Curious Case of Employer Branding

The long introduction is to help set some context to an interesting story that I heard about a passionate technologist who got influenced to switch to another organization after being part of the community.

With a growing number of technology streams and opportunities in the market having a differentiated employee brand is critical to engage, influence, hire and retain world-class talent. However the ability to connect with top notch talent is a fairly lofty goal to pursue. Often we see the employer brand is fairly disconnected from the corporate brand objectives and, mostly focuses on tangibles like fair policies, freebies, and flexible work options. Do these benefits influence a technologist to pursue technologists to a brand an employer?.

According to McKinsey & Company, companies with a strong, clearly defined identity see anywhere between 60% and 200% higher returns to shareholders. In most cases, what is more critical is a free learning environment, freedom to voice one’s opinion, access to great mentors and one employee being invested in the other team member’s growth. However seldom these get discussed when it comes to the employer value proposition.

 In a recent LinkedIn article –Employer Brand (EB) holds a key proposition in every CMOs 2020 charter.

While EB has various elements, see here for all the components. In this blog post, I would like to speak about one key area within the employer brand - how to create engaged and value-driven external communities.

Creating external communities is about getting passionate individuals with progressive ideas on a specific subject and enabling them to collaborate and discuss perspectives on a regular frequency. The upside to such forums is – the space becomes the hotbed for innovation, and experimentation. 

One organization that has been able to create such a thriving community is ThoughtWorks. The core philosophy for the organization is democratisation of knowledge. The organization believes in sharing what they learn, and regularly holds community events across theworld. ThoughtWorks has robust communities by specialisations – Geek Night for software developers, VodQA for QA community, Converge for ideators, designers, & analysts, and XConf is open for all technologists. ThoughtWorks encourages every regional office to build local communities that creates a platform to discuss the local as well as key trends across each of the communities.

From a brand perspective, community engagements help build a sustainable employer brand where most messaging across service providers, captives, product companies are sounding similar. I often joke that if we remove the logo of the Top 15 companies, it would be tough to differentiate one from the other. Regular engagement will ensure the community understands key elements of the brand and builds awareness. In the case of ThoughtWorks, community engagements helped build a brand of being the tech haven. An organisation that works, engages and talks about technology that is still on the horizon while promoting a culture of sharing and learning.

Community engagement is also a great way to nurture passive technologists to be interested to be part of the organisation by involving them in the tech dialogue. Let me elaborate by telling you the story I recently heard at a new induction batch during my interactions with them.

Samrat recently moved to Pune about 3 years back. He was looking for avenues where he could go and attend technology workshops and bootcamps. He did miss attending practitioner-led events like what they have outside of India. His team lead in the current organization told him aboutThoughtWorks QA community called VodQA and session discussing cool things around docker, headless browser testing (ahead of the time). Samrat had only read about these subjects and hadn’t heard of many companies that had worked and were willing to talk about it. Samrat attended the session and he was impressed with how the community operated and shared their learnings. Post the session, there were a few ThoughtWorkers at the back of the room and they engaged him in a serious round of discussion around the docker. Samrat regularly attended and contributed to VODQA community events in Pune. When he was looking to change jobs, ThoughtWorks was his aspirational company to join and work with the passionate team here.

Samrat was a passive candidate but was influenced by the community to really be part of the organization.

Ensuring you have a strong community engagement will definitely help in building an aspirational brand that passionate and top notch talent will want to be part of and can be easily retained.