by Employer brand describes an employer’s reputation as a place to work, and their employee value proposition, as opposed to the more general corporate brand reputation and value proposition to customers. The term was first used in the early 1990s, and has since become widely adopted by the global management community. Minchington describes employer brand as “the image of your organization as a ‘great place to work’ in the mind of current employees and key stakeholders in the external market (active and passive candidates, clients, customers and other key stakeholders). The art and science of employer branding is therefore concerned with the attraction, engagement and retention initiatives targeted at enhancing your company’s employer brand.”
Just as a customer brand proposition is used to define a product or service offer, an employer value proposition (also sometimes referred to as an employee value proposition) or EVP is used to define an organization’s employment offering. Likewise, the marketing disciplines associated with branding and brand management have been increasingly applied by the human resources and talent management community to attract, engage and retain talented candidates and employees, in the same way that marketing applies such tools to attracting and retaining clients, customers and consumers.
Growing Importance of Employer Branding
A candidate’s market, combined with new consumer behavior, has led to the rise in importance of employer branding as a Human Resources and Marketing Discipline. The market has shifted since the great recession in favor of candidates given low unemployment. This means that employers are fighting over the same small pool of candidates to fill their open roles, especially in hard to fill areas like data scientist and other STEM based roles.
Moreover, consumer behavior has changed the way that people look for jobs. The candidate journey isn’t simply a job seeker finding your job and applying. This is especially true of the best candidates they want to research a company and build a relationship with it over months before applying for a job. This creates a dynamic where companies who invest in employer branding are seeing lower cost per hire and time to fill.
Employer value proposition (EVP)
An employer value proposition encompasses your organization’s mission, values, and culture, and gives employees a powerful reason to work for you. It’s everything your company can offer as an employer, in exchange for all the skills and experience your employees bring to the table.
An organization benefits from a well-designed EVP, communicated often to both potential and current employees. A strong EVP can attract and retain the best people, help prioritize goals and agendas company-wide (especially in HR and workforce planning), help re-engage a dispassionate workforce, and reduce hiring costs. Most of all, it contributes to a favorable and robust employer brand.
The messaging you use to broadcast your employer brand and value proposition shouldn’t just be a list of the perks and benefits you offer, but these are an undeniable part of the story. An EVP is considered an employee-centered approach because it’s a proposition that’s been discovered, defined, and tested using existing employees. Before you craft your employer brand proposition, your company’s benefits should be well-established, well-defined, and a proven hit with your current employees. And if they’re not, and you’re looking to revamp things, consider what influences a person’s decision whether to accept a job offer or not, including:
- Company values and culture
- Company location(s) and facilities, including accessibility and convenience
- Overall compensation
- Career development
- Management style
- Team caliber and quality
- Quality of work
- Ongoing employee recognition
- Work-life balance, or proportion of work to time off
- Benefits, such as dental insurance and vacation time
- On-the-job perks like lunch, on-site childcare, flextime, and telecommuting
- Non-salary financial perks like commuter credits, bonuses, housing subsidies, relocation, and assistance
- Opportunities for travel and client exposure
- Opportunities to perform community service
- Job security
Employer Branding and Tools
There are now an emerging group of tools that can assist HR and Marketing teams in their employer branding efforts. Some of these tools were originally designed for marketing purposes. Others are existing HRTech that have evolved to have employer branding capabilities such as the newer generation of applicant tracking systems and job boards. There is also a small group of software providers that focuses explicitly on employer branding such.
Employer brand management
Employer brand management expands the scope of this brand intervention beyond communication to incorporate every aspect of the employment experience, and the people management processes and practices (often referred to as “touch-points”) that shape the perceptions of existing and prospective employees. In other words, employer brand management addresses the reality of the employment experience and not simply its presentation. By doing so it supports both external recruitment of the right kind of talent sought by an organisation to achieve its goals, and the subsequent desire for effective employee engagement and employee retention.
Employer brand proposition
As for consumer brands, most employer brand practitioners and authors argue that effective employer branding and brand management requires a clear Employer Brand proposition or Employee value proposition. This serves to: define what the organisation would most like to be associated with as an employer; highlight the attributes that differentiate the organisation from other employers; and clarify the strengths, benefits and opportunities of the employment offer.
Internal marketing
Internal marketing focuses on communicating the customer brand promise, and the attitudes and behaviours expected from employees to deliver on that promise. While it is clearly beneficial to the organisation for employees to understand their role in delivering the customer brand promise, the effectiveness of internal marketing activities can often be short-lived if the brand values on which the service experience is founded are not experienced by the employees in their interactions with the organisation. This is the gap that employer brand thinking and practice seeks to address with a more mutually beneficial employment deal / Psychological contract.
Brand-led culture change
Compared with the more typically customer centric focus of Internal marketing, internal branding / brand engagement takes a more ‘inside-out’, value-based approach to shaping employee perceptions and behaviours, following the lead of the highly influential ‘Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies’ study published in the mid-1990s. This sought to demonstrate that companies with consistent, distinctive and deeply held values tended to outperform those companies with a less clear and articulated ethos. While brand-led culture change is often the stated desire of these programmes their focus on communication-led, marketing methods (however, involving or experiential) has been prone to the same failings of conventional internal marketing. As Amazon.com’s founder, Jeff Bezos, asserts: “One of things you find in companies is that once a culture is formed it takes nuclear weaponry to change it”. You cannot simply assert your way to a new culture, no more can you assert your way to a strong brand, it needs to be consistently and continuously shaped and managed, which is one of the primary reasons many organisations have turned from the short term engagement focus of internal branding initiatives to more long term focus of employer brand management.
Use
Strategic in nature with a focus on the whole employee lifecycle from hire to retire, employer branding can also become a medium to hire. It can be used to hire through employee referral or referral recruitment.
How to improve your employer brand
To increase the number of quality, enthusiastic applicants vying for positions at your company, your CEO, leadership, marketing team, and recruiters can all help develop and growth your employer brand. Whether you have a big budget or small, whether you’re a large company or a start-up, there are plenty of strategies you can use to think like a marketer, build deep and meaningful relationships with your staff, and boost your employer brand like a boss.
- Don’t focus on compensation
Your employer value proposition will be the strongest if you can talk about how a role will be meaningful (personally fulfilling or about a global good) or a superior work experience, over compensation, especially if you want to attract younger candidates. Your EVP should be unique, compelling, and tuned into the deeper motivations of why a person might want to join your team.
- Start a company blog
If you’re a recruiter with a marketing mindset, you know that content and lots of it can be a great strategy for competing in a noisy marketplace. Job seekers often check out a company’s blog to get to know an organization on a more human level. You can post company news, culture updates, and articles written by your employees or company leaders, all in a personable voice. A blog can also be used to highlight the unique people policies, processes, and programs that show your organization’s commitment to employee happiness.
- Use rich media
Use high-quality videos, photos, and slideshows to tell your company story, celebrate your diverse employees, and show off beautiful workspaces. A welcome video from your CEO or hiring manager is a great way to make an introduction, as are staff interviews talking about their experiences working for your organization. Plan and budget for these and other marketing costs at the start of each quarter.
- Hire for diversity
It’s no surprise that who you hire says something about your brand. Having unique thinkers from a diverse range of backgrounds shows you’re not only walking the walk as an equal-opportunity employer, but also extending your brand’s reach (both customer, and employer) into new groups a sound business move, and a key strategy when building a powerful employer brand.
