The rising importance of an authentic employer brand
The rising importance of an authentic employer brand
The recruitment game has well and truly changed. Big name brand? Slick office location? Impressive pension scheme? Chances are, the candidates you’re looking for want something more meaningful.
And that something is your employer brand.
Implemented well, a strong employer brand is a multi-tasking superstar. It goes beyond attracting diverse, high-performing talent and helps retain those high-performing employees already in role, reassuring restless employees for whom culture, values and social impact matter, that yes, they are with the right firm.
Yet done badly (or not at all), and the results can be hard to stomach. Amazon, Uber, Brewdog… all evidence that financial success isn’t a guarantee of success in the recruitment and retention space. Poor retention, coupled with challenging (and costly) talent attraction, makes it difficult to fill essential roles, driving up the costs of recruitment and training and doing little to counteract the challenges that drove the initial employer branding challenges.
Employer branding – theory meets reality
Yes, there’s plenty organisations can do. A quick search online or AI prompt gives you a list of potential actions – showcase employee testimonials, highlight your diversity initiatives, show how commercially responsible you are. But that’s just theory. What are the fundamentals of building an employer brand? What are the secrets to making real progress?
Raising the profile of employer branding
As a relatively new discipline, EB professionals could be forgiven for feeling a little … left out. Part recruitment, part marketing, part something else; it’s an in-between space that’s misunderstood in many quarters. Yet The EB Space – a free global community for employer brand and recruitment marketers – is helping change that. We spoke to the founders, Claire de Souza and Alex Her to get their take on employer branding and the challenges faced by those working in the employer branding space right now.
First up, we focused on what employer branding actually is. It’s fair to say that employer brands exist whether or not someone’s doing the work, so what does employer branding involve?
Claire: It’s a funny job, and to be fair, I was working in it for some time (past role!) before realising that employer branding was the name for what I was doing. It sits in the crosshairs of recruitment and marketing; you could describe it as ‘recruitment marketing’.
Alex: Ultimately, it’s about educating your candidates on your culture, expectations, the rigours of the role and the journey they’ll take in your organisation… get that right, and you’ll get people who thrive and stay.
Employer branding is still pretty new, and that presents some unique challenges.
Claire: It really does. Many companies have just one employer branding person for the entire organisation and that’s a struggle – they’re expecting Champagne-level activities with a beer budget, and it can be exhausting.
Alex: Yes, you have to be really clever with your budgets and quite scrappy with the different platforms you use.
Claire: Being taken seriously is another challenge. In a similar way to marketing around 20 years ago, employer branding can be viewed as a ‘nice to have’. Nowadays, marketing is seen as absolutely critical, and I believe employer branding is on that trajectory. Probably the biggest problem is the internal focus. No one cares about recruitment until they need to recruit, and that makes it difficult to get executive buy-in.
That old chestnut… any tips on getting executive buy-in?
Claire: The most important thing to do here is ensure your goals are aligned with everyone else’s. Whatever you’re working on, you need to make sure it’s important enough to get the visibility it needs and stays top of mind.
And remember that networking is critical. Invest time in talking to others, scheduling coffee chats and learning what makes your leadership team tick. This will help you understand how your project can fit into the broader business and give you the insight you need to ensure relevance.
ROI is everything to exec teams. Do you have tips on how to measure the effectiveness and progress of your employer branding initiatives?
Alex: It’s so important to go beyond vanity metrics such as impressions and clicks. Instead, dig deeper. Don’t just look at the figures; look at the facts behind your figures. Where are your clicks coming from? Who is actually engaging with your content? Let’s say you have a brilliant diversity video, but 90% of the viewers are male… what does that tell you? What can you do to change that? That level of granularity gives you something to share with your leadership and demonstrate the power of what you’re doing.
It’s really important to benchmark your internal KPIs as well – applicant quality, time to hire, reliance on job boards – these things work together to tell you a story.”
Claire: There are so many KPIs you can use, and it’s one of the discussions we see a lot in The EB Space. But ultimately, it’s up to you to find a way to evidence your commercial impact. The message you need to share will be different for each organisation.”
How do you think employer branding will evolve over the next few years?
Alex: I think AI will play a big role. So many EB teams have just one or two people in them, and we need to be as efficient as possible. Tools such as OpusClip allow us to slice and dice videos into multiple clips – that’s a huge time and cost-saving.
Claire: Yes, totally; AI will be a big factor – and not in a ‘take everyone’s jobs’ kind of situation. But I’m excited for the future because I can see a point where employer branding will start to grow and mature with more businesses and teams really investing in it because they can see the value.
It’s an exciting thought! With that in mind, what’s the most important thing you can do as an employer branding professional?
Claire: Push the agenda and keep it going. Don’t just launch your website and leave it. Think – what can I do next? How can you demonstrate the effectiveness of the work you’re doing? The more you do, and the more you push your agenda and visibility of your work, the more people will care, and the more employer branding will grow.
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Learn more about how Connectr Talent Technology can build your employer brand.