I'm going to risk preaching to the choir here...

I believe companies build their employment brands one candidate at a time.

It's borderline amusing to me when people start talking about employment branding, and they immediately go to their "ugly careers site" and their "lack of a good tagline" and don't discuss their recruiting and interviewing process. Come on!?!

Now, there's no question you should have a quality careers site, and - I suppose - some sort of tagline (although most of those are so silly and generic - they're all some sort of take-off on "Imagine the possibilities" or "Come join the winning team", aren't they?)

To really build a great employment brand, though, I think most companies would be better off investing their time and money in their candidate experience. I've been able to meet with many new hires and survey current candidates (both as an in-house corp recruiting leader and consultant), and I'll tell you what - there's usually quite a bit of room for improvement. And the things we can do to impact our candidate experience often have an (admittedly hard to measure) exceptionally high ROI on our employment brand.

I'll talk about how you might baseline your current candidate experience, identify opportunity areas, and some of the lower hanging fruit (relatively cheap and easy) things you can do to improve candidate experience in future posts.

In the meantime, tell us: Are you measuring your candidate experience today? Do you have any insights into the way your improvements to candidate experience have improved your employment brand? Please share. We'd love to hear what you're doing.