How to Identify Key Talent Competitors for Your Employer Brand

Knowing which talent is being targeted by your competitors is a key element in employer branding. Because organizations compete for talent in the same way that they compete for customers, one way to gauge the relative strength of your employer brand is to measure it against the strength of the organizations you’re competing against. Theoretically speaking, you’re competing with every employer on the planet, but a more practical approach is to identify a reasonably small subset of your toughest competitors. Here’s how:

1. Identify organizations from which you hire the most people and those your employees tend to leave your organization to join.
2. Add to this list any other employers that appear to be outcompeting you for the kind of talent your organization is trying to attract.

When identifying the organizations you’re completing against for talent, broaden or narrow your focus based on functions and critical roles. Here are some examples:

• For front-line, volume-hire roles, such as customer service staff, your key competitors are likely to be the leading employers in your city or region.
• For people with sector-specific skills, your key competitors are likely to be the other key players in your industry.
• For more portable technical skills, such as information technology (IT), your key competitors are more likely to be employers from a wider range of sectors with particularly strong reputations within their chosen discipline, such as Google, Microsoft, and large banks.

You can try to collect this information yourself, but the alternative is to make use of LinkedIn’s Talent Flow Analysis tool, which provides a useful analysis of the relative current inflows and outflows of talent by company. However, be sure to supplement this insight with additional research into the talent you’re targeting but not currently reaching due to candidates’ lack of awareness or familiarity with your organization.