Employer Brand Management for Graduates

Often when talking about employer branding – and maybe especially when applied to graduates – the focus is on attracting and recruiting people to your organisation.
And when looking for graduates, you can see the sense in that. There’s a big investment in wooing, influencing and persuading graduates to choose your grad scheme over all the others on the market – especially if you’re outside some the of the sexier sectors like accountancy and consultancy. (When did that happen by the way? What are we telling ver kids that mean they all want to join a big 4 accountant?!)
You hope that the graduates you hire will be some of your key middle-managers and even leaders of the future. You bring them in young, immerse them in your culture and show them a career path that can satisfy their ambitions. You grow your own generation to take your organisation into the future.
Or, to be more precise, you hope to keep enough of the people that you’ve made this huge investment in to be left with something of a generation for the future. It’s a numbers game.
That’s where your employer brand can help again. At the recruitment stage you made your graduates promises. And in an ideal world those promises were based on reality and research. They are what you can confidently see that your current crop of graduates and other colleagues enjoy, receive and are motivated by. And they are what you can confidently aspire to promise to them as your business evolves and grows.
Prove those promises to your graduates; don’t let them stumble upon the evidence. If you promised them a culture of recognition, show them it, demonstrate it, make it part of their everyday experience. If you promised them a fast-track career, draw their path out, show them what they need to do, and give them every bit of support to make their next step. That’s how you win the numbers game.
And that’s how you woo, influence and persuade next year’s graduates too – with real case studies of people like them having their career ambitions fulfilled.
Because if you don’t, then you can be sure that graduates will be the first to leave at the first sign of broken promises. And the first to share their experience with their social circles.

This article first appeared on www.recruitmentbuzz.co.uk