Employer Branding For Dummies®
Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016962922
ISBN 978-1-119-07164-8 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-07162-4 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-07178-5 (ebk)
When it comes to talent, business is a lot like sports: The teams with the best organization and players win, and these same teams attract the best players, keep them, and build franchises with the momentum to continue their success.
As the global competition for talent heats up, your organization must do more to attract, engage, and retain the talent it needs to succeed. One of the most effective ways to accomplish this goal is to build a strong employer brand — a reputation and proven track record for being a great place to work.
Follow our lead, invest the necessary time and effort upfront, and your organization will soon have an employer brand that does much of the heavy lifting required to attract, engage, and retain the most talented candidates in the workforce.
Already have an employer brand? Then this book is also for you. You can apply the same guidance presented in this book to fix a broken employer brand, build a better employer brand, or create a new employer brand from scratch. You also discover strategies for giving a global employer brand local relevance.
Is your organization losing the talent contest? Are you disappointed with the applicants, struggling with high turnover, and plagued by employee disengagement? Then Employer Branding For Dummies is the book you need. With this book, you can begin to turn your situation around.
Organized in an easy-to-access format and presented in plain English, this book brings you up to speed with what an employer brand is, how it can help your organization perform better, and how you can build a strong employer brand from the ground up. Here you discover how to lay the groundwork, evaluate your current situation, develop an effective employer brand strategy, communicate your brand through the right channels, deliver on your employer brand promises, and then measure your success with key metrics and make adjustments as necessary to maintain and build momentum.
Although we encourage you to read every single word of this book from start to finish, you’re welcome to skip around to acquire your knowledge on a need-to-know basis and completely skip the sidebars (which are shaded gray). Although the sidebars may be too fascinating to ignore, they’re not essential.
Within this book, you may note that some web addresses break across two lines of text. If you’re reading this book in print and want to visit one of these web pages, simply key in the web address exactly as it’s noted in the text, pretending as though the line break doesn’t exist. If you’re reading this as an e-book, you’ve got it easy — just click the web address to be taken directly to the web page.
First things first: If you’re smart enough to pick up a book about employer branding, you’re one smart dummy. You’re smart enough to rise to a level in your organization where you’re involved in employer brand development, but you’re not completely confident in your knowledge and skills in this area. That’s okay, because that’s exactly what this book is for.
Here are a few additional assumptions we made about you and others we hope will read this book and apply its guidance:
Throughout this book, icons in the margins highlight different types of information that call out for your attention. Here are the icons you’ll see and a brief description of each.
We want you to remember everything you read in this book, but if you can’t quite do that, then remember the important points flagged with this icon.
Tips provide insider insight. When you’re looking for a better, faster way to do something, check out anything marked with this icon.
This icon appears when you need to be extra vigilant before moving forward. Here, you find out how to sidestep the obstacles that are likely to trip you up.
In addition to the material in the print or e-book you’re reading right now, this product also comes with some access-anywhere goodies on the web. Check out the free Cheat Sheet for tips on making the case for employer branding, developing your employer value proposition, and more. To get this Cheat Sheet, simply go to www.dummies.com and type Employer Branding For Dummies Cheat Sheet in the Search box.
We structured this book so you could use it in a couple different ways. To get the most out of it, read it from cover to cover, so you don’t miss out on any valuable information and insight. You may also use it as an employer branding desk reference; when you’re dealing with a particular issue related to employer branding, simply look up the topic in the Table of Contents or the Index and flip to the designated page to find the information and guidance you need.
If you’re not sure where to start, you can’t go wrong with Chapter 3, which is about conducting an employer brand health check. Even if you’re not actively engaged in creating and promoting an employer brand, you already have one; your employer brand is your reputation as an employer — the collective perception of everyone inside and outside your organization. You don’t know how well or poorly you’re doing from the perspective of those who really matter until you collect and analyze relevant data, both quantitative and qualitative.
If you don’t have an employer brand, or you have one but need to refresh or improve it, head to Part 2, where you find out how to define your employer proposition, build your employer brand framework, generate engaging content, and develop and implement your brand strategy. The chapters in Part 3 provide additional guidance on how to promote your employer brand through the proper channels — including websites, social media, recruitment advertising, and college campuses.
No matter where you start, this book will help you build a strong employer brand. You simply need to decide where you are in the process and take it from there. Happy branding!
Part 1
IN THIS PART …
Discover what employer branding is all about and how it can benefit your organization in attracting, engaging, and retaining the right people.
Identify the four steps to developing and executing an effective employer brand strategy.
Clarify your organization’s strategic objectives, identify the talent required to achieve those objectives, and gain the support of your organization’s leadership team.
Evaluate your existing employer brand to determine how well it’s currently perceived and whether it’s delivering the kind of talent your organization needs to succeed.
Chapter 1
IN THIS CHAPTER
Wrapping your brain around the concept of employer branding
Planning and executing your employer brand strategy
Exploring and assessing various marketing channels
Delivering a distinctively great employment experience
Gauging and improving on your employer branding success
Employers used to assume they were in the driver’s seat. Advertised vacancies would attract a plentiful selection of candidates. Employers would select the best, and the best would gratefully accept their offers of employment. Times have changed. Established companies can no longer assume that the right kind of talent will beat a path to their door. The new economy requires significantly more people qualified in science, technology, engineering, and math than our education systems are producing. The most innovative and entrepreneurial are increasingly choosing to join or found startup businesses rather than join established companies. And the declining birthrate in many countries means fewer young people are replenishing the workforce as baby boomers retire. Given these trends, it’s no surprise that competition for talent is now more intense than it has ever been.
Although times have changed, many companies haven’t. They continue to recruit the same way they did 20 years ago — posting openings and screening out unqualified candidates. Although this process of elimination has worked reasonably well in the past, more progressive companies are realizing there are more efficient and effective ways to attract and retain talent. They’ve begun to harness the power of employer branding, applying the same kind of rigor and creativity that companies have long applied to winning and keeping customers.
Throughout this book, we provide detailed guidance on how to begin to build the kind of workplace and employer brand that attracts, engages, and retains the world’s top talent. In this chapter, we deliver the big-picture view, so you have a conceptual framework of employer branding and an overall understanding of what it involves.
Employer branding is the process of creating a distinctively great place to work and then promoting it to the talent whose knowledge and skills are needed by the organization to meet its business goals and objectives. Like consumer branding, employer branding involves less push and more pull — developing the kind of positive reputation that will help attract talented individuals when and where they’re needed.
In this section, we highlight the benefits of this approach and step you through the process/cycle of employer branding, so you have some idea of what you’re about to get yourself into.
Some companies are reluctant to invest in employer branding, because the costs may seem steep in relation to the immediate returns. After all, to build a strong employer brand, you need to spend money on research and creative development and add to the workloads of already busy departments, including recruitment, human resources (HR), and marketing. Before you commit time, money, and other resources to employer branding, you and others in your organization naturally want to know “What’s in it for us?”
To spark the passion and drive needed to build and maintain a distinctively great employer brand, you need to answer that question for yourself and for everyone else in your organization, especially for those in leadership positions. Everyone involved needs to be aware of what’s at stake and the positive impact a strong employer brand can have on the success of the organization and everyone who’s a part of it.
Here are just a few areas where employer branding can positively impact an organization’s success:
The approach to building a strong positive employer brand can be summed up in two steps:
Of course, the process is more involved than that, and it’s more cyclical than linear — a continual process of building brand momentum and making adjustments in response to an ever-changing business and workforce environment. A more detailed summation of the process/cycle looks more like this:
Evaluate your current employer brand image among potential recruits and the employer brand experience of your current employees.
Identify how this compares with what your key target talent groups are looking for. (See Chapter 3.)
Define your employer value proposition (EVP), the key ingredients that will make your organization a distinctively great place to work.
An effective EVP describes your current reality, as well as realistic aspirations — the employer you want to be and be known as. (See the later section “Defining the give and get of the employment deal.”)
After you’ve gone through the process once, building brand momentum becomes cyclical — shampoo, rinse, repeat.
A key step we intentionally omit from this process is getting everyone in the organization, especially leadership, involved in your employer branding efforts. Your C-level executives and managers need to embrace the importance of employer branding, encourage and facilitate collaboration, and commit resources to support your efforts. Various departments, including HR and marketing, will need to contribute their insights and expertise. Employees must help with content generation, engaging with prospects, and serving as brand advocates. Without a coordinated effort, your EVP will be DOA (dead on arrival). (See the later section, “Rallying the troops [and leaders].”)
In many ways, 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. Forces that act in the opposite direction slow the object, stop it, or reverse its course. Forces that strike the object from different angles move it off course.
When building an employer brand, everyone in the organization needs to push in the same direction with a force of the greatest magnitude possible. With everyone working in unison, brand momentum begins to build, and you begin to win brand advocates outside the organization who put their weight and force behind the brand, moving it ever faster forward.
Branding of any kind works best when everyone agrees and all branding activities align. To achieve this alignment, you need to build your employer brand on a firm foundation. In this section, we cover the basics of laying that foundation.
Just as forces within an organization advance the employer brand, the employer brand is a force that propels the organization forward by delivering the talent needed for the organization to meet its business goals and objectives. As such, it must align with other forces within the organization that share that mission. Specifically, your employer branding strategy must align with the following three strategies that drive the organization’s success:
For maximum impact, all strategies should align perfectly, but in the imperfect reality of a business, different functions will inevitably have their own goals and objectives. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself having to actively reconcile competing agendas and conflicting perspectives among your key internal stakeholder groups.
Employer brands never exist in a vacuum; they’re created in the context of the corporate and consumer brands, and, for the most part, they need to align with their corporate and consumer counterparts:
Aligning the employer brand with the corporate and consumer brands is complicated by the fact that corporate and consumer brands can be associated in several different ways. In some cases, such as Apple and Shell, the corporate and consumer brands are synonymous. In others, such as the Coca-Cola Company, the company shares the same name as its leading product but not the rest of its product portfolio. And in other cases, such as Unilever and P&G, the corporate brand may be only loosely associated, if at all, with its many consumer brands.
Prior to launching any employer branding initiative, you need to decide how closely and in what ways you want your employer brand to align with your existing corporate and consumer brands. When the needs of consumers diverge from those of employees, close attention needs to be paid to how the brand is communicated to each target group. For example, “Citi Never Sleeps” made perfect sense to potential CitiBank customers, but would have made a particularly poor call to action for potential CitiBank employees.
If you’re in charge of employer branding, part of your job is to make sure everyone’s on the same page, clear about his or her responsibilities, and collectively accountable for doing his or her part. To be successful, you need the backing and support of a wide range of different stakeholders throughout your organization:
Regardless of whether you’ve done anything to build an employer brand, you already have one. Your employer brand is written on the faces of the people you meet who ask you where you’re working. It’s present in the gory or glorious detail of your Glassdoor reviews. It’s embedded in the energy or malaise of your everyday working environment. Your employer brand is your reputation as an employer — whether your organization’s work environment is distinctively great, generically mediocre, or exceptionally bad.
Before you invest time and resources into building an employer brand, perform an honest self-assessment of the brand you have to work with. In Chapter 3, we provide detailed guidance on how to conduct an employer brand health check. Here are the four areas to examine:
Don’t mimic what other organizations are doing to win the competition for talent. Your goal is to become distinctively great, and you can’t accomplish that by doing what everyone else does. What other organizations do may not work for you. Find ways to capitalize on your organization’s unique qualities. Use your research on other companies as a stepping stone for your own creative ideas.
As with most strategic operations, execution of your employer branding initiative requires coordinated and persistent effort, which is best accomplished if you have everything in place prior to launch. With employer branding, “everything” consists of your EVP, brand framework, and compelling communication content. In this section, we describe the three pieces you need to have in place before initiating any employer branding operations.
The purpose of employer branding is to attract people with the knowledge and skills your organization needs to meet its objectives and then convince these people to work for your organization. This purpose can be described in terms of the give and get of the employment deal — you’re offering people something they value (money, recognition, opportunities to be creative or make a positive impact in the world, and so on) in exchange for something you value (knowledge, skills, passion, creativity, and so on). In employer branding, this give and get is distilled and communicated through the EVP. It consists of a core positioning statement (the one thing about your company that sums up how and why it is a distinctively great place to work) and three to five pillars (details that support and expand upon the core positioning statement).
Here’s a simple example from Facebook whose EVP is shaped by its strong mission and company values, along with the key attributes identified by employees, which make working at Facebook unique.
Here are a few suggestions for developing a solid EVP and getting stakeholders to buy into it at the same time:
A brand’s impact is primarily a function of standout and consistency. Brands need to catch people’s attention and maintain that attention within a crowded environment through a clear and consistent identity. Employer brand guidelines (commonly referred to as the brand framework) help to maintain a consistent look, feel, and overarching message that differentiate you from your competition. The brand framework commonly includes the following:
Your brand must be consistent to build reliability and trust but flexible enough to adapt to different target audiences and changes in candidate and employee preferences over time. A brand framework generally accomplishes this goal by preserving the core while allowing changes around the periphery — closer to where the core meets the audience. At these touch points, the brand must flex to address the unique needs of each talent group.
When your goal is to build a strong employer brand, the worst that can happen is that the talent you’re scouting for doesn’t care enough to visit your company’s career website, check out your list of job openings, or submit an application. You need to give them a compelling reason to tune in and engage, and that reason comes in the form of relevant content that the heads you’re hunting deem valuable in some way — educational, entertaining, engaging, enlightening, or perhaps all four.
As you strive to attract and recruit the best talent for your organization, keep in mind that content is king. Here are a few content categories to stimulate your imagination:
The best content is often free. Posting on blogs or discussion forums often sparks active discussions in which the participants generate content for you. Consider posting questions or introducing relevant issues for discussion and allowing others to create content for you. If you own the blog or forum, be sure to monitor it closely to ensure participants treat each other respectfully.
In addition to posting content on your own online properties, consider posting in relevant forums you don’t own, like Medium, Tumblr, GitHub, Facebook, and other platforms. When you’re engaging with talent online, become an active member of the communities they belong to.
With a compelling EVP, distinctive brand framework, and engaging content in hand, you’re ready to start promoting your brand and reaching out to key target prospects. Where you choose to share your content depends on where you’re likely to reach the talent you’re looking for, but you have numerous options, including the following:
www.monster.com), CareerBuilder (www.careerbuilder.com), and Indeed (www.indeed.com). You can also find plenty of specialty job boards for a variety of talent, including sales, technology, and marketing. Companies with the strongest employer brands increasingly hire through referrals from current and former employees. As you reach out through social channels, don’t lose sight of the fact that the employees you already have can be your most valuable source of high-quality applicants and new hires.