Consumerism has overtaken recruiting. People are using the same behaviors to look for a job that they use to buy products and services. The first thing job seekers are going to do when interested in learning about your company is go to your website and they could have many online interactions with your company before they make the decision to apply for a position.

Did you know that you have an employer reputation? It’s called your employer brand and you can either leave it to chance, or you can manage it. It’s much better to manage it if you want to have a say in the narrative that is being shared about your company in its role as an employer.

Would you ever buy a house without walking through it first? Do you think you could make a confident purchase if you weren’t even allowed to peek through the windows? Probably not. Yet that’s what you might be asking your job candidates to do if you don’t use employee testimonials in your recruitment marketing. Employee testimonials give your candidates a window to peek through to see if your company is a good place to work, and if the job you want to fill is right for them.

If you have been involved with hiring for your company, you probably know how this scene plays out. You have a position to fill, and you post the job. Applicants come in and you screen the candidates to get a shortlist, and so on. You end up with a hire that may or may not be a good fit. Time will tell, and hopefully you don’t find yourself filling the same job again in a few months or even a year or two down the road.

When it comes to communicating that you can do what you say you can do, your customers’ words carry a lot more weight than yours do. When you talk about yourself, it’s a platitude. When your customers talk about you, it’s credibility. That’s why it’s important to gather and use testimonials throughout all of your sales and marketing messages so that you can build trust with every interaction.

Customer success stories should be in your content marketing mix if you want to set yourself apart from your competition. When you tell the stories that only you can tell, you give prospects a tag to remember you by. If you take the reader up and over the dramatic arc with your story, an empathetic response is stimulated that can lead to action. This isn’t going to happen, however, if you don’t get your stories in front of your prospects.

When Chris Freeman, a marketing professional at managed IT company XPERTECHS in Ellicott City, MD, moved into the role of product manager, he felt pulled in too many directions. As a product manager, Chris was tasked with developing new IT service product offerings, but he still had to maintain all of his marketing responsibilities. The result was that daily marketing tasks started to fall through the cracks, and Chris knew that he didn’t have the bandwidth to get everything done.

There are a whole lot of employer brand stories in the making right now as companies are figuring out how they will respond to the continuing COVID-19 public health crisis. We’re hearing some of these stories already. Some companies are finding ways to enable employees so that they can work from home. Others have had to temporarily shut down. Still others are operating at a reduced level. Many are stepping up to help their communities at the same time that they’re creating their own coping strategy.

Sarah Olson joins her mom, Lori Creighton, as a writer at Homestead Media, helping companies communicate their reputation as a good employer through employee experience storytelling. Her role at Homestead Media provides a way for Sarah to keep her professional experience fresh while she cares for her two young sons. It’s a great situation that helps her to put her family first, and stay close to her mom, Lori, owner of Homestead Media.

When you hear the word “branding,” your mind might think of logos, colors, and design. While a consistent visual presence certainly plays a part in creating a positive impression to the job candidates that you want to attract, employer branding encompasses a whole lot more than your graphic style. It’s your reputation.

No one has to tell you that it’s difficult to find the workers you need. That’s stating the obvious. A low unemployment economy, however, isn’t the only challenge that you need to overcome in order to swing that situation around. Chances are good that if you’re still doing recruiting the way you’ve always done it, that your process is broken. The time to fix it is now and here’s why.

You know a stock photo when you see one, don’t you? Authentic photos of a business and its people are much more effective at nurturing trust and building relationships with potential job candidates and prospects than a generic stock photo. Getting great employee photos, however, takes a lot more effort than just browsing through a library of stock images, and you need to take care to make sure that using real photos of your people will be a good experience for employees and that you’re not violating privacy concerns.