From year to year it is becoming more and more difficult for you to acquire a good teacher or secretariat employee? Perhaps this is related to school’s seat, or perhaps to salary, or maybe you are not an employer one wants to be with? Check out how to build Employer Branding strategy and become an employer of choice.
Recently a letter written by a girl named Chloe, who expressed willingness to work for Google, was published online. To everybody’s surprise, a few days later Google CEO Sundar Pichai replied to her application.
Do you wonder why a child wrote to Google?
According to Business Insider 2016 ranking, this is the best place to work in the USA.
86% OF GOOGLE EMPLOYEES
ARE SATISFIED WITH THEIR JOBS.
Employees can use the Googleplex, housing a gym, free laundries, swimming pools, beach volleyball court and several cafes with diversified menus, where they can have free meals.
Additionally Google provides childcare in the place of work and remote working facility owing to flexible working hours and free Wi-Fi. The employer assumes that competition is good and it motivates for work using diversified (and at the same time substantive) remuneration.
How does that relate to your language school?
Google is just an example. You don’t have to start with raising your employees’ salaries by 50 percent, building a spa for them, or hiring a child minder. The thing is to build a powerful employer brand, to become an attractive place for advancement of their careers.
Research confirms that from year to year it is becoming more and more difficult to obtain proper candidates for work and forecasts do not bode well for the future.
The working-age population is expected to continue to decline until 2050.
As you know very well, receiving hundreds of CVs and making appointment for an interview with ten-odd of applicants borders on impossible, while selection of the final candidate is usually just a “lesser evil choice”.
This happens not only in language school industry, although the latter also experiences huge problems with recruitment, particularly for teacher jobs. Employer Branding to the rescue as a factor determining recruitment’s success.
What is Employer Branding?
It is a long-term process of building a positive employer image. It has an extremely important role to play, because it builds a powerful brand in the labour market, consequently attracting and keeping TALENTS and making the company stand out against competition. An attractive brand in the eyes of candidates not only translates into increased number of applications during recruitment, but also to reduced rotation of the existing employees and their enhanced engagement in work.
Today a good employee is worth their weight in gold so companies adjust to them, guarantee additional benefits called Employee Value Proposition (abbreviated as EVP). EVP includes:
- Attractive remuneration
- Stability of employment
- Positive atmosphere and good relations with superiors
- Opportunities for career advancement and training
- Participation in company development and organisational culture
- Work & life balance
How to build Employer Branding?
A key role in the process of building employer brand is played by current employees and their opinions about your language school. Employer branding should be also perceived in two dimensions: internal and external one.
STEP 1. Internal analysis
This is about surveying satisfaction of current employees, taking their viewpoints into account (What matters for them? What values they appreciate?). We should secure to them career advancement opportunities, create a friendly atmosphere, appreciate their value for the company on ongoing basis, to build mutual trust.
Employees – both present and former ones – are ambassadors of your brand. So even if you do not carry out employment engagement surveys, do make one-on-make interviews with them.
STEP 2. External review
Once you have figured out the internal situation of the company, you may proceed to reviewing company presence in the Internet. This concerns an analysis of how the school speaks about itself externally and what other say about it.
Focus your attention on all and any communication channels, discussion forums or Facebook groups. Measure the weaknesses and strengths, check actions of your competition and your position against the background of the competition.
STEP 3. Target group
It is worthwhile to devote some time to analysis of what kind of candidates are attracted to your language school and whether they overlap with your target group.
Think what employees you really want, what kind of people will best match your organisational culture and what expectations they have. In the case of various groups of customers (language courses for children or for business), you are likely to need different employees. Perform a segmentation of employees e.g. a young parent, a new parent, a newly minted university graduate, a pensioner.
This will help you to better detail the EVP, i.e. the benefits that will first persuade the best candidates to work for your school and then to remain there for longer.
STEP 4. SWOT analysis
Now you have really a lot of pieces of information about your language school. It suffices to put all pieces of the puzzle together by focusing on four elements:
STEP 5. Drafting the strategy
The last step consists in defining the objectives of your brand as the employer. Answer those questions for yourself:
- How do you want the school to be perceived?
- What benefits you should offer to particular target groups?
- How to communicate? (develop core image-building content elements and catchphrases, graphic materials)
- What instrument I will use to reach candidates? (check the ideas in the article Recruitment at your school – how to catch a goldfish?)
- How to measure effectiveness of the strategy? (presence in brand awareness rankings, recognisability among particular target groups, average time and cost of employees’ employment lifecycle)
Shortage of employees in the labour market, a new generation of candidates and different contemporary challenges, cause employers to make various types of concessions, to develop a unique EVP offered to employees for a start. The saturated market of language schools is not conducive for recruitment so to win the best candidates and have any choice whatsoever, you should think about building a powerful employer brand. Today this is no longer a whim but a necessity.
What do you think about contemporary labour market in language school industry? Can you see the changes enforced by demographics and how do you cope with them?
Read the Part 2. of Management Series
Should employees determine
the level of their salaries?
[CASE STUDY]