Employer branding can be challenging to navigate, especially if HR managers, recruiters, or marketing teams need help knowing where to begin. The best way to ensure a positive brand identity is by creating a strong employer brand that uses the various employer branding tools available.
In this article, we will explore the various tools available to create a strong brand identity and effectively navigate the challenging landscape of employer branding.
These are the topics you will find:
- Employer Branding Tools
- Content Creation Tools
- Social Media Scheduling Tools
- Recruitment Tools
- Engagement Tools
- Education Tools
- Candidate Relationship Management Tools
Employer branding tools: Content creation
While we will discuss all the possible avenues HR managers, employer branding managers, and recruiters can explore, it is essential to first consider what is important for the brand as a whole.
Using social media for employer branding is an essential part of getting information about your brand out to those worldwide. Having said this, creating content for these various platforms can be time-consuming and challenging. However, content creation tools can make this process simple and efficient.
Here are a couple of tools that we recommend:
Canva
Price: Free (Canva Free), £99.99 per year for one person (Canva Pro) or £129.90 per year for 5 people (Canva Teams)
No matter what your visual content needs are, Canva has got HR managers, recruiters, and employer branding managers covered. Whether it’s creating content for Instagram, updating the company’s LinkedIn cover, or designing an infographic highlighting the benefits for new hires, Canva has the tools to help you out.
While you get your money’s worth for the Pro version, the free version can be a good starting point if you need clarification on whether or not to invest a large sum of money from the get-go.
Here’s some of what to expect from each price point. For a full range of features, visit the Canva website.
| Feature | Canva Free | Canva Pro | Canva Teams |
| Free stock photos, graphics, and videos | 1+ million | 4+ million | 4+ million |
| Free templates | 8.000+ | 60.000+ | 60.000+ |
| Team reports | No | Yes | Yes |
| Invite team members | No | Yes | Yes |
| Workflow approvals | No | Yes | Yes |
Animaker
Price: Basic ($10 per month), Starter ($19 per month), Pro ($49 per month) and Enterprise (Custom)
Although the pricing is USD, this content creation tool is available in the UK. Animaker allows you to create videos and GIFs and edit them live.
They offer a dynamic way to attract the attention of potential candidates and can be used to showcase a company’s culture, values, and work environment. By providing an inside look into a company, these visual media can help candidates determine if they are a good fit for the organisation.
Create any character you like and watch it come to life with vivid facial expressions and the auto-lip-sync feature. You can even use one of the ready-made templates if you feel less creative.
Employer branding tools: Social media scheduling
Each social media platform has a different time for when its users are the most active, which makes it physically impossible for you to post everywhere at those peak times.
With the help of social media scheduling tools, HR managers and recruiters can efficiently manage their social media presence and streamline communication with candidates and employees.
These tools enable managers to plan and schedule posts in advance, ensuring a steady flow of content and a consistent brand voice across all social media channels. By automating the posting process, HR managers can save time and focus on other aspects of their job, such as engaging with candidates and employees.
Scheduling tools also provide analytics and insights that help managers track the performance of their social media campaigns, measure the impact of their employer branding efforts, and adjust their strategies accordingly.
These are a couple of our top picks:
Planable
Price: From £10 per month, per user, for up to 4 social media platforms and unlimited posts
Although a relatively new social media scheduling tool on the market, Planable’s affordability makes it one of the most sought-after tools for any business!
Here are some of its top features:
| Feature | Description |
| Create posts | You can create, make changes to and preview all your social media posts in one place. |
| Schedule posts | Once your posts are approved, you can schedule them to go live on a specific date and time, saving you the hassle of doing it manually for each platform you wish to use. |
| Collaborators | By adding collaborators and setting permissions, you can control who can edit the posts and who can only view them. Your collaborators can also add internal comments and give you feedback – all in one place. |
| Media storage | It has extensive media storage, allowing you to have all your media in one location. |
| Approvals | It offers one-click approvals, making it easy for managers to undertake final checks before they go live. |
| Manage workflow | If you’re dealing with multiple clients, you can create separate workspaces to ensure you never get posts for one confused with posts for another. |
Sprout Social
Price: From £75 per user, per month
Don’t let the price of this social media scheduling tool put you off. It offers some significant features that other tools don’t and is worth the investment.
Here are some of its top features:
| Feature | Description |
| Free trial | Unlike other tools, Sprout Social gives you 30 days to try their product before you commit and pay a single penny. |
| Training and educational materials | While receiving comprehensive reports from tools like these is highly beneficial, they are only valuable for your employer’s brand if you know which insights to focus on. For this reason, Sprout Social teaches you to draw out the crucial insights that will impact your brand’s overall success. |
| Compare performance | You can compare how your posts are doing in relation to those of your competitors’ on the same platform, which can help you identify what you are doing well and what you could do better. |
| Social listening | You can create listening columns using mentions, brand reviews, and keywords. This handy feature will notify you of conversations on different platforms that you should be involved with. |
| Customisable workflow | You can assign specific team members to be the point of contact for different topics of discussion, ensuring that every message and/or comment gets responded to. |
Employer branding tools: Recruitment
Even though the human touch is appreciated by candidates during the recruitment process, as recruiters, we know it is physically impossible to screen candidates and formulate performance reports manually. This is where recruitment tools come in handy.
These tools are cost-effective, save time and reduce the risk of bias. Simplify your recruitment process by making use of tools like the ones we’ve given below:
Textio
Price: Custom
When using employer branding in recruitment, ensuring a good quality job advertisement is important. Textio helps you achieve exactly that.
It uses hiring and language insights to improve your writing and aims to optimise your job descriptions. Here are some of its top features:
| Feature | Description |
| Detection of social bias | Textio detects unconscious social bias in your writing to help you understand how your language comes across to different social groups. |
| Language insights | Textio’s advanced language insights make you aware of phrases that are particularly useful to include and those which are harmful, cliched or gendered. |
| Write anywhere | With Textio’s many extensions, you can write on platforms like Outlook, Gmail or LinkedIn and still use its wide range of features. |
Lusha
Price: Basic (Free), Pro ($29 per month, per user), Premium ($51 per month, per user) and Scale (Custom)
When recruiting, getting the correct contact information of the candidates you’re looking to hire is essential. With Lusha’s extension, recruiters can quickly and efficiently scan a profile page to extract the latest contact information. This saves time and improves engagement overall.
You can find more information on the Lusha extension and its features at different price points here.
Employer branding tools: Engagement
Engagement tools enable managers to gather feedback and insights from their employees, allowing them to identify areas for improvement and make informed decisions about how to enhance the employee experience.
With the use of these tools, managers can provide their employees with opportunities for social connection, collaboration, and team building, which can ultimately lead to increased job satisfaction and employee retention.
Employee advocacy depends highly on employee engagement, which employers can manage and improve by using different tools like the ones below.
Culture Amp
Price: Three different options – Engage, Perform, Develop, Enterprise – all with custom pricing
With Culture Amp, you can create custom surveys, develop feedback programs and compare results against other companies within the same industry.
Once your employees have completed the survey, Culture Amp analyses the responses and recommends where you should focus your efforts in the future.
In addition to strengthening the relationship between employees and employers, Culture Amp aims to enhance team performance. You can keep track of goals, receive feedback from peers and managers, and reflect on your performance.
Achievers
Price: Custom
There are two main aspects to Achievers: Achievers Listen, and Achievers Recognise.
Achievers Listen ensures that employee voices and concerns are heard and addressed promptly. In addition to regular surveys, you can check in with your team by using one of their many visual polls.
Moreover, Achievers Recognise uses a points-based system that employees across the company can use to recognise and reward colleagues for their hard work. Employees can then use these points to purchase products from over 2,500 brands worldwide.
Employer branding tools: Education tools
Whether you’ve recently hired a new cohort of employees or want to enhance the skills of those already working for you, it is vital to use education tools to provide continued support and training.
With these, HR managers and recruiters can create and manage educational content for their employees, ensuring that they have access to the necessary training and development programs.
These tools can help HR managers and employer branding managers to enhance their employees’ skillsets, increase their engagement and satisfaction, and promote a culture of continuous learning and development within their organisation.
These are our top picks:
iSpring
Price: iSpring Suite (£685 per author, per year) and iSpring Suite Max (£863 per author, per year)
Although it comes at a hefty price point, you can try before you buy with their 30-day free trial.
An easy-to-use learning management system, iSpring allows you to boost your employee learning and development initiative.
You can create interactive courses, role-plays, and assessments and enrol employees in specific learning pathways. With iSpring’s in-depth reporting system, you can even track learner progress and see how effective your training materials are, allowing you to make amendments as necessary.
Learner Mobile
Price: Standard ($2.95 per learner, per month, for minimum 50 learners) and Enterprise (Custom, for 250+ learners)
You can use Learner Mobile’s creator tool to build engaging, customised content for your organisation and add podcasts, infographics or video links to bring your training to life.
You can even create custom badges and certificates to award your employees when they complete a training course. Employees can further use these recognitions on their social media profiles.
Book a demo to see if this is the right education tool for your employer brand. If you’re still uncertain, use their 30-day free trial to find out for sure.
Candidate Relationship Management Tools
When recruiting, you have to think about how you can create a positive candidate experience. Engaging with prospective candidates throughout the recruitment process can be time-consuming if done manually.
Candidate relationship management (CRM) tools allow managers to track and manage candidate interactions throughout the recruitment process, from initial contact to onboarding. These help managers streamline their communication with candidates, ensuring timely and personalised responses that can enhance the candidate experience.
Moreover, these tools can also help managers to build and maintain a talent pool of qualified candidates, allowing them to quickly fill positions when they become available.
Use one of these CRM tools, and you’ll be sure to improve candidate experience, reduce cost-to-hire and increase retention rates.
TalentLyft
Price: Starter ($124.17 per month for 10 active jobs) and Pro (£249.17 per month for 10 active jobs)
With TalentLyft, you can post current vacancies on multiple job boards with just one click. In addition to automating these posts, this tool also provides recruiters with online scorecards, allowing them to see how well a prospective candidate is suited to the position applied for.
Here are some of its top features:
| Feature | Description |
| Applicant tracking system | Customise the hiring stages, track all candidates in your pipeline and retain or disqualify candidates based on their skills. |
| Interview scheduling | Send personal invitations to candidates, allowing them to choose from available times in your calendar. These will automatically sync to your calendar. |
| Improve productivity | Mention other team members, share candidate profiles, assign tasks and set permissions that determine the allowed actions of individuals or groups. |
| Evaluate and test candidates | Customise your evaluation plans and define how your hiring team will grade job candidates. |
BambooHR
Price: Custom
BambooHR is your one-stop shop for all things HR and people management. The software takes care of all the manual tasks you usually dread and gives you a chance to truly focus on your organisation’s people.
Here are some of its top features:
| Feature | Description |
| People data and analytics | With one secure employee database, BambooHR allows you to track employee data, customise workflows and approvals and generate reports and insights. If you forget to do something during your workday, you can use the mobile app to quickly approve a request or find contact information about a colleague. |
| Hiring | The applicant tracking system keeps candidate information well-organised throughout all the hiring process stages. The BambooHR Hiring App allows you to interact with potential candidates as easily as you can with your colleagues. |
| Onboarding | BambooHR’s onboarding tools allow new hires to complete paperwork quickly, use electronic signatures, and easily set up emails and IT processes. |
| Payments | Employees can track their time easily and efficiently using the BambooHR software. They can clock in and clock out with one click, track their time worked on specific projects, and receive automatic reminders. Moreover, managers can approve time-tracking requests with the push of one button. |
| Culture | With BambooHR, you can measure employee performance and understand their overall satisfaction, allowing you to create a plan of action as and when the need arises. |
As you can see, the right tools will help you get to the next level of your employer branding. Finding them and using them to their highest potential will definitely save you time and money, and will help all your departments perform better.
