Employer Branding For Dummies

Richard Mosley, Lars Schmidt

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119071624
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Attract the very best talent with a compelling employer brand! Employer Branding For Dummies is the clear, no-nonsense guide to attracting and retaining top talent. Written by two of the most recognized leaders in employer brand, Richard Mosley and Lars Schmidt, this book gives you actionable advice and expert insight you need to build, scale, and measure a compelling brand. You'll learn how to research what makes your company stand out, the best ways to reach the people you need, and how to convince those people that your company is the ideal place to exercise and develop their skills. The book includes ways to identify the specific traits of your company that aligns with specific talent, and how to translate those traits into employer brand tactic that help you draw the right talent, while repelling the wrong ones. You'll learn how to build and maintain your own distinctive, credible employer brand; and develop a set of relevant, informative success metrics to help you measure ROI. This book shows you how to discover and develop your employer brand to draw the quality talent you need.

• Perfect your recruitment marketing
• Develop a compelling employer value proposition (EVP)
• Demonstrate your employer brand ROI

Face it: the very best employees are the ones with the most options. Why should they choose your company? A strong employer brand makes the decision a no-brainer. It's good for engagement, good for retention, and good for the bottom line. Employer Branding For Dummies helps you hone in on your unique, compelling brand, and get the people you need today.

Part 1

Getting Started with Employer Branding

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

Building a Strong Employer Brand

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.

What Is Employer Branding?

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.

Recognizing the benefits of employer branding

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:

• Recruitment: Companies that have a strong employer brand attract larger numbers of qualified candidates, improving the quality of new hires while reducing the overall cost of recruitment.
• Engagement: Employer branding involves creating an environment in which employees are fulfilled by their work and proud of the company they work for. Such a work environment drives engagement, and higher levels of engagement lead to higher levels of productivity and customer satisfaction.
• Retention: A great workplace populated with highly talented and engaged employees is a place employees want to stay. In addition, a strong employer brand clarifies what people can expect from the organization before they apply. Companies with strong employer brands experience significantly lower attrition rates.
• Competitive advantage: Employer branding enables you to build an all-star team with a roster of the most talented individuals in your industry. The collective intelligence, creativity, drive, and determination of highly qualified individuals enables you to gain and maintain a competitive advantage within your industry.

Stepping through the employer branding process/cycle

The approach to building a strong positive employer brand can be summed up in two steps:

1. Make your organization a distinctively great place to work.
2. Make sure the right talent knows how great you are.

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:

1. Develop a clear understanding of your organization’s business objectives and the talent needed to meet those objectives.
2. 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.)
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.”)
4. Build your employer brand framework, the creative elements that collectively capture the look and feel you want to convey and the emotion you want to evoke. (See the later section, “Establishing employer brand guidelines.”)
5. Generate engaging, story-led content and employee experiences that bring your EVP to life in ways that resonate with the talent you’re trying to attract.
6. Actively engage with prospects through selected channels, including your organization’s career website, social channels, job boards, and programmatic (automated ad placement driven by analytics). (See the later section, “Spreading the Word through Various Channels.”)
7. Measure your success to determine what’s working and what’s not, from your overall brand strategy down to individual recruitment marketing activities. (See the later section, “Monitoring Your Employer Branding Success.”)
8. Adjust your employer brand strategy and individual recruitment marketing activities, as needed, to improve results.

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].”)

Laying the Foundation for Your Employer Brand

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 tra...