Employ Your Brand

Erica Marom and Uri Ar’s approach to building an employer brand (hint: it doesn’t involve foosball tables!)

This is a small excerpt from a workshop on employer branding that we gave our portfolio companies.

Last year, we attended an employer branding lecture given by an expert in the field at a prominent Israeli tech company. There was a lot of talk about Instagram and Facebook, along with various photos of yoga classes and happy hours.

We looked at each other and knew what the other was thinking — that’s not employer branding.

We are Urica – Erica Marom (LinkedIn), former journalist turned startup storyteller, and Uri Ar (LinkedIn), brand and experience strategist. We both work at Aleph helping our portfolio companies build their brands, tell their stories and build meaningful experiences. With growing competition over top talent, we saw increasing demand from our portfolio companies to differentiate themselves as employers. Why should anyone work at startup A versus startup B?

Together with Racheli Kogan, an HR expert previously of Fundbox, we decided to share our view of what employer branding really means and how it translates to a method of building a meaningful employer brand that any startup could quickly and easily adopt.

What is an employer brand?

Employer branding is a fundamental process based on applying your company story and values to everything you do, from hiring and firing to company life. Your employer brand is defined by how outsiders and potential employees perceive your company as a workplace, and by how your employees feel and experience your company and express that to others.

Your employer brand differentiates you based upon your value proposition to your employees, beyond the basic elements they’ve come to expect from any tech company – like compensation, perks and benefits – to the things they actually care about, like impact and personal development.

It can be tempting to try to attract employees with foosball tables, game rooms and happy hours. But everyone else is already doing this, so it doesn’t even help you stand out, and, more importantly, it is unlikely to be a meaningful expression of your values or of your company’s personality and unique vibe.

Every perk, activity and benefit, every company process and policy, should be viewed both as an opportunity and a commitment to building and communicating your employer brand.

While employer branding may be owned by HR or marketing (ideally a joint venture!), every employee should be made aware of and understand the fact that they are a representative of the company and have the opportunity to be an evangelist of the employer brand. The best evangelists are true believers –so you must make sure your Kool-Aid is worth drinking. ;)

How do I build an employer brand?

Brand is a relationship. Branding is all about building relationships, setting expectations and defining your commitments. It encompasses every single thing you do as a company, and it’s guided by your values. While values can often be considered clichéd fluff, in our minds your values are your commitment and your promise, your touchstone by which to measure everything you do. Every encounter with your brand is an opportunity (and a challenge) to express that relationship – from how fast your website loads to your marketing copy to your product usability to the experience of being hired by your company.

An employer brand is derived from your overarching brand and values. It is the relationship you build with your employees – from the potential candidates who are learning about or even entertaining the idea of working at your company, to your actual employees, to those who are leaving your company.

Before embarking on an employer branding process, you need to understand who you are as a company and what the values are that guide you – as these values will be your lighthouse for everything you do going forward.

Once you’ve defined your values, the next step is to examine all of your company lifecycle applications: hiring, onboarding, recognition/evaluation, internal communications, external communications, culture, welfare and termination. Then start thinking about how to infuse your values into every one of these applications in order to build an employer brand that resonates throughout day-to-day company life:

• Hiring: The entire recruitment process, the type of people you want to hire, the job descriptions, how you pitch to candidates, how you conduct job interviews and the type of questions that are asked, candidate experience, surveys, how you handle rejections, how you choose a final candidate, etc.
• Onboarding: Orientation, care package, what the first day looks like, handovers, how much emphasis you put on training vs. throwing into the deep end, documentation/handbooks, etc.
• Recognition/Evaluation: What you praise and value as an organization, how you decide on promotions, what behaviors you want to encourage, who evaluates whom, how to conduct reviews, salary increases, bonuses, how, if and when you acknowledge success and key employees, etc.
• Internal Communication: How you communicate with employees (new employees, people leaving, downsizing, etc.), how the executive team interacts with employees, how transparent you are, where you conduct internal messaging, internal channels of communication like Slack/email, how (and if) you use other channels like WhatsApp, what you communicate where, communication expectations over weekend/holidays, etc.
• External Communication: Your career page, company LinkedIn page, Glassdoor page, job ads, rejection letters for applicants, PR (which types of articles or lists you want to be in, and which you don’t), your relationship with the media, Life@social pages (Instagram/FB/Twitter), etc.
• Culture: How you run your company, how you make decisions, which methodologies and processes you choose, social culture, hierarchy, company and team events, etc.
• Welfare: All your perks and benefits, including things like vacation, sick leave, maternity/paternity leave, meals, transportation and insurance, equity, personal development, etc.
• Termination: How you end a relationship with an employee, how many chances you give them, are you transparent, do you look for a replacement before they leave or not, do you fire people around the holidays or if someone has a difficult personal issue, how you handle downsizing vs. lack of performance vs. when a worker leaves on their own, how many perks you give when someone leaves, do you announce it within the company, recommendations, etc.

These are all of the employee lifecycle applications as we have defined them. If you have any others that are relevant or specific to your company, feel free to add them. Our approach to building an employer brand is to construct a table in which we then cross our values with each of these different company lifecycle applications. In each square, we define the guiding principles of conduct as well as practical ideas based upon each value.

An example of the table we construct crossing company values with different company lifecycle applications.

So, for example, using the value of collaboration as defined by one of our portfolio companies and applying it to the lifecycle application of termination, we defined:

“When we are ending a relationship with an employee, it should not come as a surprise; we should engage in open talks and conversations with them ahead of any considered termination in an attempt to collaborate and improve their performance. We should also offer guidance and support both on their work and their career path. A decision to terminate should also be a collaborative process with relevant stakeholders within the company. If a decision is made to terminate, the employee should be clearly notified and be an active part of that process wherever possible (final date, type of compensation, etc.). We would never start looking for a replacement before the employee is notified that they are being terminated. The rest of the employees should be informed, and they should understand how it will affect their work. All communication on the topic should be positive, grateful and respectful. In this spirit of collaboration, we might help that employee find a new role in the company, or even a new job, if possible.”

This methodology can and should be applied to all of your company lifecycle applications, until you have completed the entire matrix.

Now what?

Once completed, you will have a table full of guiding principles and practical ideas that you can implement at your company. You can use these to build out a long-term employer branding strategy that takes into account both the larger, more expensive initiatives as well as tackling easy, low-hanging fruit.

We recommend that you prioritize these projects based on impact versus cost and effort – how much impact an idea will have on current and potential employee perception versus how much money, time and resources it requires.

For an employer brand to succeed, it needs to be treated just like any other project at your company. It requires a strategy, budget and buy-in from leadership and management. It requires an owner and a dedicated team. These efforts should be communicated clearly throughout the company so that everyone gets on board.

This matrix is just the beginning. Every encounter within the company is an opportunity to maintain or strengthen your employer brand. The main idea going forward is to simply be thoughtful about every single interaction until it becomes second nature. Taking a minute before you share a social post, conduct an interview or create a new policy to ensure they are aligned with your values will already put you ahead of the game. It’s not just about taking advantage of opportunities; it’s also about not damaging your employer brand by neglect or by doing the wrong thing.

Once you’ve adopted an overarching strategy for your employer brand, you will need to adapt it to different people and varied interactions. While the same company principles and values apply to everyone, what impact means and what personal development means vary based on role, and it’s crucial to understand what drives them. Take into account the persona of whom you are interacting with; marketers, for example, care about different things from developers. Communicating collaboration via a company hackathon may be more relevant to developers, whereas for marketers, collaboration could be about brand and performance marketers working together as a team.

While there are plenty of companies still trying to build an employer brand by talking about happy hours and foosball tables, there are some brands who are getting it right. During the Covid pandemic, for example, Lemonade shared a blog written by the CEO Daniel Schreiber calling for every company to ask every employee to get vaccinated. Corporate responsibility, he said, can move the needle and make a difference. As a certified B-Corp, Lemonade is all about social impact and responsibility; they donate extra profits to charities of their users’ choice, and believe that doing well and doing right are not mutually exclusive. This blog, however controversial – or even because it is controversial – establishes Lemonade’s employer brand in a clear and differentiated way and attracts employees that align with their values. It might not be for everyone – but that’s the point.

Ultimately, if you take one thing away from this blog about how to build a compelling employer brand, the trick is don’t be lazy. Don’t just do what everyone else is doing. If you let your brand story and values guide you and are willing to invest just a bit more, you can build a meaningful employer brand and lasting relationships with your employees. We recently had a portfolio company successfully recruit a senior executive (away on sabbatical!) based on their unique set of values – so if you build it, they will come.

Our 10 Commandments of Employer Branding:

1. Leverage your EVP (Employee Value Proposition). Extract from your values what your candidates and employees actually care about and what is unique to you as a company. What claim can you make – that none of your competitors can make – that your employees care about?
2. Communicate with employees. Constantly be aware of your audience. What brings employees to your company and what will keep them at your company? Listen. Something that seems trivial to you could be a deal-breaker for someone else.
3. Arm your employees. Your employees are your best ambassadors and evangelists. Give them the tools, the platform and the permission to talk about their experiences.
4. Measure what you can. Measuring your work can rally the management to support and amplify it as well as help you improve your output.
5. Take it seriously. Build a strategy and a budget for employer branding; this is a project like any other at your organization.
6. Focus. Don’t open a million channels and spread yourself thin trying to manage all of them. Open the channels that you decide are relevant for you and your audience and focus on optimizing those. Avoid posting for the sake of posting; you can harm your reputation with low-quality content or by being off-brand.
7. Mind your image. PR needs to be micromanaged, not just managed. There is such a thing as bad PR, and you want to make sure every article or event you participate in is aligned with your values.
8. Control your online presence. Carefully manage your presence on external platforms like LinkedIn and Glassdoor.
9. Teamwork. A good employer branding strategy is built by marketing and HR working together. Make sure everyone is aligned.
10. Live your values. Really – and don’t be hypocritical about them. People expect you to stand by your values.

This blog is based on a workshop given by Uri Ar and Erica Marom to Aleph portfolio companies in June 2021. We’d love to hear from you, reach out at uri@aleph.vc or erica@aleph.vc