style="font-size:15px;"> ❯❯ Consumer brand: Customer perceptions of the company’s products and services and the brand associations that the marketing team is trying to promote
❯❯ Employer brand: The company’s reputation as an employer inside and outside the organization
Aligning the employer brand with the corporate and consumer brands is complicated by the fact that corporate and consumer brands can be associated in several different ways. In some cases, such as Apple and Shell, the corporate and consumer brands are synonymous. In others, such as the Coca-Cola Company, the company shares the same name as its leading product but not the rest of its product portfolio. And in other cases, such as Unilever and P&G, the corporate brand may be only loosely associated, if at all, with its many consumer brands.
Prior to launching any employer branding initiative, you need to decide how closely and in what ways you want your employer brand to align with your existing corporate and consumer brands. When the needs of consumers diverge from those of employees, close attention needs to be paid to how the brand is communicated to each target group. For example, “Citi Never Sleeps” made perfect sense to potential CitiBank customers, but would have made a particularly poor call to action for potential CitiBank employees.
If you’re in charge of employer branding, part of your job is to make sure everyone’s on the same page, clear about his or her responsibilities, and collectively accountable for doing his or her part. To be successful, you need the backing and support of a wide range of different stakeholders throughout your organization:
❯❯ Senior leadership: For the brand to be truly authentic and fully embedded in the organization, it needs to be led by the CEO and collectively owned by the entire senior leadership team. The key to getting the leadership team onboard is to make a strong case for employer branding, as explained in the earlier section, “Recognizing the benefits of employer branding.” Senior leadership needs to appreciate the crucial role employer branding plays in securing the talent the company needs to achieve its growth ambitions.
❯❯ Marketing and communications: The folks in marketing and corporate communications tend to be very protective of the corporate and consumer brand and resist the notion of a separate employer brand because it can appear to threaten brand integrity. You can make them more receptive to the idea of an employer brand by showing them how it can help to build internal brand engagement and extend the appeal of the brand to external audiences who may not have otherwise considered the brand.
❯❯ HR: You definitely need HR on your side. Nobody has more direct accountability for shaping people management processes and more influence over talent strategy. Initially, HR may be reluctant to take on the additional responsibilities associated with employer branding, but making a strong business case and appealing to HR’s desire to keep up with best practice are generally sufficient to win its support.
❯❯ Line management: Like HR, line management is likely to be reluctant, at first, to commit time and personnel to employer branding. To rally their support, tailor your presentation to their pain points and aspirations. Highlight the fact that a strong employer brand will help to deliver the kind of talent they need to meet their objectives and ensure they lose fewer key players to competitors.
Taking an Honest Look at Your Employer Brand
Regardless of whether you’ve done anything to build an employer brand, you already have one. Your employer brand is written on the faces of the people you meet who ask you where you’re working. It’s present in the gory or glorious detail of your Glassdoor reviews. It’s embedded in the energy or malaise of your everyday working environment. Your employer brand is your reputation as an employer – whether your organization’s work environment is distinctively great, generically mediocre, or exceptionally bad.
Before you invest time and resources into building an employer brand, perform an honest self-assessment of the brand you have to work with. In Chapter 3, we provide detailed guidance on how to conduct an employer brand health check. Here are the four areas to examine:
❯❯ What you already know or perceive: You probably have some sense of what your organization’s employees and people outside your organization think of it as an employer. Add to this knowledge any additional information you may already have, such as feedback from customers and partners, recent employee surveys, or a general review of sentiment across your social media channels.
❯❯ Employment experience: The employment experience and how employees perceive it contribute significantly to your organization’s reputation as an employer. Conduct employee surveys and focus groups to find out what current and former employees think of you, and any gaps that may exist between what you offer and what they want. Although compensation and benefits are often ranked pretty high, they’re rarely at the top of the list.
❯❯ External perception: You need to figure out what people outside the organization think of you as a potential employer. How well are you known among the talent you’re trying to attract? What are you known for? And how do people feel about you? In Chapter 3, we provide suggestions on how to gauge awareness, brand associations, and sentiment.
❯❯ Competition: The organizations you compete with for talent are typically those within your industry from which you hire and lose the most people. Add to that list the top employers attracting the best talent from every industry to learn what they’re doing better.
Putting the Pieces in Place
As with most strategic operations, execution of your employer branding initiative requires coordinated and persistent effort, which is best accomplished if you have everything in place prior to launch. With employer branding, “everything” consists of your EVP, brand framework, and compelling communication content. In this section, we describe the three pieces you need to have in place before initiating any employer branding operations.
The purpose of employer branding is to attract people with the knowledge and skills your organization needs to meet its objectives and then convince these people to work for your organization. This purpose can be described in terms of the give and get of the employment deal – you’re offering people something they value (money, recognition, opportunities to be creative or make a positive impact in the world, and so on) in exchange for something you value (knowledge, skills, passion, creativity, and so on). In employer branding, this give and get is distilled and communicated through the EVP. It consists of a core positioning statement (the one thing about your company that sums up how and why it is a distinctively great place to work) and three to five pillars (details that support and expand upon the core positioning statement).
Here’s a simple example from Facebook whose EVP is shaped by its strong mission and company values, along with the key attributes identified by employees, which make working at Facebook unique.
Core positioning statement: Connecting the world takes every one of us.
Facebook’s
