Confronted with the difficulty of finding and recruiting talent, building an employer brand has become a priority topic in today’s HR conversations.
This article explores how utilizing the right visual content is essential to rollout an effective employer branding strategy. More precisely, we are going to see how you can leverage infographics to promote your organisation and feed your talent pipeline.
Organizations of all sizes around the world use an employer branding strategy to attract and retain the best employees. Yet many have difficulty creating an employer brand that makes their organisation stand out. This is probably the reason why only 28% of organisations place employer branding at the heart of their recruitment and retention strategy, according to StepStone.
Employer branding is a by-product of HR and Marketing, turning organisations into commodities which, like products, need to be marketed and placed under the spotlight. For HR professionals, it’s a communication exercise with several problematic implications: relying on employees who value their organisation to amplify its image, attracting the best talent, and, finally, retaining high-performers in the long run.
Creating an impactful employer brand cannot happen just like this, though. Simply being present on social media is not enough to be of interest to today’s prospective job candidates. To make employer branding effective, you need to have something to say, a compelling message, and you need to provide valuable, meaningful information that will act as a magnet to grow your talent pool.
In other words, your employer brand cannot exist (and thrive!) without a rich, varied and regular content strategy.
Infographics constitute an integral part of any well-rounded content strategy. They offer a fresh approach to content formats. Research has even shown that coloured visuals increased a person’s likeliness to read a piece of content by 80%. In addition, marketers place visuals as the second most important content type.
Here are 5 reasons why you should use infographics as part of a compelling and HR focused content strategy:
1. Infographics Are Worth a Thousand Words
Data has always been a powerful tool to engage people. Facts, numbers and charts are highly influential. For an organisation actively recruiting candidates, having to summarise the business’ mission, history and activities is not usually an easy task.
Infographics are not just a pretty way to present information, they allow you to broadcast a large amount of data in a way that is easily digestible and has a big impact on its viewers. An ingenuous combination of font, sizes, colours and visual elements have the power to focus attention on the facts that matter.
When it comes to enhancing your company’s brand and presence, infographics appear as a great means to position your organisation as an employer of choice.
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2. Infographics Can Give a Snapshot of Your Company’s DNA
Infographics have the benefit of showcasing your organisation using attention-grabbing visuals, which present its identity in an approachable manner. They give job candidates the opportunity to become familiar with your brand and what it has to communicate.
In the infographic below, Coca-Cola manages to introduce over 50 facts about their company.
Now, imagine having to present the same amount of information using a classic text format. That data becomes suddenly overwhelming! This infographic has the merit of providing prospective candidates a quick summary of the DNA of the company: what they do, who works there, who they work with, and so on.
3. Infographics Can Help Reinvent Your Discourse on Values
The discourse on values has become pretty boring over the years. Corporate values, usually a set of 4-5 keywords, seem to be easily interchangeable between organisations these days. “Team spirit,” “honesty,” “customer service,” etc. From one business to another, the same ideas are boasted with pride.
When taking a closer look, you might realise that a traditional value proposition might not hold as much meaning for an external candidate as it may for your managers and employees internally. Infographics can help you present your values in a way that is much more significant for potential employees.
Like Nestle, you could use an infographic to illustrate the efforts your organisation has made in areas that contribute to your core values.
Do you truly believe that customer service is at the core of everything your organisation does? Create an infographic showcasing the data around the actions your business takes to deliver a 5-star service. Options can be easily declined to suit your employer brand and make your values shine in a new light.
Visuals can help you take values away from the state of mere concept. Thanks to infographics, you can depict what your organisation believes in through vetted facts and figures, turning them into more palpable and meaningful concepts.
4. Infographics Are Highly Shareable
In the digital era, you can’t ignore the impact of social media on your recruitment strategy. And with Millennials entering the workforce in increasing numbers, it makes even more sense to leverage this channel to feed your talent pipeline.
Infographics have the advantage of using principles of gamification to bring a viral dimension to your employer brand building strategy. Millennials, having grown up with video games, are especially receptive to this format.
Also, infographics not only happen to be one of the most shared forms of content on social media, they are also a fun and interesting way to communicate information. In fact, content that features interesting visuals attracts 94% more views than content without.
And given that 62% of candidates turn to social media to gather information about an employer’s brand, there’s a definite opportunity to use infographics to build a positive employer brand image on those sites.
You can easily promote your brand’s infographics on your company profiles, embed them on your company pages and have them shared by others to amplify your employer brand message.
5. Infographics Don’t Cost the Earth
HR professionals, who are constantly under pressure to cut costs down, don’t always have the budget and resources to fuel the production of expensive recruitment or corporate videos. Infographics have the advantage of being affordable to produce and, thanks to simple online tools like Venngage, it’s easy to create engaging visuals to represent your employer brand without the need to spend thousands with a design agency.
It’s also an opportunity for the HR and Communication department, who know how to produce content, to work together. Employees from both departments are forced to change their work habits to adhere to the overall organisational communication strategy.
Final Words
Sight being one of our most potent cognitive faculties, it’s only logical that we tend to use it to make sense of concepts and elements and absorb their meaning. Hence, why infographics greatly improve our ability to comprehend and retain information.
Infographics are a fantastic medium to help you present your organisation in a new light, while also creating awareness around its values and identity.
Sharing infographics to expose your employer brand is also a great way to help you build and maintain a relationship with candidates, and not only when they are actively prospecting for a new role.
Infographics can help you start a conversation, and ultimately, reap the benefits of a positive employer branding.
For more HR insights, visit EmployeeConnect.