Employer Brand: Image vs Reality

To be attractive and retain their employees, companies must communicate externally as well as internally. And this, preferably by distinguishing yourself from the competition.

Today, a company’s reputation appears relative and fragile. In an era where everything is digitalized, computerized, and communicated, it has never been easier to learn about someone or something.

Consumers and users give their opinions, share, and communicate their experiences on the Internet. This is why you need to control your employer brand. The messages must be disseminated, whether by the company itself or by a third party, to reflect reality. Without this, informal information channels risk-taking precedence over official statements, which would work against the reputation and image of your company.

This massive digitalization requires you, as an employer, to pay attention to the image you project as well as the consistency between the image experienced by your employees and that which is conveyed on your social networks.

Employer brand communication will thus translate the identity, culture, and values ​​of your company by disseminating the vision, mission, and corporate culture internally and externally while remaining in line with reality.

The employer brand must, above all, reflect a promise to the future employee

An often tempting pitfall would be to embellish reality to attract candidates and improve your image by artificializing the company’s positioning.

It’s indeed easy to choose to highlight the most flattering, most attractive aspects when building an employer brand. However, putting forward “an ideal” can have dangerous consequences for your various stakeholders.

In a recruitment situation, the candidate, once arriving in your company, will be confronted with his reality and will build his own experience in your company. If this reality does not correspond to what was communicated to him, he may choose to leave the company, and in this case, the time spent recruiting him will cost you dearly. The second possibility is that he chooses to stay; this will affect his commitment and motivation, degrade the relationship of trust, and thus disrupt the social climate.

For employees already in the company, noticing a communication campaign that does not correspond with their reality will be perceived as an action that is out of sync between this ideal presented and their experience. This will, therefore, have negative consequences on the group, directly impacting the cohesion and commitment of all.

So, any discrepancy between communication and reality will lead to disillusionment and have negative consequences for your organization. Any company needs to respect its commitments and accurately reflect the promise on which it has communicated.

Also Read: Employer Branding: 5 Tips For Building A Strong Employer Brand