Never walk alone: How Collaboration Helped Strengthen Wrike Employer Brand

I strongly believe that employer branding should be considered as a unique department in a company, functionally separate from marketing or HR. Yet, when striving for independence, we may miss out on chances to work together. Joining forces with other teams in the company can provide more benefits and resources.

In this article, I will detail how our EB crew teamed up with other departments, explain how we worked together, and offer some guidance (even if it’s not universally applicable, it might be helpful). Think of it as me giving advice to my former self.

1. Product Marketing

When I first started working on the Wrike employer brand over 8 years ago, the Product Marketing team and Employer Branding were on different sides of the river. We had no collaboration and no understanding of each other’s work.

The product marketing team was focused on the product itself, located far away, and had different goals. As the only specialist in the employer brand, my focus was on making the company appealing to potential hires in the region where Wrike as a product was relatively unknown, and where there were no plans for sales development. Thus, I could not use the existing product branding because the product was unfamiliar, and the primary employer brand messages were not in English. Consequently, I had to develop communication channels from scratch. So our sub-brand Wrike TechClub was launched.

Later, as our organization grew and expanded globally, we developed a closer working relationship with the marketing team. We collaborated on various projects, incorporating our content into their social media and blog posts to ensure consistency across our brand.

Tips:

• Get to know the marketing team and gain insights into their practices and specialties in SEO, SMM campaigns, email marketing, and content management.
• Collaborate with them to craft compelling narratives for your audience, drawing from their product stories or through brainstorming sessions. Building trust in the product brand among potential candidates is a crucial aspect of establishing an effective employer brand.
• Identify opportunities to leverage their various communication channels such as blogs, links, and social media to promote the employer brand.
• Schedule joint meetings to align efforts and prevent duplication of work.
• Whenever possible, share resources to optimize productivity and achieve common goals.

2. Recruiting and Sourcing

Recruiting and sourcing serve as the primary point of contact with candidates. One of the goals of the EB team is to widen the candidate pipeline and assess the efficacy of your hiring-related endeavors. Even if your recruitment and sourcing results are not directly evaluated based on recruiting and hiring outcomes, you are still in the same boat as the rest of the hiring team.

Tips:

• Emphasize collaboration instead of conflict. Work towards a common goal — to make your company appealing to potential job candidates and bring them on board.
• Encourage recruiters to participate in employer branding (EB) events such as meetups, conferences, and promo booths. Engage them in networking to gain their buy-in and assistance in collecting data. This approach benefits both parties, as the recruiters have warm leads familiar with the employer.
• Define and agree upon metrics, and regularly update dashboards together.
• Involve recruiters in the planning process to ensure collaborative efforts.

3. Internal Communication

I think that employee-generated content is the best way to boost a company’s reputation as an employer. Staff can talk about their struggles and accomplishments, highlighting the company’s distinct qualities without any “marketing filters”.

Stay up-to-date with company gatherings, internal community events, and resource group get-togethers, and access exceptional content by working alongside your internal communications managers.

Tips:

• Plan and organize informal events together with HRs.
• Schedule regular syncs with your internal communications managers.
• Highlight how internal stories become public and have an impact on people’s lives.

4. Design

I am lucky to work with the amazing team of Wrike designers, especially the graphic design unit. They enjoy working on EB projects, cos that let them express their creativity, take risks, experiment, and sometimes even develop as project managers. Tasks such as making a conference booth, forming a welcome pack for new employees, or contributing design aid for a convention necessitate both creative and organizational talents.

Design and visuals grab attention when interacting with content and events. Using visuals, one can understand the details of the company, its principles, and even perceive the individuals involved.

Tips:

• Include designers from the start of a project, even prior to creating a plan or written content.
• Demonstrate the outcomes of their efforts. It’s the best recognition and motivation!
• Use project management software. When innovative components arise, target dates can become derailed.
• Simulate scenarios to better understand what works and what doesn’t. Test ideas. For complex projects like a conference booth, it’s helpful to create a prototype and test the interaction between booth staff and the audience. Additionally, consider hosting a focus group to discuss swag, giveaways, activities, and prizes. Check the case on Behance.
• Trust your designers!

5. Finance

The finance team can also play a vital role in employer branding by providing support for your budget planning and money spending (underestimation and overestimation, I really cannot say what is better :)) For example, the finance team can help to:

• Develop and track budgets for employer branding initiatives
• Create financial models to forecast the ROI of employer branding investments
• Estimate the costs of employer branding activities, such as recruiting events, employee engagement programs, and social media marketing campaigns

By collaborating with the finance team, employer branding professionals can ensure that their initiatives are financially sustainable and aligned with the overall business strategy.

Conclusion

One of the main values at Wrike is “Work as One”. Our Employer Branding team has made significant efforts to overcome doubts, make adjustments, face disappointments, and make new attempts to embody this value in our work. As a result, we have determined the approach: independence in decisions and responsibility, while fostering collaboration at work.