such as Glassdoor. Here is what you want to do: focus on the cons that are mentioned about them. Reflect on this (be honest), relating to your organization. Do you have the same problems? If so, move on. If not, that is a plus point you could put into your copy.
Cost: $0
4. Write it for a 12-year-old
This is probably the hardest part. Getting raw data is easy. But transforming it into readable, marketable and emotionall evocative paragraphs, that’s tough! Ok, don’t panic. Writing well may not come naturally for many of us but there are tools which could guide you towards achieving your goals. To begin with, you would still need some sort of copy to work with. It could be bad copy; that’s ok. What you want to do next is take that copy and head over to Hemingway Editor. What’s that you ask? Hemingway Editor is a web application that makes your writing bold and clear. Think of it like the spellchecker built into your word processor. But instead of checking for typos, it checks for the style. This way your reader will be able to focus on your message, not your prose.
Cost: $0
5. Proofread it
Of course, you are not going to do it. We are in 2016. There’s an AI for everything! In this case, I’m talking about Grammarly. As the name implies it helps to correct any grammatical errors in your copy. It will also spot spelling mistakes and detects traces of plagiarism in the process.
Cost: $0
These are the quick and dirty tips to get your first employer branding content up in double-quick time. Obviously, there is a lot of room for improvement, and that could easily be looked at when you have some working copy; something that you learned how to do up in little time and with zero cost.
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