It's important to build an employer brand strategy in the same way you would your company's overall brand strategy. Think of the various touchpoints beyond job descriptions that make an impact on a candidate's understanding of what it's like to work at your company and audit the story you're telling:
Candidate Outreach: There are a few factors to consider when crafting your email outreach to candidates: both ask who the sender of the email is, and describe why you think the person you're reaching out to would have a major impact on your company's growth. Highlight opportunities for career growth, whom this person would be reporting to, and share any success stories from other diverse members of the team (eg. on your blog). Personalize your messages so that you demonstrate why this candidate is specifically great for the role at hand. When you can, vary who is reaching out. Data shows that female-identifying candidates respond better when the outreach sender is also identifying as female.
Website and Careers page: Make sure a representative view of your team is highlighted on your website — if you're including photos of the team, make sure they're representative of the whole group. If you feature the voices of your employees on your blog, pay attention to who speaks on behalf of the company. Highlight employee benefits that might be appealing to a broad swath of people: flexible work schedules, parental leave, etc. directly on your site.
Company Reviews: Candidates use review sites like Glassdoor and Comparably to do their research before engaging with a company. Make sure your profiles are up to date, reflect your branding and your company policies, and offer your employees instructions on how to voluntarily submit a review of the organization if they choose to do so.
Employee Highlights and Blogs: People want to join a team where they know they will be welcomed and be able to make an impact. A great way to do this is via Employee highlights or blog posts. Here are some examples from Dover’s own blog:
Make sure to link to these posts from your outreach messaging. Including employee highlights and blog posts have shown a significant increase in response rate.
Elevate leadership through podcasts, AMAs and blogs: If your company leadership come from underrepresented backgrounds, highlight this across media channels. Elpha.com and similar websites are great places to do an AMA to showcase your leadership team and culture. Here are some examples of one of Dover’s founders doing an AMA on Elpha and across podcasts:
Tech in Color Interview with Anvisha on what prepared her to be a founder and on hiring a diverse team
Key Values: Create a post on keyvalues.com — this is a helpful employer branding tool for your engineering team because it allows candidates to see how a team’s values would impact their day-to-day experience on the job: do engineers shape the talent roadmap? Does the team actively prioritize diversity and employees with families? Does the team welcome “failure”? These are just some of the cultural attributes that you can surface to prospective hires with a Key Values profile.