Employer Branding For Dummies
Overview
Attract the very best talent with a compelling employer brand!
Employer Branding For Dummies is the clear, no-nonsense guide to attracting and retaining top talent. Written by two of the most recognized leaders in employer brand, Richard Mosley and Lars Schmidt, this book gives you actionable advice and expert insight you need to build, scale, and measure a compelling brand. You'll learn how to research what makes your company stand out, the best ways to reach the people you need, and how to convince those people that your company is the ideal place to exercise and develop their skills. The book includes ways to identify the specific traits of your company that aligns with specific talent, and how to translate those traits into employer brand tactic that help you draw the right talent, while repelling the wrong ones. You'll learn how to build and maintain your own distinctive, credible employer brand; and develop a set of relevant, informative success metrics to help you measure ROI. This book shows you how to discover and develop your employer brand to draw the quality talent you need.
- Perfect your recruitment marketing
- Develop a compelling employer value proposition (EVP)
- Demonstrate your employer brand ROI
Face it: the very best employees are the ones with the most options. Why should they choose your company? A strong employer brand makes the decision a no-brainer. It's good for engagement, good for retention, and good for the bottom line. Employer Branding For Dummies helps you hone in on your unique, compelling brand, and get the people you need today.
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About The Author
Richard Mosley, Universum's Global Head of Strategy, is widely recognized as a leading global authority on the subject of employer branding. He regularly chairs or delivers keynote presentations at many of the world's leading employer brand events.
Lars Schmidt, Founder of Amplify Talent and Cofounder of HR Open Source, is a leading strategy consultant, speaker, and writer in the fields of employer branding and recruiting.
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employer branding for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Employer branding can be boiled down to two steps: First, make your company a great place to work, and second, make sure everyone knows your company is a great place to work. Of course, it involves more than that. You need to know what employer branding is, why it matters, how to develop your employer value proposition, and some best practices.
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Human Resources
Even when you’re doing everything right, employer branding involves a considerable amount of trial and error. After all, you’re dealing with people and with a host of factors that are subject to change — economic conditions, what employees value, how people conduct their job searches, and so on. However, you can lessen the amount of trial and error by avoiding the most common and serious mistakes.
Human Resources
When you set out to build a strong employer brand, you may feel overwhelmed by everything it involves. Here, it gets easier with these ten key success factors. These ten factors serve as a framework for the more detailed activities you’ll be conducting. Structure your activities around this framework, and everything else should fall neatly in place.
Human Resources
Two common arguments against employer branding are: (1) It costs too much, and (2) It’s hard to identify and measure the return on investment. Creating recruitment campaigns, developing or buying content, and drawing time and focus from other business activities all demand valuable resources. Investing in your employer brand delivers value in terms of better quality hires and enhanced performance, but it can also help your company to reduce the costs.
Human Resources
Customer experience is an important part of employer branding. People often take for granted the planning and discipline required to deliver an excellent customer experience. When companies get this right, it often feels easy and natural, much like a great athletic performance, but it generally takes considerable effort to deliver a quality experience on a consistent basis.
Human Resources
Employer branding requires some guts. Too often, large organizations start to take themselves too seriously. Perhaps it’s the suits. Or maybe neckties and tight-fitting collars cut off circulation to the brain, dulling the imagination of the organization’s leaders. Whatever the case, your organization needs to get real.
As you set out to build a strong employer brand, adhere to the following employer branding best practices:
Get your leadership team's understanding and support. Effective employer branding starts at the top. The executive team needs to communicate in words and actions that delivering a positive employment experience and building a strong employer brand reputation are critically important to the success of the business.
Employer branding can be boiled down to two steps: First, make your company a great place to work, and second, make sure everyone knows your company is a great place to work. Of course, it involves more than that. You need to know what employer branding is, why it matters, how to develop your employer value proposition, and some best practices.
Human Resources
Before you can launch an employer branding strategy, you need an employer value proposition (EVP). EVPs appear in a number of different formats, and the language used to describe the different parts of the proposition varies. However, the EVP format most commonly favored by leading employers comprises a clear and concise brand statement supported by three to five supporting qualities, often referred to as pillars.
Human Resources
To connect with your target talent, your employer brand messaging needs to reach them where they hang out. Just as billboards target drivers, TV ads target couch potatoes, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising targets people who spend time online, your recruitment advertising needs to target your talent where they spend most of their time or at least where they spend most of their time looking for jobs.
Human Resources
Glassdoor is a popular social media jobs site that helps employers across all industries and sizes build their brands, monitor their reputations, advertise their jobs, and promote their companies to a highly researched, highly selective candidate pool. Its social media component provides job seekers with a backstage pass to find out more about companies from the people who work there.
Human Resources
Building an engaged network on Twitter can have a huge positive impact on your employer brand’s recruiting efforts, particularly if you’re recruiting in fields such as knowledge workers, who tend to flock to Twitter. It’s an open platform, meaning anyone can see any content without necessarily following the account, so tweets have the potential of reaching a wider audience.
Human Resources
Like any successful marketing campaign, your employer branding strategy requires good data. Developing a strong employer value proposition (EVP) is partly a creative exercise informed by fresh ideas, but it should also be based on solid research. After you’ve collected your data, identify the key insights and translate them into a format that’s easy for other people in your organization to digest.
Human Resources
Your employer brand will likely be focusing largely on recruiting. No recruiting tactic is more effective than contacting and engaging with a prospect on a personal level.Imagine recruiting the top college baseball or football players for a professional team. You certainly wouldn’t post an ad in the newspaper or even on Monster in the hopes that your top pick would notice it and respond.
Human Resources
Your employer brand should align with your corporate brand. The term corporate brand is generally used to describe the overall reputation of the company, as opposed to its more specific reputation as an employer. In addition to finding your fit within the strategic hierarchy, you need to clarify your place within the brand hierarchy.
Human Resources
Your employer branding strategy needs to complement your customer brand when possible. Maintaining consistency from your employer brand to the customer brand depends on how closely the corporate and customer brands are associated:
Corporate and customer brands are identical or nearly identical. In many organizations the corporate brand name is carried by the company’s products and services, as is the case with Apple, Shell, Vodafone, and Deloitte.
Human Resources
The employer brand forms one branch of the overall brand tree. The trunk of this tree is the corporate brand, which includes those elements (including core values and identity guidelines) that should ideally be reflected in every branch of brand communication (to current and future employees, customers, investors, business partners, and other key stakeholder groups).
Human Resources
If you are doing your employer branding well, there are bound to be rejected candidates. For every candidate you hire, dozens, hundreds, or even thousands more are rejected. Every single one of these candidates is a potential source of candidate referrals and is a potential brand advocate or detractor.For these two reasons, and others not mentioned here, you need to invest some time, effort, and resources in creating a positive candidate experience (CX).
Human Resources
The purpose of your employer brand’s core positioning is to highlight one overall characteristic that you most want people to associate with your organization as an employer. This single-mindedness is valuable from a brand communication perspective. Establishing one major brand association in everyone’s mind is generally easier than establishing many smaller ones.
Human Resources
A powerful way to network for talent is to create your own employer branded talent communities. A talent community is a forum where individuals with shared skill sets and interests can gather and interact both personally and professionally with each other and with the company’s leadership, management, and HR personnel.
Human Resources
Both what you say and how you say it (your body language) are important factors in making a strong positive impression on people. In employer branding, think of your visual brand identity as the body language of your brand. Use the corporate brand identity described in your EVP as the starting point for any decisions relating to how you present your employer brand from a visual perspective.
Human Resources
An employer value proposition (EVP) defines the key qualities you want to be associated with as an employer. The EVP consists of a core positioning statement supported by three to five pillars, which provide a consistent focal point for all your brand-building activities:
Core positioning: The one key quality you most want to be associated with you as an employer
Pillars: The three to five qualities that further define the key components of your employment offer
Here are a few suggestions for developing an effective EVP, including the support you need to make it stick:
Establish your employer brand objectives.
Human Resources
If your employer brand management efforts are focused primarily on recruitment marketing, engaging employees may be limited to a news update. However, if you’re taking a more integrated approach that involves recruitment marketing and overhauling the employment experience, then some form of proactive engagement is valuable.
Human Resources
Once you’ve made an offer and it’s been accepted, you may think that you can take your foot off the employer brand marketing pedal. Nothing could be further from the truth. Onboarding talent in the right way is just as important as recruiting the right talent. If you succeed, high expectations will fast-forward into high engagement and high performance.
Human Resources
Your employer brand image is the idea that people form in their minds when they think of your organization as an employer. Evaluating this image is important, because it will help you to understand why potential candidates consider or choose to work for your organization or one that’s competing against you for that same talent.
Human Resources
When you need to raise the search engine ranking for your employer brand in a hurry or you’re looking for a way to more effectively target certain talent, consider paying for a higher search engine ranking.With SEM, such as Google AdWords, you can target or exclude geographical areas, set your daily budget and how much you’re willing to pay per click, create your own ad(s), and specify the keywords and phrases you want to trigger your ad(s) appearing in the search results.
Human Resources
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.
Human Resources
Your employer brand needs to make tangible claims. Developing a pie-in-the-sky employer value proposition (EVP) to attract talent without paying due care and attention to your organization’s ability to deliver on your promises is seldom a good idea. False promises destroy credibility and trust and undermine your employer brand.
Human Resources
Online videos now exceed 50 percent of mobile traffic and 64 percent of all Internet traffic. Knowing this, your employer brand can’t afford to deny the power of video. These figures continue to rise each year, as does the importance of having a video component as a component of your recruitment marketing efforts.
Human Resources
The uncertainty that accompanies reorganizations can damage attraction, engagement, and retention with your employer brand unless managed proactively by HR and line management. Here, you discover how to navigate reorganizations, acquisitions, and mergers while maintaining the strength of your employer brand.
Navigating a reorganization and how it affects employer branding
Given the constant need to adapt to changes in the market environment, many companies must reengineer, restructure, and right-size their organizations on a regular basis.
Human Resources
When it comes to content marketing and your employer brand, the most valuable asset you have — second only to the people in your organization who generate content and drive engagement — is the content itself. Properly
Assembling a content marketing and management team
Although you’re no doubt eager to dive into content marketing, wade in the shallow end first and making sure you have a competent team in place to do it right.
Human Resources
In addition to assessing where and how your competitors are communicating their employer brand, you should also assess what their key messages are. In brand speak, this is described as positioning — how companies position themselves in the minds of potential recruits. Here’s an excellent approach to mapping your competitors’ brand positioning:
List the taglines and headlines featured across each competitor’s main career site pages (home page, “Why join?
Human Resources
Your employer brand can’t afford to neglect Facebook. Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla of the social media world, and because the platform is so powerful and influential, your company needs to be on Facebook. After all, about 20 percent of the world’s population is on Facebook, providing you with an incredible opportunity and tool to build your employer brand.
Human Resources
If you want to be truly successful with your employer branding strategy, you will need to embrace content marketing. New trends have sparked a revolution in marketing, as Rebecca Lieb explains in her book Content Marketing:Companies have been creating and distributing content for many years, both to attract new business and to retain existing customers.
Human Resources
Referral has always been an important source of hire (SOH), but the increasing adoption of social media as part of employer branding has resulted in a resurgence of interest in network-based recruitment.In Universum’s recent global best practice survey, 60 percent of leading global employers claimed they were increasing investment in employee referral and 50 percent were increasing investment in alumni referral.
Human Resources
Recruitment advertising is the easiest employer branding marketing activity to evaluate, because it involves an investment in creative development and media buying and a return on investment in the form of applications for one or more vacancies.
Advertising costs in employer branding
Advertising costs include the expenses involved in creating and placing advertising content:
Creative development cost: The total investment in creative development and production of core advertising assets.
Human Resources
The objective of social content marketing tends to be employer brand engagement and relationship building instead of drawing attention to immediate job opportunities. Some companies post a lot of job adverts or alerts on social channels, but people in these communities often regard such postings as feed clutter, and these adverts are more likely to damage your employer brand than enhance it.
Human Resources
Employee-generated content can be a great way to engage as part of your employer branding strategy. One of the most exciting aspects of mobile personal technology, such as smartphones and tablets, is that they facilitate the sharing of content. Whenever convenient and applicable, employees can post content (text, photos, videos, and so on) and engage with others inside and outside the organization.
Human Resources
LinkedIn is typically the first tool in most organizations’ employer branding portfolios. It’s certainly no stranger to recruiting, with more than 90 percent of recruiters using the platform to find talent.If you want step-by-step instruction on how to use LinkedIn, consult LinkedIn’s online help system or check out LinkedIn For Dummies, 4th Edition, by Joel Elad (Wiley).
Human Resources
To communicate your employer brand effectively, you need to think about the other person at least as much as the message you want to convey and the desired response. This principle holds true when you’re trying to convince talented prospects to come and work for your company.Before you give any consideration to the messaging you want to use in your recruitment advertising campaigns or the media to use to reach out to prospects, you need to size up your audience to determine their preferences and what they are likely to find appealing.
Human Resources
Spotting generic plays in employer branding strategies and opportunities to be different involves identifying common patterns of communication — words, phrases, and images that crop up with noticeable frequency across your competitive set. Patterns tend to be particularly obvious within industries where companies often reach the same “route one” conclusions about what will attract target talent, with noticeable examples of companies that stand out from the crowd.
Human Resources
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an element all employer brands need to consider. Go to Google, search for your company name followed by “jobs,” and then scroll through the search results to see where the link to your career website shows up. If it’s not on the first page, you have some work to do. Here are a few suggestions to place you on the path to improving the search engine ranking for your online career content via SEO:
Make your site mobile friendly.
Snapchat is a new player that can be used for your employer brand. Snapchat is unlike any other social platform. It’s all about capturing a moment through a photo or video and sharing it in real time. You can customize these moments with filters, emojis, text, and drawing, but you can’t share links, self-promotional “thought leadership” blog posts, or auto-scheduled posts, only moments.
Human Resources
Gone are the days when recruiting teams debated the value and return on investment (ROI) of social engagement. In today’s employer branding world, the question isn’t whether you should be on social, it’s where to show up and how to engage.
Don’t venture into any social platform without a clear strategy. Establishing a presence merely for the sake of being there is likely to do more harm than good.
Human Resources
In many ways, effective recruitment marketing for your employer brand is like trying to hit a moving target; the needs and preferences of the talent you target tend to change in response to changes in the economy, the popularity of certain social channels and media types, and shifts in interests and values. To improve your chances of connecting with and engaging the right people, put a recruitment marketing system in place that’s designed to adapt to changes.
Human Resources
Tracking the success of your own recruitment marketing activities and employer brand equity and performance is important, but keeping your employer brand strong over the longer term also requires that you keep an eye on the wider talent market to ensure you keep pace with emerging trends.Companies tend to take a good look at their immediate talent competitors when they develop their EVP, but they often fail to take a similarly systematic approach to monitoring the competitive environment on an ongoing basis.
Building a strong employer brand can be costly in terms of time and money, so you need to make a solid business case for investing in it. Here are some of the leading reasons for making the investment:
A stronger employer brand will make it easier for your company to attract the many different kinds of talent it needs to succeed.
Human Resources
Companies often focus on the investment needed to develop an employer branding strategy. However, they often neglect to see the cost-cutting benefits when it is successful.A LinkedIn survey of 2,250 corporate recruiters in the U.S. revealed that the average cost-per-hire in organizations with a strong employer brand was two times lower than those with employer brands ranked moderate to poor.
Human Resources
Developing a solid employer branding strategy has performance benefits. A recent study from the Boston Consulting Group and World Federation of People Management Associations (“From Capability to Profitability”) involving 4,288 HR and non-HR managers in 102 countries revealed that employer branding, alongside effective recruitment, onboarding, and retention, appears to be highly correlated with strong business results.
Human Resources
When you have a clear idea of the look, feel, and function of your employer brand and career website, you’re ready to turn your attention to the most important component of any website — content. As you gather and create content for your website, follow these guidelines:
Align your content with your employer value proposition.
Employer branding is the process of promoting an organization as a great place to work to the kind of talent required by the organization to meet its business goals and objectives. Employer branding focuses on three key areas:
Recruitment: Attracting the talent the company needs to achieve its business objectives
Engagement: Ensuring that employees become dedicated brand advocates and highly motivated performers
Retention: Encouraging talented individuals to continue working at the company and discouraging them from working for the competition
Employer branding operates on two interrelated fronts:
Reality: First and foremost, employer branding strives to make the company a great place to work.
Human Resources
In many ways, employer 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.
Human Resources
Traditionally, recruitment advertising was the primary means by which organizations built their employer brands, but this approach is quickly becoming less effective as demand for a richer, more diverse range of marketing content grows. If you’re looking for reasons to ditch old-school recruitment advertising to free up resources for generating more engaging content, you’ll find plenty.
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