What impact does your Human Capital Management (HCM) System have on Your Employer Brand?

As you likely know, your employer brand is critical for inspiring, attracting, and retaining talent in today’s hiring market. Given that 75% of job seekers consider an organization’s employer brand before deciding to apply for a job, an organization with a positive employer brand has a much better chance of hiring – and keeping – top candidates.

To build a positive employer brand over time, an organization needs to:

• Uncover what their employees value and what factors set them apart from hiring competitors
• Come up with a messaging and visuals platform that communicates the differentiators
• Communicate those messaging and visuals consistently across all candidate and employee touchpoints

The communication of your employer brand extends to the messaging and visuals you use across typical candidate journey touchpoints like LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed and your career site, but it also has broader applications too.

While a lot of money and focus gets put into the top-of-funnel communication of your employer brand, candidate and employee perceptions about your brand as an employer also extend to the employee and candidate experience you provide – which is facilitated by the tech systems you use and the quality of the user experience they provide.

Building trust in your brand with your HCM

If you work for a large organization, your Human Capital Management (HCM) system is likely designed to manage robust amounts of data as a primary function. While your HCM will handle this task well, the trade-off is that user experience comes second. Many enterprise-friendly HCMs provide employees with a frustrating and difficult employee experience rather than a modern, branded, and mobile-optimized one. 

One drawback of a poor employee experience is that it’s likely out of line with the employer brand messages that you’re sharing across your other candidate and employee touchpoints. This misalignment can cause employees to lose trust in the authenticity of your brand since you’re not upholding the promises you made during the hiring process and the messages you continue to spread to employees.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself to uncover if your HCM is helping or hindering your employer brand:

1. Does your HCM provide a digital workplace experience that is mobile optimized, and offers positive high-value and high-volume interactions?

If an employee’s digital workplace experience differs from what was promised when they were recruited and hired, you can face engagement and retention issues. For instance, if your employer brand messaging positions your company as innovative and forward-thinking but the tools you’re providing to employees are complicated and outdated, employees will lose trust in your brand promises.

It’s crucial for organizations today to provide a digital workplace experience that supports their employer brand positioning. This type of systems experience will show that your organization values employees by providing systems that are pleasant to use. These are systems that are intuitive, well branded, mobile friendly, and accessible any time and from anywhere. These systems ensure the user experience is enjoyable for employees whether they are engaging with a high-value (like onboarding or benefits enrollment) or high-volume task (like time tracking or vacation approvals).

2. Does your HCM communicate your employer brand throughout the entire candidate and employee journey?

Many organizations provide false hope to candidates by communicating a great employer brand at the top of the funnel, but fail to continue to support and bring the brand to life during onboarding and other employee touchpoints. 

Instead of providing employees with a seamless and branded experience, new hires are forced to go through onboarding and use HCMs that are not mobile friendly and are complicated to use. This is a missed opportunity because onboarding can make a big difference when it comes to employee engagement over the long run. In fact, 69% of employees say they are more likely to stay three years or more with companies that provide great onboarding. 

To address this, your onboarding and self-service platforms should provide the same look and feel as your career site and other digital platforms. Aligning your brand experience helps to fuel employee excitement, build brand loyalty, and increase overall engagement as employees begin and continue their journey within your organization.

3. Does your HCM provide workflows that are streamlined and easy to complete?

Time-consuming workflows and employee interactions across multiple systems take up more time than they should and provide a frustrating experience. For instance, if an employee has to log in and out of multiple systems in order to complete one task, it provides a negative experience and reduces productivity.

By contrast, a simplified, consolidated employee flow that is easy to navigate and complete increases efficiency and maximizes visibility so that management, employees, and new hires are all on the same page. 

To do this, you need to remove the clutter from your out-of-the-box HCM workflows. Take a critical look at each of your workflows, and think about where you might eliminate steps, sign ons, or the appearance of your system to improve the performance and better reflect your brand. 

How An Employee Experience Platform can help your HCM system communicate your employer brand

If you answered no to any of the above questions, don’t worry – your HCM doesn’t need to take away from your employer brand! With the right tech add-ons and attention to detail, you can provide a positive experience that helps your organization deliver on your employer brand promises.

The InFlight Employee Experience Platform (EXP) ensures your digital workplace experience makes the right first impression with candidates and continues to engage employees at every interaction. The InFlight EXP works with the technology you already have so that you can drastically improve your candidate and employee experience without having to go through the pain and costs of implementing a new HCM.

InFlight builds on the foundations provided by HR applications like Workday, Taleo, SuccessFactors, PeopleSoft, and others, to ensure a modern and enjoyable employee experience by providing the following:

• A completely reimagined user experience that replaces complicated user interfaces and confusing workflows
• A one-stop onboarding experience so that everything new employees need is in one place
• Seamless branding that matches your corporate website and career site
• A consistent user experience, no matter what system the information, forms, or content originates from

While many organizations think switching to an entirely new HCM is the answer to improve their employee experience and advance their employer brand, there is an easier option. New HCM system implementations cost organizations more money, take a long time to implement, and often end up feeling outdated again quite quickly. The InFlight EXP upgrades your current HCM so it better aligns with and communicates your employer brand through a modern, mobile-optimized, and easy-to-use systems experience.

Take a look at how the InFlight Employee Experience Platform provides organizations with an improved employer brand and employee experience without replacing their current HCM system – and see the platform in action: InFlight Improves the Pre-Hire to Retire Employee Experience at Cox Enterprises.