A great employer brand is key to attracting great talent. LinkedIn recently published its 2015 'Most In Demand Employers' – the ranking of the most sought after employers based on the activity of the UK’s 19m LinkedIn members. Chris Brown, Head of LinkedIn Talent Solutions UK.

These companies are getting it right and successfully attracting and engaging potential candidates. The UK Top 20 list includes many recognisable household names, such as Apple, Google and John Lewis – but that’s not what got them into the ranking. They understand the power of a strong employer brand and have invested in developing this on social platforms (where their future employees are). Building an effective employer brand takes time and investment. But more and more organisations recognise the value of it. It pays off – quite literally. We recently undertook research that found a poor employer brand could mean an extra wage bill of £4m for an average company with 10,000 employees. This was the added cost of attracting people to their organisation. Furthermore, employers with this kind of poor reputation find their candidate pool is effectively halved in size, limiting the number of potential recruits they have to choose from. So how do companies go about creating their employer brand?

Start at the top

The companies with the strongest employer brands are the ones where the C-suite buys into it and actively supports it. If people at the highest levels are visibly engaging on social platforms, this will encourage others to join in. 

Empower your biggest advocates

Your current employees are often your best ambassadors and, when armed with the right guidance and content, can be a powerful employer branding force. Encouraging employees to keep their LinkedIn profiles fully up-to-date, and arming them with relevant industry research, company news announcements, thought leadership, or industry news can quickly raise your company’s engagement online and increase the chances of being discovered by great potential candidates. Whether you share, post, tag, tweet, like or pin there are plenty of ways to get involved.

Create and share engaging content

LinkedIn Company Pages are an ideal place to build and share your employer brand. Interested professionals can choose to follow companies they’re interested in, and stay up-to-date with news and content shared by those organisations. It’s possible for employers to quickly build a large following of customers, suppliers, and partners, all of whom could be potential candidates. The pages are also a great place for employees to find content they can share with their own networks. Make sure your organisation has claimed its Company Page and is representing itself in the best possible way.

Be authentic

It’s very easy for all of us to spot generic content that doesn’t ring true. You can tell when it’s been written by an employee rather than by, for example, a marketing or commerce team. That authenticity gives those potential candidates real insight into what you can offer and sets you apart from your competitors. Building an employer brand that’s as powerful as those of Google, Apple, John Lewis or ASOS.com won’t happen overnight. It’s important to build a strategy to move forward with, rather than throw out messages ad hoc without assessing why they’re going out, and what the best channel for communicating those messages is.