Building A Powerful Employer Brand: Lessons From Netflix, Starbucks, and Toyota

Key takeaways:

• Talent leaders know building an employer brand is a critical part of attracting and retaining top talent, according to data from the Willo 2024 Hiring Trends Report
• We can take lessons from the top companies in the world like Netflix, Starbucks, and Toyota and apply them to companies of any scale
• A great employer brand starts with honesty, communication, and authenticity

Try recruiting talented, in-demand people without an employer brand.?

Instead of talking about growth opportunities or what the role is like, you’ll be wasting time explaining how you’re not quite like that competitor and… yes, that “Uber for X” metaphor more or less explains what your company does.

A great employer brand solves this problem; it gives people a broad, generally correct understanding of your brand name and what you do for customers. It also helps talented individuals see themselves in your organization—the most important part, as far as I’m concerned.?

I understand I’m preaching to the choir a bit here: the vast majority (83.6%) agree that a good employer brand is either very or extremely important for attracting and retaining top talent. To that end, I did some reverse engineering to understand what makes global companies like Netflix, Starbucks, and Toyota so successful with their employer branding efforts—and I’m sharing the lessons here so you can use them in your organizations.?

Netflix focuses on vision

Netflix is famous for its high pay and stories about fast firing with generous severance packages and transparency about why someone was let go. But it seems the company has evolved a bit as well.

Here’s what I noticed:?

• A highly detailed careers page: It’s not just a job ad—it’s a company explanation from a talent perspective.?
• The company created a career vision: This is the mantra by which they attract talent and get work done. In Netflix’s case, it’s “A great workplace combines exceptional colleagues and hard problems.”

Applying this to your organization:?

It’s possible that Netflix’s detailed careers page was an attempt to get ahead of the press talking about them. But regardless of motivation, the lesson is valuable for companies of all sizes—own your own narrative and speak from the perspective of a would-be employee.?

You may not have the resources for a custom-built careers page. I can empathize; as a startup, Willo relies on our company about page and LinkedIn presence to communicate our employer brand messaging. That’s fine, provided you find some way to directly communicate to candidates rather than solely to potential customers.?

Source: Willo 2024 Hiring Trends Report

Starbucks highlights unexpected benefits

The most visible employee of Starbucks is a barista, but the company has dozens of different role types. From what I can tell on the company’s careers page, they are working hard to make the full diversity of the Starbucks ecosystem known.?

A couple lessons stood out:

• Use the medium of their candidates: The company’s Instagram page seems more angled toward barista roles and other jobs that might go to younger people while their LinkedIn is a more polished and professional vibe.?
• Make it easy to understand the business: The first thing on their careers page is a quick navigation to identify the core jobs they offer—retail, manufacturing, retail leadership, and corporate. There’s even a subsection for existing employees (“Partners”) to look for internal roles.
• Highlight unexpected benefits: All jobs offer pay and most offer some standard health benefits. But Starbucks offers more than that, and makes it easy to find via a LinkTree page.??

How to apply this to your organization: Take an honest stock of what your employees get by working with you. And any time you’re looking at a competitor thinking “we can’t offer that” – think of what you offer instead. For instance, if you don’t have huge budgets to offer massive benefits and multiple offices globally because you’re a small startup, think about what makes you unique (lots of customer exposure, for instance). This is something charter airline SmartLynx did to help fuel their global growth with huge success.

Toyota flows its product approach into its employer brand

Toyota is famous for its iterative improvement mindset called Kaizen. While I don’t see the company directly claiming they use Kaizen to approach employer branding, it seems clear to me that the culture has steeped throughout the company.?

Take the careers page as an example: it’s no-nonsense, outcome-focused, and has a few flourishes but doesn’t try to be overly fancy. At the same time, it has every feature you need (and some you didn’t know you needed). Kind of reads almost like a Toyota car description, doesn’t it??

The hero image on Toyota US’ career page

How to apply this to your organization: In your career page, think consciously about what type of information someone might want from it; use that insight to create both page design and the order of content.?

Toyota, for instance, shows hot new jobs first, a section explaining Toyota’s corporate structure, job categories, and then further detail about Toyota’s culture.

It’s important to note the idea is not to copy this exactly. Instead, it’s to think about what your perfect-fit candidates might want. Toyota, for instance, is a massive global corporation with multiple different divisions—the candidate for a local car dealership is likely different from the candidate for head office in car design. With that in mind, their website needs to make self-segmentation clear.?

But regardless, you can take inspiration from Kaizen and consider your careers page an ever-improving process rather than a once-and-done website project.?

Always build from honesty

An employer brand is the reality of working with you, presented in the best light possible. There’s no shame in highlighting the good, but not if it’s disingenuous or someone sees one thing on the website but experiences something vastly different when they join.?

As you build up your employer brand, remember: take inspiration from anywhere you’d like, but start and end with honesty. If you’re telling the truth, both about the present and looking into the future, you won’t go far wrong.