Comprehensive Employer Brand Architecture

How leadership, culture and hiring creates your brand, position and promise

It is easy to say changing one's employer brand is difficult, that it borders on herding cats or nailing Jell-o to a wall. And those are fairly true statements if you don't understand where your employer brand comes from, or what supports it.

Think of a plumber looking to stop a leak. Without understanding where the water is coming from and how it flows from place to place where the junctions and merges are, they'll run out of patience and duct tape long before they solve the problem. Don't be that person.

To that end, I mapped out how all the elements that make up the brand and how they support each other to enable you to actually make the changes you want to your brand.

Most of these boxes should be self-evident, but let's start with some definitions.

Leadership: Depending on your company, it could be the owner, the executive committee, or "senior leadership." Effectively, these are the people who make company-wide strategic decisions about what to produce, where to produce it and when to change.

Culture: This is your company’s DNA. It is the self-reinforcing machine that dictates what the company likes and dislikes, regardless of team, level or role, the connective tissue between individuals, usually only becoming obvious when decisions are being made by groups (or even when individual people choose to not make a decision and allow something to happen or continue). For example, when the CEO decides that the company will focus on hiring a more diverse workforce, that is the decision of an individual. But when no change is being made on the number of people being hired from diverse backgrounds, that’s the culture.

Competition: Specifically, these are the other companies who are vying for the same people you are. They may or may not be in the same industry.

Brand Position: What drives your company and the people in it to succeed? Is it the ability to grow themselves, the amount of support they give each other, their ability to make an impact, work-life balance, the mission? That's your position.

EVP: What do you offer an employee or candidate? Better that it is clear, differentiated and authentic.

Brand Promise: What is the promise you make every employee and prospective employee about their work experience?

Now let's break this down, starting with the elements that build and reinforce your company's culture.

First, leadership's purpose is to select a direction and means to execute. That's your mission and values (and your strategy, if you care about that sort of thing). Without a purpose, you can't figure out what the company is trying to do and those don't know who you need to hire to make it happen.

At the same time, the values should drive the language of the company. If you value the team and collaboration, you should be using different words to describe yourself, describe your work and communicate with each there than if you were a competitive company. Some might call this a "voice," but the voice is the way you use the words, which can evolve and shift over time and writer. The language are the actual words being used in job postings, boilerplate, recruiter outreach, career site, interview questions, etc.

The values also help you select which people to hire. A culture of sharks should attract and hire more sharks. A culture of innovators should attract and hire more innovators.

Leadership drives hiring, first as it initially grows and makes hiring decisions, but those hiring choices echo throughout the company, both because it signals what kind of company you see yourself as, but also because those hires will eventually make hiring decisions of their own.

Finally, the policies you company puts in place shape your culture either by supporting the culture or undercutting it. For example, if you have a culture of support, you can point to a generous family-leave policy as proof of that claim. Alternatively, if you claim to reward risk takers, but your incentive-system is shallowly bracketed, meaning one person doesn't get a much bigger bonus than another, you're belaying that message.

The culture engine acts like a feedback loop: who you are is who you hire is who you are.

The culture engine acts like a feedback loop: who you are is who you hire is who you are. From within that, culture exists and is reinforced. If you are looking to change the culture, this makes it clear that it's not something leadership does, but does in conjunction with the people and policies and can take time to manifest.

Beyond the culture engine, external forces impact your ability to change your brand. The first is the industry your company exists within. For example, you might be seen as staid and boring in comparison to a finch startup, but as a law firm, you might be the crazy company saying "hold my beer," before jumping into the pool from the roof. Being in the law industry gives you a very different frame for your company.

But when it comes to competing for talent, you are often looking outside your industry. Great developers, project managers, admins, legal, HR, marketing staff can be hired from companies who have no connection to your industry, so one some level the talent pool you are drawing from also provides a lot of context to your candidates about your company.

All those factors impact your brand position. The easiest way to think of your brand position is to understand what motivates your employees to do great work. In a world where pay rates are all but public, when each person can validate that they are being paid a "fair" salary, what makes them choose your company and ultimately makes them stay? Are they driven by personal growth? Ego? The chance to work toward a shared mission? The opportunity to use and create new things? That position is the foundation for all your employer brand thinking.

Though not designated within the diagram, as you develop or uncover your brand position, you should verify that it aligns with your mission and vision. If you've got a brand position based on supporting the team, where you are recognizing teamwork over individual contributions, your values should reflect that. Otherwise, you have a serious disconnect to evaluate and fix.

But there are all sorts of pitfalls to "just picking one," which this article won't get into. Suffice it to say, the most honest you can be able what trains drive your best people and who you hire, the better you'll understand your position.

With your position, you can refine your thinking to define your employer value proposition. What are you offering a candidate. This promise can be company-wide or tailored to the team or individual. If you are all about supporting each other, how will a team see that support? Lots of PTO? A culture that forgives mistakes in service of trying new things? A sense of "team?" "Support" is a broad idea, so how do you make it more clear and concrete?

Finally, that EVP allows you to build a brand promise. For some companies, this promise comes in the form of an actual promise or oath. For others, it is a tagline. This is the distillation of all the elements of your company, your competition and culture into something simple, direct, meaningful and even pithy. Language counts here, so when you are building this, bring in your best writers to help you craft it.

How can you impact and influence your employer brand if you don't understand what creates it and what moves it?

With this map, you are going to be better able to see the levers you have access to and how they make change, either directly or indirectly. You'll be able to influence your employer brand and create the impact you seek.

This may feel like a lot of structure and thinking for a tagline, but that misses the point. The fruit from this tree are all the tactics and campaigns you will be able to drive that inherently align to each other and a common brand. The left hand and the right hand don't have to know exactly what each is doing to know that they are not communicating conflicting messages. Tactics are of the most value when they are serving a common strategy rather than pushed out willy nilly or in reaction to some sudden crisis. The work you do thinking through your brand will not only shape the work for years to come, it will ensure that the work drives more value and bang for the buck.

Employer brand is the most powerful way you can impact your ability to hire great talent. If you're ready to get serious about your employer brand, either to uncover it, distill it or activate it, I'd love to help.

For more information, go to jamesellis.us, employerbrand.consulting or listen to my weekly podcast at The Talent Cast.