How to avoid being "the potato guy" ?? in Employer Branding?

Employer Branding should reflect the reality of the company to make sure it attracts people who want to be a part of the said reality. The focus should not be flexible working hours, benefits, and a nice office. That is personal gain featured in a job ad. NOT the essence of the culture.

But, if work on Employer Branding starts with thoughts like these:

"Let's boost some posts."

"We should not expect God knows how much from this."

"Let's get people to talk about our fancy coffee machine. What else is there to do?"

"Everyone is doing it, let's get involved to keep up."

How could we possibly do more?

Most likely, we will not, because the Employer Brand is the result of a lot of processes that exist to make sure that what is published externally is factual.

Approach: "Fronti Nulla Fides "(Appearances Can Be Deceiving)

Companies that easily approve ideas have "the agency approach". The shelf life of the said idea is of a canned pate - does not require particular storage conditions and you are going to have to be really desperate to open it and give it a try.

We approved it and then ... nothing happened.

This indicator of 'the agency approach" means that momentum starts from the outside, with a lot of enthusiasm, a short term in mind, and the goal to sell the image of the company (not its true essence or strategic business development vision) to people who have no contact with it.

The best you can hope for is a good buzz in the public. Sadly, that buzz has an underbelly in the form of a less than flattering murmur of former employees who are now incentivized to spread negative WOM to counteract the buzz.

In order for the story not to remain merely a buzz (that can be deafening), less focus should be placed on marketing managers, and more on personnel from human resources, process managers, and top management who will deal with Employer Branding on a strategic level.

The marketing manager has the function of giving voice to others and projecting a defined image in public.

That is it.

The main problem with "the agency approach" and deciding "what we would like to be "first, and then focusing on propagating our decision (without basing it on the factual state), happens every time a new hire is onboarded. The ball starts to unravel and that person inevitably realizes they have been deceived.

As IT staff is in high demand, it is bad that the working relationship starts with lies. Trust is not achieved by deception, and these people can always do better.

The situation is even worse if the new person is sucked into the internal turmoil with existing employees. The end result is management interpreting the (justified) dissatisfaction of the new employee as "not fitting into the culture".

Culture that exists on paper and social networks, not in reality.

Approach: Let's fix Social Media, website, and profiles on job portals FIRST

This is a mistake as well, but an understandable one. When the budgets are not easily approved or results are expected immediately, the person in charge of Employer Branding believes that fixing the website and other tangible things will "open the bag" of the owners for further development. Which sometimes happens and sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't, it is mostly the case that the motivation of the decision maker who approved the budget for such a thing is a "positive pick me up" during the day.

Who does not like to hear nice things about themselves?

How could you have predicted this, I hear you ask?

No results are expected from EB. When there are no expectations. rest assured that resources will not be allocated, nor will you be given any authority other than being a Community Manager.

If you really want to be in the business of shaping a brand, expectations are a good thing. They will show you how seriously your job is taken. Expectations are a great thing. Even if you fail, you get further without having a goal. If nothing else, it's a great item for your CV if you want to continue your career at another company. Try to avoid (whenever you can) having the quality of your work measured (only) by someone else's feelings.

Stick to numbers.

How to justify investments in EB, an example from practice:

Management claims that it is not worth investing in EB because the acquisition costs X and the salary of the person being acquired is Y, where X is greater than Y. Your response to that is to go back to your desk and calculate how much the employee needs to be tracked and how much is the cost in his salary until they are fully functional. This means that every time a new person needs to be hired, Y times the number of months is invested, instead of immediately attracting a person who is a good fit for X amount. You go to the GM with that argument. Let the money have your back. They speak that language fluently.

Approach: "Culture fit when there is no culture in sight".

Young organizations with high employee turnover do not have an organizational culture. What they call culture is the working atmosphere, cool projects, free coffee, and other material benefits.

Lack of procedures and rules, fast growth, and flexible working hours are the working conditions, but it is not the culture. If any stable and progressive civilization was based on that, it would not exist.

Organizational culture implies that the system is stronger than man, and culture fit means that the people who are part of that system like it.

What happens in most IT companies is that they indulge the individualistic tendencies of employees who (let's say) believe that remote work does not change anything and does not affect business results and the company as a whole. Of course, it does. In both positive and negative ways.

The point is, when the culture is strong enough and people are culture fit, hardly anyone wants to be remote. One does not run away from a hearth that pleases the heart.

In order to have a culture as a company, there still needs to be continuity that crystallizes its components over time: symbols, language, values, norms, and rituals. Also, the culture does not stop being a part of you even when you leave the organization.

Remember the question of nationality. You may change your citizenship, but changing your nationality is more difficult.

Believe it or not, a collective trip to the funeral of an employee's family member is a reflection of a strong organizational culture, as is a joint lunch on Tuesdays (without exception) at 2 pm in the meeting room.

Project-based organizations rarely have an organizational culture, yet they make up the majority of outsourced companies that need Employer Branding. Why do they need it? They have to do something to attract staff who would rather work products, so they provide excellent benefits as a substitute.

Back to the point: in order for the employer to present themself adequately (it's much better than disappointment, believe me), someone who deals with EB must feel the pulse of the company and know exactly what can be said and what can't be promised, no matter how much short term benefits it brings. So it's someone with a primarily strategic perspective and understands the dangers of a blow-it-out approach. In smaller companies, that person must also be operational, i.e. carry it all out, which is a challenge because these are radically different perspectives.

If you work in a small business, I know it's hard for you. <3

Any brand, Employer Brand included, should NOT be developed by growth hacking, which implies that the price for 10,000 LinkedIn messages sent to the air is quite small.

EB should care about reputation, not only about the number of applications at all costs.

In the end, the main issue remains profiling and differentiating the organizational culture and your effort to avoid being Dositej Obradovi? who was known for shaping the Serbian culture and bringing potatoes to Serbia.

No culture in sight, but you can get fries with that shake, any time.