RETHINKING EMPLOYER BRANDING

Think of an employer brand manager working on developing a recruitment marketing strategy for the company. Her performance will be assessed by the number of hires achieved and the optimized cost per hire. She classifies broad talent markets per skill-location-experience, selects media channels, gets adverts done and plans a mass media recruitment campaign.

What’s wrong with this approach?

This approach is how marketing plans were made, at least two decades ago. Mass media and impersonal communication to relay the message used to be the way yet most of the employer brand managers are still drinking the old wine. Few of the employer brand/recruitment marketing managers, who think they are really going a notch up, are doing nothing but getting their target segmentation done a tad better than the mass marketers. But again, they are missing the bus by attending every second segment with a similar set of messaging.

Engaging that one person (or group of such) is nothing but stitching stories most relevant to that person.

The real deal is being able to engage a finely segmented audience in a way that is most relevant in terms of messaging, format, frequency and platform. Most of the talent marketers are still going out with the same overarching message to almost every segment. Talent acquisition function, in most corporates, runs like a sales function, purely focused on closures. Can one really improve the situation if companies are blindly setting out to market brands/products/services rather than cultivating audiences (customers and candidates)?

To compete in this digitally interactive and aggressive business environment, firms must shift their attention from leading transactions to maximising their candidate (or customer) lifetime value (CLV).

Talent brand managers today have powerful tools at their disposal for gathering, analyzing and synthesizing information about candidates. HRTech today, enables talent brand managers to use this information intelligently, tailor their employee value proposition to interact directly with the candidates in a bespoke way. And guess what, never before were employees/candidates expected to interact with companies so closely as well. Thanks to the digital world we live in today that enables a candidate to impact the employer brand in a positive way or otherwise.

FUNFACT — An employee is always a candidate!

CULTIVATING CANDIDATES — Building Relationships

Employer Branding and Recruitment Marketing are not dated concepts. Only when the tables turned between supply (talent) and demand (jobs), these terms fetched some attention. And if the demand is candidate-led, ain’t improving relationship with them a better, long and short term strategy? Today, companies have the whole host of options to make mass reach-outs far too rudimental and work on a candidate-cultivating strategy. The key differentiating trait between a traditional and a candidate-cultivating firm is that the former is organized to push brand benefits whereas the latter is designed to pull candidates (segments) by serving their specific needs. In a candidate-cultivating design, communication is always reciprocal and made as closely targeted as possible.

HOW TO GO ABOUT BUILDING A CANDIDATE CULTIVATING FIRM?

First and foremost, control two critical sets of information channels:

1) Employee Information (also called Workforce Visibility) — gives a clear indication of:

• Who are your ‘HiPOs’ (Hi-Potential Employees)? Knowing what your A-Players look like, makes it easier to find one.
• Why one chose your brand as an employer and sticks with you.

2) Candidate Information — what entices candidates to choose a brand to work for, which online/offline platforms they prefer to spend their time on, and what format of content they prefer to consume.

Companies use applicant tracking systems (ATS’s), something similar to CRM’s as they call it in the sales/marketing world, to make recruitment processes efficient. An ATS compiles and standardizes all candidate data into one single/simple to retrieve the database. But that’s more of a theory than what happens on the ground. Talent Sourcers need to go beyond the magic mantra called “Boolean Search” and “Ctrl + F” to screen the best candidates from the database they already own (in the ATS), and on the same platforms (LinkedIn, Job Boards, etc.), incessantly trying to compete with other companies fishing from the same pond.

Moreover, ATS’s are not built as a BI tool which would simply restructure the data integrated from multiple heterogeneous sources so it’s easier to find, and standardize it to bring clear consistency and quality for reporting and decision making. Top players in the enterprise market are continuing to test HR Tech waters (Google Hire, D365HR and LinkedIn by Microsoft’s, etc.), to bring about the change of going past the point of hire, necessary for both internal mobility and the underlying ability of predictive analytics. The idea is to sync the two information sets listed above, employee’s performance and development information with that of the candidates getting shortlisted in the database to find HiPOs look-alike in the market.

There are many jargons floating in the market around the two information/data sets. To list a few with their definitions:

• Talent Warehousing: allows compiling and making sense of all the data from both employee visibility and candidate information. It’s a combo of an ATS and Data Warehousing, serving the purpose of recruiting i.e., not just finding the candidate, but the right one. Here is a WHITEPAPER by Quarsh — on what Talent Warehouse is all about and how it helps make talent acquisition a growth enabler in real sense.
• Talent Intelligence: taking a cue from the definition of business intelligence, talent intelligence comprises the talent acquisition/management strategies and HRTech used by companies for analyzing talent information with respect to business. Talent Intelligence technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Here is a great article by Josh Bersin going in-depth of how the talent intelligence is accelerating people analytics

HOW TO PUT TALENT WAREHOUSE IN USE FOR EMPLOYER BRANDING?

Here is a step-by-step method to build an extensive warm bench of the most relevant and engaged talent pool of your talent warehouse via employer brand:

STEP.1: Marketing starts with knowing who your audience is. For Employer Brand manager we divide this into these three buckets:

STEP.2: Understand various stages of a candidate’s journey from knowing about your company to finally getting hired:

• Awareness: Where and how would a candidate find about your brand’s existence?
• Consideration: How would a candidate learn about what you offer as an employer?
• Interest: How are you different from other employers in the market?
• Application: What options are available and how easy is it to find and apply for the relevant career opportunity with your firm?
• Selection: How smooth and professional is the interview process?
• Hire: How is the onboarding experience after getting selected?

STEP.3: Use Talent Warehouse to understand the cognitive decision-making process of the candidate (or set of candidates) who would fit the bill.

• who is this person? (demographics, experience level, personality traits, etc.)
• what skills and attributes does s/he have?
• where does s/he spend her/his time online/offline? (their job search criteria, channels, and platforms they prefer)
• why would s/he choose your brand over others? (key professional driving factors — aspirations, frustration/fear factors, etc.)

STEP.4. Map individuals with different stages of their candidate’s journey.

STEP.5: Recruitment Marketing: Creating and marketing creative content with an objective of engaging/nurturing candidates the inbound way. The best way to go about it is to consistently remain empathic and drive creative inbound/pull engagements around their needs. Easier said than done, this is where a brand manager’s talent is put to test. One needs to be creative not only in terms of developing relevant stories but also in presenting it. This is where all the information one gets out of Talent Warehousing/ Talent Intelligence/ People Analytics, comes handy. The challenge is also about consistent content development. The trick is to run multiple micro (monthly and quarterly) campaigns under a major macro (yearly) campaign.

Being empathic is the core behaviour of a brand manager to be able to create emotional connect between the brand and its audiences.

A few decades ago, the candidates only had access to basic information about the employer or opportunity before speaking with a recruiter. This, as most of us are aware, ain’t the case anymore. The candidates make themselves aware of almost all that they need to know from direct and indirect sources — which includes but not limited to — corporate and career websites, niche forums, social media, employer review platforms, job boards, search engines, and peer-to-peer connections that govern cognitive components of the brand image. Once you’ve figured the candidate persona, the channels to select and content buckets to focus on, you should be able to influence various touch-points.

This infographic from Kununu provides an overview of which touch-point in the candidate journey can be directly and indirectly influenced.

The new face of Employer Branding Function

To be a truly candidate cultivating firm, the CPO (Chief People Officer or CHRO Chief Human Resource Officer) and the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) — needs to bring a great deal of strategy transformation, changing functional org structure across the company — and reinvent Employer Branding by making brand (/its USP’s) subservient, if not servile to long-term candidate relationships.

Conceive a role called Candidate Engagement Manager (CEM), reporting directly to the CHRO while working closely with Talent Acquisition Head to:

• drive demand (job consideration — likelihood to consider working for your company)
• increase employer brand awareness (knowledge of Employer Brand — how aware are candidates about your company as a place of work).

This is like how Marketing function works closely with Client Acquisition / Sales function to:

• drive demand (purchase intent — likelihood to purchase a company’s products and services)
• improve company brand awareness (knowledge of Corporate Brand — How aware are prospective customers of your company’s name, products, and services?)

This executive is accountable for designing and executing a brand’s candidate relationship strategy and managing all candidate-engagement functions.

One may ask, why create a separate function and not let the marketing department handle the employer branding as well? In other words, why should Employer branding be part of CHRO’s portfolio and not the CMO’s?
The three main reasons are:

• Employer branding goals are around Talent Fulfilment and Optimising Cost per hire which are primarily Talent Acquisition goals as a part of HR.
• Candidate and Employee engagement, under HR portfolio, are critical for driving programs like employee advocacy/ talent ambassadors to drive referrals - a critical component of the sourcing mix.
• Automation tools are part of HRTech stack, managing end-to-end hiring lifecycle, are the source of the candidate and employee information to be able to create and manage brand reputation and meet hiring goals.

A study done by LinkedIn says that a strong employer brand (constructive influence of your brand as a place to work) is twice more likely to lead job consideration than a strong company brand. This presents an apparent case for investment in employer brand (driven by HR), even for organizations that are renowned global brands (made by Marketing).

Having established that Employer Branding needs to go under the CHRO, it is paramount that both corporate marketing and employer branding teams work closely with each other. This will ensure that the overall market, which includes both — the clients (who purchase from you), and the talent (who works for you) sees the company as one brand representing one vision, mission, and value system.

What Makes a Candidate Engagement Manager?

CEM’s ought to be the “T-Shaped” personnel, who have broad expertise with depth in select areas. CEM’s would be most effective, fusing in-depth knowledge and expertise of marketing/branding with a broad knowledge of talent acquisition metrics and goals.

The job of the Candidate Engagement Manager is a classic instance of how functional lines have blurred and new roles have evolved. A CEM’s role is the ultimate expression of marketing to fill the firm’s employer branding and talent acquisition goals. They achieve this by:

• finding gaps between a candidate’s aspirations and the brand’s EVP attributes using all people-related data analytics.
• engaging the right candidates at the right time with the right piece of content in the right format to build a strong talent pipeline that is warm enough to meet talent acquisition goals. I can’t stress enough on the phrase, “building real talent pipeline”, that is warm enough, who, if given an opportunity, would love to join the brand.
• creating the brand ambassadors of current employees through employee engagement, driving brand’s innovation ecosystem by having tenured engaged employees.

Knowledge and expertise in marketing, allows the CEM’s to keep running A/B test campaigns and optimize cost per hire. This includes all the latest know-how of using marketing/branding concepts, marketing automation, programmatic advertising (building effective ad campaigns with optimal performance across all devices). For example, the candidate reach-out route you might be using today under your direct sourcing strategy would include phone calls, emails, instant messaging, social media marketing, job boards, and SMS. CEM’s won’t keep using the same communication channel which doesn’t deliver results over and over. CEM’s will have the insights into which candidate is at what stage, when would they prefer to receive piece of content, which media channel and what format of the content they prefer to devour. That kind of engagement is like gold bullion.

A few functions that need to get aligned and working closely with CEM’s are:

• Market Research — In a candidate cultivating company, emphasis on market research extends beyond the marketing department. The marketing function, in most companies, is focused on Customer Value Proposition. To attend to the future workforce, market research needs to get closely aligned with talent branding function. For a CEM to be able to successfully lead spear-fishing (instead of net-fishing) and build extensive talent pipeline, market research needs to build a talent warehouse — data mining and synthesizing from candidate and employee inputs. This group of folks is required to gather data, analyze it, present it and post putting it in use (marketing) should be able to help optimize (MIS) the whole effort to bring the cost per hire down.
• CRM — Customer Relationship Management, is a tactic to gauge and conduct a company’s communication channels with current and potential customers. There are loads of CRM tools to forecast customers’ needs and behaviors and manage interactions with the customer. Traditionally used by Sales and Marketing in an organization, a similar workflow and process must be developed within the Employer Branding function. Most of the ATS’s (Applicant Tracking Software) have evolved and are great tools to manage Candidate Relationship Management — central to CEM’s role.
• Employee Engagement — This department should report to the CEM — not only to ensure high-quality service delivered on-time but also to help cultivate long-term relationships. Don’t ever forget, an employee is always a candidate in the market.

For your talent pipeline to really produce results, creating an org structure with the above functions under the CEM will enable employer branding to move more and more candidates into the job consideration stage with the brand, and know when and how to reach out to improve the response rate.

Apart from aligning the aforementioned functions, a CEM needs to have a creative content development team and a digital marketing team to develop and market micro and macro campaigns.

All said and done, the agile transformation within an organization is not an easy-peasy goal to achieve; in the context of our topic, it will not be easy to transform the talent acquisition focused company into candidate/employee-cultivating firm. Different departments would want to cling on to their roles to keep their relative self-rule. This is simply because any change entails overcoming deep-rooted interests, which we all know doesn’t and won’t happen organically. Transformation must be propelled from the top down. And when I say, top-down, it does need to flow till the end — from CHRO to the talent sourcer. But however formidable, the shift is inevitable. It will soon be the only competitive way to survive in the candidate-driven review economy.

Branding and marketing, to bring in sales/closures is great and necessary to keep the engine humming. Organizations with a focus on day-to-day transactional hustle just to bring closures are for sure running a short sprint to make quick money. Firms on the other hand that work towards creating a legacy, have a sophisticated and forward-looking outlook. They don’t shy away from investing in long term brand marketing.

ULTIMATELY, IT’S THE STRONG BRAND EQUITY THAT BRINGS CUSTOMER LOYALTY AND PROFITS.

References: — TalentLyft.com | Quarsh.com | LinkedIn.com | Kununu.com | HBR.com | Deloitte.com | And my favourite — Josh Bersin