Employer Branding — How To Evaluate Where Your Organisation Stands
Does employer branding come up as a priority in your organisation’s everyday marketing discussions? Chances are, it doesn’t. According to LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends 2016 research, only 55% of organisations around the world have a proactive employer branding strategy. Isn’t it common for other priorities, such as lead generation and social selling, to steal marketers’ attention away from Talent Acquisition and Employee Engagement — the two most critical HR requirements, for which employer branding is an absolute necessity?
Research by CareerArc in the U.S. confirms that 75% of job seekers consider an employer’s brand before even applying for a job. Similar research also claims that bad a reputation can cost a company 10% or more per hire. It is time we took employer branding more seriously!
My relationship with employer branding began when in my social media and digital marketing team at Cyient, we started to grow our capabilities and explore the various interesting things we could do for HR. The questions shared here to help you evaluate your employer branding journey are the ones we encountered in ours. Some questions were easy to answer, while others required a long-term commitment from us to work out a solution. If you are an HR or talent acquisition leader, these questions will help you analyse where your organisation’s employer branding stands. The list of questions below is not exhaustive, but meant to prod you to relate your answers with the unique context of your organisation, and expand the process of questioning as necessary.
Let’s start:
1. Do You Distinguish Between Corporate and Employer Branding?
Stop relying on corporate branding alone to attract and retain talent. Let’s get this clear — corporate branding and employer branding have different objectives. Corporate branding speaks to ALL your key audiences, including clients, investors, society/community, talent, and other stakeholders, such as industry bodies and media. On the other hand, employer branding, as a subset of corporate branding, is much more specific — it speaks to your talent audience only.
Why does this distinction matter? Because specific is better, and because corporate and employer branding require very different channels of execution.
2. Do You Have the Top-management Buy-in?
One of the surest indicators of an organisation’s commitment to employer branding is whether the top management is convinced about its long-term value. Simply put, support from the top management decides whether or not the HR and branding teams (yes, both teams must work together) will have the budget, the manpower, and the support structure required to carry out employer branding effectively. If you are struggling to “sell” employer branding to your leadership team, it will likely take a sustained effort to evangelize the idea internally, and share industry proof-points to build a stronger business case.
3. Do You Have a Well-defined Employee Value Proposition (EVP)?
Before you embark on your journey of employer branding, ensure that you have a strong, well-differentiated employee value proposition. It is what your employer branding campaigns will communicate. My favourite definition of EVP is by Andrew Collett (from Edelman): EVP is the “give and get” of the employment deal (the value that employees are expected to contribute with the value that they can expect in return). It defines the underlying “offer” on which an organisation’s employer brand is based.
Every organisation must have an employee value proposition at all times, regardless of whether or not they are running an employer branding campaign.
Equally importantly, EVP must align with an organisation’s broader HR strategy. Startups and small organisations often make the mistake of focusing almost entirely on their core products/services, not realising that scaling up will require a definitive EVP to attract the right talent. EVP denotes a key shift from the traditional “salary and rewards” model, as Millennials and the new-age workforce look to a more holistic evaluation of employers (evaluations ceased to be one-way a long time ago).
4. Do You Leverage Digital Channels for Employer Branding?
Digital channels are where talent resides today. This continues to change the mode of engagement with talent — whether that’s fresh graduates or experienced professionals. However, in addition to its obvious growing value, digital employer branding has another dimension: cross-team collaboration. While employer branding intrinsically requires the HR and branding teams to collaborate, the digital element now brings in a third entity to collaborate with — the digital marketing team. Most HR teams underestimate the resource commitment required to collaborate with the digital marketing folks. To quote LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends 2016 research again: talent acquisition teams share or contribute to managing the employer brand in only 39% of organisations!
Here’s an example to illustrate this point: the digital marketing team can design and execute an employer branding or a social hiring campaign, but will need continuous support from HR to qualify, respond to, and follow-up with the numerous queries and comments pouring in from the digital channels. This requires ongoing coordination and clear ownership of tasks between the HR, branding, and digital marketing teams.
If you have already established the necessary structures and resources for collaboration, rate yourself high on the employer branding journey. If not, anticipate, identify, and secure the resources that digital employer branding will entail for your organisation.
5. Do You Deliver Consistent Employee Experience As Part of Your Employer Brand Promise?
Last, but not the least, employer branding is about delivering the promised experience consistently to talent. In fact, promised experience is the very foundation that brands are built on. Promising and under-delivering is the surest recipe to dissatisfaction and brand erosion. How are you ensuring that you walk your talk in delivering the promised experience to talent? Do you have the necessary processes and structures in place to ensure consistent delivery of employee experience every time, everywhere? CareerArc’s research claims that a third of employers are likely disappointing applicants in the hiring stage itself. However, employer branding does not end with hiring. It continues to live on through the everyday business-and-talent interactions, and the various employee engagement initiatives. It is important, therefore, to invest diligently in creating employee-experience delivery mechanisms, just as one would in customer experience.
At the beginning of this article, I spoke about 55% of organisations around the world as not having a proactive employer branding strategy.
Interestingly, emerging economies exhibit a relatively greater focus on employer branding as compared with their more developed counterparts.
With the exception of the U.S., where 60% of organisations have a proactive employer branding strategy, the figure stands at just 53% for other developed nations, such as Australia, Canada and the U.K. Compare this with the corresponding numbers for emerging economies — 72% in India, 64% in Brazil, and 58% in China. In a way, the trend reflects the geographical concentration of talent. If emerging markets are a major source of talent for your organisation, employer branding is all the more critical for you.
The encouraging part of LinkedIn’s research is that employer branding is getting more investments, overall. Globally, 59% of the organisations acknowledge investing more in their employer branding now than they did in the last year.
How about your organisation? Share your thoughts.
