Employer branding today: Interview with Alex Her

This year, the jury of the EMBRAS International HR Award, headquartered in Central Asia, included one of the best international experts in the field of employer brand development - Alex Her

Alex currently resides in Austin, TX, and enjoys all things employer branding, and recruitment marketing at GoDaddy.? Outside of work, he's also a co-founder of The EB Space, and is a founding leader on the Employer?Brandwagon.

Tatiana: Hi, Alex. I am happy to see you as a part of international jury of EMBRAS HR-award. Could you ?tell a little bit about you professional way?

Alex:? Now I'm based here in the US and now I am a head of global employer brand at GoDaddy. Recently I become a ?co-founded of the ?The EB space?. We have a lot of communities focused on US or UK, or prefer different platforms – Discord, Facebook or LinkedIn. And we wanted to make a community which will include other regions and also it's you know one of the reasons I want to join your award.

Central Asia is a region with is very interesting from employer branding perspective. My family is from Southeast Asia so there's a removed to the another country. ?

Tatiana: ?Alex, I want to ask you about employer brand. ?What does it mean for you and your companies? And what do you think it now means in the business world?

Alex: A lot of leaders, a lot of companies fail to realize, that then you start hiring ?you're already putting out there. If you are sharing the position - you already have an employer brand. Sometimes companies think than you need special time or signal to start working with employer brand. But when you are ?looking to hire individuals your employer brand is there. This is ?Make It or Break It? point for company. I think that employer brand what people think ?and talk about you and your company when you're not in the room. So that's extremely crucial.

If you manage that but manage it badly, it could reflect on the type of candidate that you get but also can go back and impact your company. Some of your candidate could be your potential customers. ?If they treat them terrible they will ask questions about work with you company. ?Our candidate should be threatened like a customer, because recruitment process ?impact both sides. And also – I don’t want to be a customer of the company, which is not treated their employees well.

Tatiana: What is your approach to develop employer brand? Usually it ?starts from communications? But now ?I see the trend to work more with candidate experience. If you are not working with it you can have a problems in the future. What is the main topic for employer brand manager today and which skills are important for him/ her?

Alex: I think that communications and candidate experience is important for strong employer brand. For success in your employer branding process you need to engage other departments, another way you are going to find yourself living in a bit of a silo, and not be successful.

For EB manager there are? definitely important ?the communication skills and the ability to be collaborative. That's going to be key a little tough to get things completed if you don't have that.

Also social media management. Being able to manage that, but also having the experience in terms of running paid adverts, ?because that's a lot of the job too. Copywriting skills is also important as a project management.

Also the ability to use the different digital ?tools. Canva that goes a long way. So you can, because you don't have to be the most phenomenal designer, but need references which will help you. You need to use AI, I think that's a little blur. Chat GPT changed our life. Because we've been using AI tools for different needs. It's going to take your copyrighting for the next level. You need to manage the budget so you need financial expertise. Also you have to provide market research

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Tatiana: Are publicity and visibility and personal brand of EB manager important?

Alex: I think it helps the employer brand manager, ?because in most cases, you don't have a big ?team, but you ?interact with different groups. ?You work with people who are not familiar with you, being out there publicly on social media to be helpful for you. It is also good for your company. EB manager should be the ?brand ambassador and can be a face of the company to external audience, sharing content and ?people become familiar with him/ her and company.

You can be a part of community and active on different platforms: LinkedIn? Theads, Х, Facebook. I think people forget about Facebook too, but still strong communities that are on there.

Tatiana: Could we talk about content strategy for employer brand promotion?

Alex:? I think if you just starting to work with employer ?brand you need to know what is ?available for you. ?You could start working with individuals from different departments, also with managers, with senior HR manager, countries HR managers. You ?get people to start either creating content or sending content in your way. In Go Daddy you have multiple options to work with us, to help us. If we work in different countries you need to flexible. Let people go their own way because they know audience, but also be active in guidelines and help them from HQ. Localized your communication and find healthy balance.

Tatiana: What do you think about employee advocacy?

Alex: I think than it is great if you have employees ambassadors. If you are an employer brand manager and you're creating the content they can help you to distribute it. ?You can use special programs or just MS Outlook or Teams. You create a ?channel, you provide a lot of instruction on what needs to be done and from there, you can help them share that.? You gamify things where okay individuals are sharing, you can make a rating and give winner some gifts. You can motivate them, help to share and engage to the process.

Tatiana: thank you for this conversation.