What if I told you that with just one sentence you could:

• Attract 78% more qualified talent.
• Have a 92% employee retention rate.
• Gain a recruitment competitive advantage.
• Improve the commitment of new hires by 24%.

Would you want to learn more? Well, too bad, I’m not sharing my secrets! Just kidding.

Jokes aside, it is possible, and it all starts with your brand as an employer.

What Is Employer Branding? In simple terms, employer branding is the art of managing and influencing your reputation to existing and potential employees. It is about creating an employer image through workplace experiences, professional-growth opportunities and value-driven purpose. Employer branding allows an employer to differentiate their company from others and showcase why they are a great place to work.

Whether you have consciously created your employer brand or not, it exists. The job market world has already formed an opinion about who you are as an employer and what you stand for based on previous and current employee experiences. This reputation has a huge impact on the quality of talent you can attract and ultimately retain in the future.

In fact, according to a survey conducted by Randstad, 86% of workers would not apply to work for a company that has a bad reputation with former employees.

Now, did you notice that I used the words ‘managing’ and ‘influencing’ as opposed to creating or ownership? That’s because it’s important to understand that you can never totally own your brand as an employer. Your brand exists in the minds of candidates and employees, and it’s shaped by their opinions, impressions, experiences and individual interactions with your company.

This means that unless you actively nurture your brand as an employer, your reputation is at the mercy of past, present and future employees.

That sounds pretty dicey to me!

Why Is Employer Branding Important For Construction Companies? In a labour market where attracting and retaining top talent is getting harder with every passing year, construction companies are constantly looking for an edge.

Most companies are turning to expensive recruiters and headhunters to bring in talent. However, within the construction industry, I’ve also been seeing a lot of companies trying to gain that edge by offering more employee perks.

In my opinion, this isn’t a smart move.

When offering employee perks you might see some short term gains but it can be a slippery slope. There will always be another company that is more desperate and willing to offer something extra.

If you are looking to establish a company that succeeds in maintaining long-term employee retention, then a well-crafted and managed employer brand is your secret weapon.

Why?

Because unlike perks, a great employer brand is an enduring competitive edge no competitor can replicate. It’s also something that builds genuine value in a business.

The Magical Sentence At The Heart Of Your Employer Brand So now that we are clear on what employer branding is and why it’s important for businesses, let’s talk about this magical sentence.

And that is your Employer Value Proposition (EVP) and it is absolutely crucial to your overall employer brand and the success you have with attracting and retaining talent.

Your EVP sits underneath your employer brand and is designed to communicate what you offer as an employer, how you are different from your competitors and why people should care. It should cover all the areas that are truly important to an employee such as growth opportunities, your people, your culture, your mission, vision & values.

But most importantly, your EVP should not be about you! It should be about your ideal employees and candidates and how they will benefit from working with you.

It sounds simple, but creating an effective EVP is deceptively challenging and it takes a huge amount of time, research and creative thinking to get right. But, it is a critical focus point because it influences everything else you do as a company, such as:

• Setting the tone for your company’s culture.
• The quality of talent you attract.
• Your overall company messaging and what you stand for.
• Employee retention.
• Your social media strategy.
• The tone of voice you use in job ads and social media.
• The style of video and written you create.

So How Does A Great Employer Brand Work In Reality? The Challenge: A few years ago my phone rang. A woman named Tash, was on the other end. She and her husband owned a growing construction company with more work on the books than they could handle, but retaining staff was a huge struggle. At the time Tash said, ‘It feels like I’m having to replace people every few weeks’. Frustrated by the high cost of continuously recruiting and with big projects falling behind due to a lack of staff, they had decided to get some help.

The Nitty Gritty: The first thing we helped Tash and her husband do was evaluate their current brand. We conducted a wide range of research, both qualitative and quantitative, to understand the candidate journeys of different people they were attracting. This research uncovered a huge disconnect between what employees perceived working for the company was like, and the everyday reality of what being on the job was truly like. This was the main cause of their company’s high staff turnover.

When their initial brand was created, the company employed only 20 people, but now they employ close to 200 people! Unsurprisingly, it’s a completely different company in nearly every aspect and their brand simply wasn’t reflecting these changes. As a result, they were attracting the wrong people.

Our Solution: Based on our research findings, we helped Tash completely rebuild their employer brand. We understood that if they ultimately wanted to retain great people, we had to start from the beginning and actually attract the right people in the first place.

By carefully crafting a new EVP & employer brand that genuinely reflected the company, its culture, what makes it unique, and shows employees how they are better off working with Tash and her husband, we knew that we could put an end to their retention nightmare and help them focus on what they do best – delivering great projects for their clients.

The new employer brand was brought to life with a new careers site, compelling video content that reinforced the brand, an employee enablement plan, and a rock solid social media marketing strategy.

The Results: Tash’s new employer brand was officially launched on 13th April 2021, and the results have been nothing short of amazing!

• Their employee retention now sits at 92% (up from just over 65%)
• They’ve saved $175,000 in recruiter fees and job boards just in the past 12 months
• Job applications via their careers site have increased by 217%
• They now have a talent pipeline of 630 interested and highly qualified candidates that they can recruit from at any time… for FREE!
• They are able to fill positions 3x faster
• The average amount of time people spent on their careers site jumped from 1:47 minutes to 6:37 minutes! This means people are digging the employer brand and are engaged with the content.

Today, Tash and her husband’s recruitment success continues and their employer brand and marketing is mostly managed in-house by a part time marketing coordinator, with strategy and direction being managed and updated by us every quarter.

Tash’s story is just one example of how construction companies can use their employer value proposition and their employer brand to build more sustainable businesses and ultimately attract more top quality talent.

And regardless of whether finding talent becomes easier in the next few years or not, finding the right talent will always be a challenge, and that’s why investing in your brand as an employer is a smart choice – it can literally save you hundreds of thousands per year!

In fact, Harvard Business says that 70% of a company’s worth lies in its intellectual property and human capital, i.e. its people.

So, if you’re a business owner or CEO that one day wants to sell or even introduce some sort of employee ownership scheme, having a solid employer brand and a repeatable documented method to consistently attract top talent will drastically improve the value of your company.

Hopefully you found this useful!