People are important for the growth of any business.
More so for people-intensive businesses like creative agency business.
In the early days, it is not easy to attract talent because most people want to work with known businesses.
How do you make your business known and attractive for prospective employees?
By positioning your employer brand right and creating awareness about it.
You can start with building awareness by doing something as simple as an internship in an organized fashion and branding it right.
Like Shopify is doing with their Growth Apprentice Program.
If you are stuck running a small business and don’t have lots of time or spare money then hire interns to manage interns.
So your key hire will be a human resources MBA final year student. Find someone who loves to take the lead, and let her build this program for you.
Give her an overview of what the program will look like, and be by her side as she builds this program.
Design it for 3-months first. Onboard this key intern a month ahead of when you plan to onboard the selected candidates from those who apply to your internship program.
For training let her and others who come after learning on their own. Help them with a LinkedIn learning subscription or another similar resource. For the first month, most of them will be for learning, and for the next two months, they’ll implement what they learned.
Make sure that they use 10-20% of their work hours for documenting what they are doing and learning on social media while tagging you in their posts. This will help you with visibility.
And during the 3-months period, you’ll find your next hires. Once you identify who they are, offer them a pre-placement offer.
In the beginning, don’t limit it to one school or one specialization. Onboard interns from across schools, specialization, and education levels.
So some of them can be from humanities and some others from journalism. And do a mix of undergraduate and graduate students.
Let them choose their internship focus based on what you do in a business. For a marketing agency, focus areas can be video promotion, SEO, social media, content creation, account management, and employer brand.
Hope this plan helps you with growing your employer brand.
