Employer branding, like most other HR processes, have goals that employers should keep in mind. Employer branding is usually perceived as a strategy to get noticed by job seekers and get them to apply for the openings. But there’s more to employer branding than trying to get attention. Myanmar is a country with many companies relatively new to the concept of employer branding, which why for companies looking to enter the market it is worth knowing the three main goals of employer branding so that the employers can calibrate their branding process in alignment with their branding goals.
1) To Attract
The primary goal of employer branding is to attract potential candidates and turn them into employees. Two elements in orchestrating an employer branding plan that can attract candidates are company reputation and promotion.
A company’s reputation is directly an uncontrollable factor and its stakeholders have a lot to do with maintaining a positive employer reputation; however indirect means such as reviews, ratings, and referrals on the employer all play a role in building a good employer reputation. Having good rapport with the employees is usually a good start to nurture a desired employer reputation because these employees represent your company and what they say or do has a big impact on the perception a potential candidate has of your company.
It is usually very easy to identify how reputed a company’s name is, especially in a country like Myanmar where usage of social media to learn the company reviews including the ratings, outreach figures like number of likes, and shares and the tone of the comments written by the public. These online referrals are counted as ‘credible’ by many Myanmar social media users and a company can easily lose or raise the status its name just through managing its social media presence.
Promotion is another important equivalent of reputation to establish an attractive employer brand. Promoting an employer brand, as opposed to employer reputation, can be administered by the employers themselves and is a largely strategic process that calls for advertising and marketing expertise. Employer promotion also happens to be an integrated process entailing several steps. First, the employers need to inform the public about what their company stands for, what they care about, and what their product is that they’re selling. Second, the employers ought to remind the public about its brand and employer value proposition (EVP) to invite the interest of job applicants and lastly, the employers shall leverage the visibility of their (hopefully by now) good reputation and third party recommendations to further prompt the job seekers to apply for a role.
Employers can promote their brands through both digital and physical marketing means but in Myanmar, social media platforms like Facebook and to a lesser extent LinkedIn are the best means to conduct digital marketing campaigns; while industry-wide popular job fairs like JobNation are good physical places to promote your employer brand and attract potential talents to supplement your overall presence.
As explained, employer reputation and promotion are different but much more intertwined that you’d think they are and these two elements used appropriately are adequate to accomplish the ‘attraction’ purpose of employer branding.
2) To Recruit
Attracting candidates is one thing; however getting and holding their attention enough to entice interest is another. Recruiting the right candidates successfully and closing the deal is one of the overarching goals of employer branding. As a matter of fact, employer branding to achieve the purpose of ‘recruiting’ has to come after ‘attracting’ and it takes two elements to design an employer branding plan that can ‘recruit’ - incentives and work environment.
Many of the job seekers want to know how much they’ll be earning and what their workplace looks like before they accept any job offer and it is the employers’ responsibility to ensure that the employer brand can give a hint at the benefits and the work environment the employees can expect. While the contract is a laid out agreement between the parties based largely on employee competence, the intangible fringe benefits a company offers can go a long way towards workplace morale and employee satisfaction.
Myanmar is still a developing country and compared to many other Asian countries, the average salary offered by most companies may not be as competitive. For some employees, a healthy monetary base salary is all they are interested in, and if a company does not have the resources to budget for the going rate of talent, they will not be successful in recruiting them; but not all employees are as single minded, Many Myanmar job seekers aspire to get more out of their employment than simply monetary gain, especially when they’re fresh graduates or mid-career professionals switching careers, so you can always come up with creative alternative incentives in cases when you cannot afford a very high pay.
A company’s work environment is also a key distinguishing factor that can entice (or turn off) the potential employees. The workplace is somewhere people usually spend a majority of their time in their professional lives and it is not surprising to know that employees do care a lot about where they’ll physically be spending most of their time during the work week.
In Myanmar more than the average economy, employees take into consideration the public commute while making a decision whether to accept a job offer or not. Daily commute can be a very taxing part of people’s lives in Myanmar and a good company location relative to where a company pulls employees from can be quite a positive factor. In addition, some employees also consider factors like the office culture, team working opportunities or international exposure, etc as additional layers of complexity in their decision making. Myanmar people enjoy working in teams or in international environments due to the tremendous diversity of experiences entailed in today’s world. If your company has any of those to offer, you’re well on your way to be able to recruit effectively.
Furthermore, those factors can really establish a great employer brand without requiring your company to offer competitive salary packages or monetary benefits, thus allowing you to compete with your market rivals in a more cost efficient manner.
3) To Retain
Retaining employees is an overlooked metric that every employer brand should be pursuing. Keeping current employees happy is a much smoother and cost efficient process than having to recruit new talent over and over. Most of the employers consummate the employer branding process right after they’ve landed the suitable recruit(s) but it shouldn’t be so; employer branding is an everlasting and evolving process with the goal of ‘retaining’ employees is as much important as ‘attracting’ and ‘recruiting’ them.
Retaining employees can be a defining end goal of employer branding as it tells how effective an employer brand is; an effective employer brand achieves all three goals of attraction, recruitment, and retention while ineffective ones may fail to achieve one or more of these goals, pulling the others down with it. Retaining employees involves growth opportunities for them as well as a good employer-employee relationship.
Employees will not remain long in a company unless they feel that there is an opportunity for them to ascend to positions more conducive for their professional maturity. Employers need to factor employee growth into consideration while designing their employer brand; it shows that the employees that the company cares about creating growth opportunities for them. Professionals in Myanmar tend to be much attracted to promotions, leadership positions, work autonomy, and similar future prospects than any other materialistic incentives. Although compensation is absolutely instrumental for them, promises for a better work future can incentivize the Burmese employees better than anything else.
Employer-employee relationship is also equally significant as professional growth for the employees working at any company. Myanmar people value affiliation or belonging and they tend to adhere much longer to the company if they feel that they’re cared about, looked after, and key to the fabric of the organizational population. Fostering a good relationship between the employers and the employees as well as the employees amongst one another is a long-term process and can only be implemented if both parties are willing to compromise and accommodate to the needs of everyone.
Unlike employer branding for ‘attracting’ and ‘recruiting’ that are usually intended outwardly for potential talents and candidates, employer branding for ‘retaining’ the employees mainly take place within the company and are primarily intended for employees themselves. Most of the HR and branding processes entailed to pull off this very purpose of employer branding may be different from the previous two purposes but it is worthy to keep in mind that availability of employee growth opportunities and maintenance of positive employer-employee relationship are two very cardinal components to successfully execute the ‘retaining’ of employees as part of employer branding.
This employer branding purpose of ‘retaining the employees’ as part of building an employer brand actually supports the previous two factors by motivating the current employees to act as the brand advocates, ambassadors or reputation creators of your company. When done right, all three aspects of the employer brand feed off one another to bolster the company profile as a whole.