success:
❯❯ Recruitment: Companies that have a strong employer brand attract larger numbers of qualified candidates, improving the quality of new hires while reducing the overall cost of recruitment.
❯❯ Engagement: Employer branding involves creating an environment in which employees are fulfilled by their work and proud of the company they work for. Such a work environment drives engagement, and higher levels of engagement lead to higher levels of productivity and customer satisfaction.
❯❯ Retention: A great workplace populated with highly talented and engaged employees is a place employees want to stay. In addition, a strong employer brand clarifies what people can expect from the organization before they apply. Companies with strong employer brands experience significantly lower attrition rates.
❯❯ Competitive advantage: Employer branding enables you to build an all-star team with a roster of the most talented individuals in your industry. The collective intelligence, creativity, drive, and determination of highly qualified individuals enables you to gain and maintain a competitive advantage within your industry.
The approach to building a strong positive employer brand can be summed up in two steps:
1. Make your organization a distinctively great place to work.
2. Make sure the right talent knows how great you are.
Of course, the process is more involved than that, and it’s more cyclical than linear – a continual process of building brand momentum and making adjustments in response to an ever-changing business and workforce environment. A more detailed summation of the process/cycle looks more like this:
1. Develop a clear understanding of your organization’s business objectives and the talent needed to meet those objectives.
2. Evaluate your current employer brand image among potential recruits and the employer brand experience of your current employees.
Identify how this compares with what your key target talent groups are looking for. (See Chapter 3.)
3. Define your employer value proposition (EVP), the key ingredients that will make your organization a distinctively great place to work.
4. Build your employer brand framework, the creative elements that collectively capture the look and feel you want to convey and the emotion you want to evoke. (See the later section, “Establishing employer brand guidelines.”)
5. Generate engaging, story-led content and employee experiences that bring your EVP to life in ways that resonate with the talent you’re trying to attract.
6. Actively engage with prospects through selected channels, including your organization’s career website, social channels, job boards, and programmatic (automated ad placement driven by analytics). (See the later section, “Spreading the Word through Various Channels.”)
7. Measure your success to determine what’s working and what’s not, from your overall brand strategy down to individual recruitment marketing activities. (See the later section, “Monitoring Your Employer Branding Success.”)
8. Adjust your employer brand strategy and individual recruitment marketing activities, as needed, to improve results.
After you’ve gone through the process once, building brand momentum becomes cyclical – shampoo, rinse, repeat.
Laying the Foundation for Your Employer Brand
In many ways, branding follows the laws of physics. In physics, vectors represent forces that act on an object to move it, like a pool cue striking a ball. Every vector has a magnitude and a direction. The more vector forces and the greater their magnitude propelling an object in the same direction, the faster and farther that object travels. Forces that act in the opposite direction slow the object, stop it, or reverse its course. Forces that strike the object from different angles move it off course.
When building an employer brand, everyone in the organization needs to push in the same direction with a force of the greatest magnitude possible. With everyone working in unison, brand momentum begins to build, and you begin to win brand advocates outside the organization who put their weight and force behind the brand, moving it ever faster forward.
Branding of any kind works best when everyone agrees and all branding activities align. To achieve this alignment, you need to build your employer brand on a firm foundation. In this section, we cover the basics of laying that foundation.
Just as forces within an organization advance the employer brand, the employer brand is a force that propels the organization forward by delivering the talent needed for the organization to meet its business goals and objectives. As such, it must align with other forces within the organization that share that mission. Specifically, your employer branding strategy must align with the following three strategies that drive the organization’s success:
❯❯ Business strategy: The employer brand must support the kind of talent capabilities required for the organization to compete effectively. In addition to being fit for talent, it must also be fit for business.
❯❯ HR and talent strategy: Your employer brand must either reflect or shape the way HR and talent management operate within the organization to ensure promises are consistently aligned with experience.
❯❯ Marketing strategy: The employer brand must reflect corporate and customer brand promises to maintain a general sense of brand integrity.
For maximum impact, all strategies should align perfectly, but in the imperfect reality of a business, different functions will inevitably have their own goals and objectives. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself having to actively reconcile competing agendas and conflicting perspectives among your key internal stakeholder groups.
Employer brands never exist in a vacuum; they’re created in the context of the corporate and consumer brands, and, for the most part, they need to align with their corporate and consumer counterparts:
❯❯ Corporate brand: The reputation your company is seeking to build based on its purpose (the reason for its existence, beyond making
