Build and Amplify Your Talent Brand Now

In your 2014 SCALE, talent branding is one of the core themes.  It turns out that the ACT-1 Group is not the only company talking about building your Talent Brand.  LinkedIn recently presented their top 5 recruiting investments for 2014, and investing in Talent Branding was #2 on their list.

LinkedIn describes Talent Brand as follows:

“Your Talent Brand is the highly social, totally public version of your employer brand that incorporates what your talent – past, present and potential – thinks, feels and shares about your company as a place to work”

According to LinkedIn, their survey reveals that 83% of people agree that Talent Brand has significant impact on the ability to hire great talent and can also:

• lower cost per hire by up to 50%
• reduce employee turnover by 28%

Where to invest time and budget is a question that all companies ask and the LinkedIn Global Recruiting Trends Survey identified the top 10 channels for communicating talent branding. The Company Website continues to lead as the place where most companies invest their efforts, but online professional networks (like LinkedIn) showed the largest year over year growth.

One of the top tasks you can undertake is to standardize the LinkedIn profiles for each of your employees to include the key marketing messages for your company.  The profile of every employee on LinkedIn is essentially a micro-marketing site and very few companies are leveraging this potentially valuable marketing real estate.  And the best thing about standardizing and updating LinkedIn profiles is that this initiative will cost you nothing except for the time to develop, train and roll-out a standard template for your employee’s LinkedIn profiles.  LinkedIn even has a new feature where users can upload presentations or other collateral to their LinkedIn profiles and this would be a great way to include a standard marketing deck or product information for your company.

Other ways to leverage LinkedIn include:

1. Make sure that all employees have a website link and other ways to connect with your company in their profiles
2. Update your LinkedIn company page frequently with interesting information
3. Instruct your employees to like and share any content posted on your company page

You can view the entire LinkedIn presentation on the “5 Recruiting Investments You Need To Make in 2014” below and you can watch their webcast at this link.