How can you build and improve your employer brand in the digital services sector?

Editor's note: The term "digital services" includes IT Services and digital transformation consulting services.

Digital Service Companies (IT Services) are increasingly facing a talent shortage. According to a study by the Institut Montaigne, 10% of job vacancies in the digital sector remain unfilled. So, not only are IT Services suffering from a lack of talent on the job market, but recruitment at IT Services is penalized by a declining attractiveness according to the opinion of young profiles, due to a not always flattering reputation of life at IT Services. Added to this is a high turnover within the industry, in excess of 20%, which only accentuates these difficulties. 

It is therefore imperative for IT Services to work on improving their employer brand. If they don't, they risk slowing down their growth. 

Employer branding encompasses a company's image in terms of human resources management and recruitment. It is the image perceived both by candidates, who are on the job market and could apply, and by the company's employees on these various subjects.

Working to improve your employer brand therefore involves working on the subjects of employee engagement and satisfaction. The higher the level of employee satisfaction, the better the employer brand. After all, employees are the voice of the employer brand among job applicants. 

This article provides digital companies with a guide to developing and improving their employer brand.  

Evaluate your current employer brand

Understand the current perception of your employer brand

Before undertaking any improvement projects, you need to know how your IT Services employer brand is currently perceived. You need to know how your IT Services name is perceived in terms of human resources management, well-being at work and employee satisfaction.

This enables us to prioritize our actions. Developing a company's brand image is a long-term project, and it's important to set priorities where the results will have the greatest impact.

Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your employer brand

To analyze the perception of your it consulting employer brand, you can adopt for a combination of approaches.

First of all, you need to establish the precise topics on which you want to understand people's perceptions. The subjects chosen must therefore be those on which you will have the means to act. You can create a list of points to review around the themes of well-being at work, flexibility in the workplace, the value of assignments, learning and training, career development, and finally, the financial aspects of packages. 

To define the impact of each of these topics and go further in prioritizing them, you can determine an impact score internally based on your knowledge of the subject. You can also use a survey of your target audience to obtain an even more reliable result.

The next step is to define the sources that will enable you to draw conclusions about the perception of your employer brand. You can seek information from a variety of sources:

• employee or former employee reviews on dedicated sites such as Glassdoor ;
• comments on the internet ;
• a questionnaire sent to candidates corresponding to your target group;
• an internal employee satisfaction survey ;
• a survey sent to freelancers - if you work with them on a regular basis.

You can then combine all these sources to obtain more data and a more reliable statistical approach. When you choose to send out questionnaires, remember to provide for the anonymization of responses. Anonymous feedback is systematically less biased than when you have to reveal your identity.

Questionnaires must be well constructed to ensure clear scoring. Questions should be mostly closed-ended, to leave as little room for interpretation as possible. On the other hand, this is also an opportunity to ask more open-ended questions to obtain suggestions on the most important actions to take.

Once the feedback has been obtained, you can clearly identify the strengths and weaknesses of your employer brand. You can put a perception rating against each of the topics you study.

With the help of this scorecard, you now have a concrete view of how your employer brand is perceived on each of the subjects studied, as well as their impact on your image. You now have all the key elements in hand to build an effective action plan to improve your employer brand.

Develop an attractive employer value proposition

The war for talent in the consulting and digital sectors requires you to create an employer brand that is both attractive and differentiating. If you don't differentiate in this area, your employer brand will be lost in the shuffle, and you won't be able to reap the full benefits.

Identification of corporate values and culture

The main pillar of the employer brand is the company's corporate values and culture. While it is possible to accentuate and communicate better around these subjects, it is not possible to invent these elements or other actions. A company's values are very closely linked to its culture. linked to the approach and values of management, and especially of the company's founders.

We mustn't fall into the trap of trying to invent from scratch a culture and values that are not aligned with management's vision, otherwise all the communication will be in vain, and the initial effect will quickly fade away. On the contrary, management needs to carry out an in-depth reflection to establish the current and future values that will be aligned with the company's long-term strategy and the convictions of its leaders.

We need to restrict the number of values selected and promoted to ensure that communication around them remains convincing. It's not enough to communicate about values; they must be truly lived within the company if they are to remain consistent. Finally, they must also be simple so that everyone can understand them, both internally and externally.

Creating a differentiating employer value proposition

In a competitive sector like digital, where the war for talent is raging, it's imperative that you have a strong employer value proposition that's different from your competitors. Above all, it must not leave candidates indifferent! You need to emphasize the specific aspects that your company brings to the table.

• On corporate culture 

Explain how you maintain a collaborative and dynamic spirit. Emphasize your values and get your employees to testify on these subjects. Your employees are young: show them how you organize social events to encourage informal meetings and exchanges between colleagues.

• On challenging projects 

The project-based working and the ability to work on different subjects is an element that should be used as an opportunity an opportunity for your value proposition. But you also need to be able to offer your employees this diversity of assignments. If so, you can describe how your company can enable them to to work on challenging, high-impact high-impact projects.

Showcase your company's successes with well-known brands to demonstrate your expertise.

• On training and development  

Set up training and professional to help your employees progress in their careers and acquire new skills.

• On flexibility and work-life balance 

Authorize telecommuting by setting clear rules that make it possible to flexibility. Focus on employee well-being.

• On recognition and rewards 

Set up recognition programs to ensure that employee successes are systematically recognized and shared. They need to feel that good work is recognized and appreciated.

There are many other ways in which you can make your employer brand a differentiator that helps you recruit and retain employees longer.

Aligning the value proposition with the expectations of potential employees

The choice of values and actions in favor of employees must be fully aligned with the expectations of potential employees.

The expectations of potential future employees vary widely, depending on the sector, the level of education, the career development opportunities offered by the sector, and many other criteria. 

As in marketing, you need to the profile of potential employees and their and their expectations to make the right employer branding choices in order to satisfy your employeesboth current and future.

For consulting activities and IT Services, we also need to take into account how values are perceived in the agendas of candidates and employees. With a workforce that is often younger on average than in most other sectors, we need to promote values that resonate with candidates just out of school and often display a strong ambition for personal growth, but also an assumed a commitment to well-being.

Your internal communications and commitments

Prioritize transparent, open communication

Your employer brand can increase the number of job applications by over 50%, according to a study published by Welcome To The Jungle media. But to achieve these results, you need to know how to communicate this employer brand so that it grows and becomes known to candidates. It also needs to be constantly realigned and adjusted to be as consistent as possible with the reality of life in the company for employees, and thus accommodate current issues. This is why management must take steps to strengthen communication around the employer brand, and open channels for employees to report discrepancies between what is communicated and the reality of the facts.

Make sure your company communicates transparently about its vision, goals, successes and challenges. Show that you encourage open exchange and value everyone's ideas and contributions.

Employees must be given the means to express themselves fearlessly and frequently on these subjects. Either through employee surveys, or by organizing dedicated feedback sessions in which employees give specific feedback on the subjects of life at work and their well-being in the company in general.

Of course, managers need to be empowered and trained in the approach. This will enable them to be totally open to employee feedback, and prevent negative feedback from generating consequences for the employee, otherwise feedback will quickly become biased, or even useless.

Use effective internal communication channels

In a digital services company, it's more difficult to get together regularly at the office, as teams are often dispersed across agencies and customer sites, and opportunities to exchange ideas are rarer. The key is to create effective internal communication channels. 

Teams should be brought together as often as possible forteam-building events. Offer internal communications tools that facilitate internal exchanges, even when employees are working for a customer for several months.

You also need to choose tools that make it easy to collaborate: allow employees to position themselves on future customer needs, indicate the skills they wish to improve, or enable managers to send project participation proposals to their teams.

Employees need to feel part of the company, so it's imperative to keep them informed of company news through regular e-mails, newsletters or an intranet.

You can also give them the means to see what projects other employees are working on and when they'll be in the office.

Staff your teams more effectively

Develop a recruitment and promotion strategy

Use of recruitment channels relevant to the digital sector

Finally, the last pillar of employer branding is the recruitment channel and the promotion of your brand on the chosen channels.

To recruit in the digital sector, it's important to focus your efforts on the channels most used by candidates. This means researching and listing sites specializing in digital offers.

There are many platforms that list job boards according to their expertise. A search on a search engine allows you to identify the best ones according to your needs. Ideally, you use tools that allow you to post to multiple recruitment platforms at once.

Last but not least, school forums are a great place not only to recruit, but also to promote your employer brand. Face-to-face exchanges enable you to highlight the specific features of your company and how it stands out from others in the sector.

Promoting the employer brand on social networks and professional platforms

In the age of social networking, the importance of social networking platforms for promoting your brand should not be underestimated. Here again, it's important to choose the right platform for your organization. Certain social networks and professional platforms are saturated, and promoting your employer brand on them can be very costly. On LinkedIn, for example, it's increasingly difficult to promote your employer proposition, given the sheer number of companies promoting themselves there.

The key is to identify networks that are more recent or less saturated with these topics. At first glance, Tik-Tok might seem a long way off the mark, but a number of companies that were there before its kind have boosted their employer brand tenfold by exploiting the novelty of this network and the void left by the rest of the market.

In short, digital companies need to assess their employer brand, develop a differentiating value proposition aligned with the expectations of potential employees, and strengthen their internal communications to improve their employer brand in their industry.

This is a major exercise that needs to be taken to the highest level of the company to ensure that the employer brand is disseminated throughout all teams.