Employer Branding In Pharma - Why it's Important!

Recruiting these days is more than just placing a job description online and trawling through the responses, or searching through hundreds of CVs in the hope to find someone who matches your latest job vacancy.

Your job is to sell the company and the job, and one of the best ways of doing that is to build your employer brand to make sure that everyone knows that you're a great company to work for, even before they apply or you reach out to them.

So what is your current employer brand? Do you have an authentic and consistent voice? How do potential pharma candidates perceive your company? If you don't know, you need to find out - and don't forget that your brand doesn't exist in isolation, it exists in a competitive space with every other employer out there in the sector!

As a start, you can look at Glassdoor or Indeed. Both offer employee reviews so you might get some insight there as to what current (or past) employees think of you. 

Also, consider the following aspects: 

• Have you asked your employees / recruits / candidates how you are perceived?
• What is your induction process like? - do you dump new recruits in at the deep end and expect them to get on with it or do you have a comprehensive induction to get them on board right from the start.
• Do you put employees first? - Is your company seen as team working towards a collective goal, or as a faceless machine where the staff are not important
• Do you have defined career paths? - is this defined independently for every individual?
• Do you offer valuable and flexible options for training? - employees want the opportunity to grow.
• Do you listen to your employees? (and take action where appropriate) - how to your employees raise concerns or make suggestions?
• Do you listen to your clients? - your clients will tell you a lot if you listen
• Do you have great benefits? - parking, away days, gym membership, great pension etc. 
• Are you fun! - everyone wants to work in a fun environment!
• Do you offer a pleasant working environment? - what are your offices like?
• Are your teams supported - are they provided with the tools and the management support they need.
• Does the company practice corporate responsibility (eg environmental, social) - charities that you support.

Let's assume that your company has ticked all the boxes above (Wow, what a great place to work!) - The next thing to consider is how do you let people know? Maybe you've never really considered it, as you just assume that everybody knows - well here's some breaking news - they don't.  Also remember it's different now - you have a lot of competition for great candidates, so you need to get the message out there.

Some key channels to build your employer branding might include:

• Your website: Especially your careers pages
• Your news stories: You need a steady flow of corporate feel-good stories (not just new product launches and financials) - don't just hide these on your own website, get them out there, using a news distribution service or better still, PharmiWeb.com.
• Your job adverts: this is the one place where candidates need to be up to speed with your great company. If you're using a job board such as Pharmiweb.jobs, make use of their employer branded hubs. Make sure the job advert includes a quick summary of key benefits and something about your culture, and how great you are.
• Events (on or offline)
• Supporting charities or other groups 

Building your employer brand is not an overnight thing, and requires a strategy and continuous effort. You will need to continually plug away at it. You will need to keep asking employees, new recruits, and even candidates at interview - how they see your company - build on the positives and work on the negatives to become the employer of choice.

If you would like to have an informal discussion with PharmiWeb, about how we can help you achieve all this - just drop us a line. sales@pharmiweb.com