Using Technology to Humanize your Employer Brand

Recently, Cliquify was invited to participate on a panel hosted by Employer Branding College in advance of World Employer Branding Day, October 9-11 in Amsterdam. The topic was about transforming your employer brand through people and technology, where discussion revolved around the role technology plays in onboarding, creating a flexible and inclusive remote or hybrid experience, using data analytics?to gain employee insights, and how leaders inspire a tech-driven, innovative mindset.

There's no doubt that in today's digital era, technology plays a crucial role in shaping the employer brand and employee experience. However, many in this field are concerned that an increase in the use of this technology may depersonalize the experience current and potential candidates have with a company's brand. So how do you take the benefit new technologies provide without losing the authenticity of the message??

In the world of EB, storytelling is one of the most effective ways to share your company culture, and the author of those stories need to be current employees, not the company itself. One way technology has facilitated this content strategy is through employee advocacy platforms like Cliquify. Automation, as well as simplifying the process for employees to share their stories has proven to be far more engaging for potential talent than paid advertising, not to mention much less expensive.

Additionally, technology can improve the employee experience by providing tools for communication, collaboration, and feedback with platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. However, just having the platforms is not enough, creating a strategy and pushing content through these platforms, as well as encouraging employees to share insights about your company culture on their own channels is one way to maximize the benefits these technologies provide.?

How are you leveraging technology to better strengthen your brand? Share insights with your peers by contributing a blog post we can feature in our next newsletter! Just submit your idea here.

This month's EB Insights...

How to Improve Your Recruitment Marketing Strategy on Social Media

By Hayfa Bukhari, Employer Brand and Recruitment Marketing Specialist, Cognizant

Social media is an effective platform for recruitment marketing, but some recruiters may feel uneasy about using social media. In this blog, Hayfa aims to provide tips and best practices to enhance recruiters’ skills in recruitment marketing on social media, including how to create engaging content and measure and optimize results.?

Read more

Sign up for a Cliquify Product Demo!

Cliquify is hosting a Product Demo on July 24, 2024 from 12 - 1pm Eastern. If you want to see how many top companies are activating their employer brand easily in ONE place: Brand controls + On-brand designs + Employee advocacy + Employee generated videos and photos + Deep insights on EVP performance + ATS candidate source tracking. Reserve your seat to see it in action and register here.

EB Leader Spotlight

Meet Ben Phillips !

Ben is an employer brand and talent marketing leader with experience across recruitment, culture transformation, learning, leadership development and consumer marketing. Ben has led multi-national teams delivering complex projects across multiple sectors and has worked for companies such as Happening, m2M Cycling, IBM, Radancy, Hootsuite, Radley Yeldar, Tesco, and Pizza Hut (UK) Ltd.?

EB Insights: What led you to a career in Employer Branding?

Ben: My career has always centered around people, communication, and technology, with a sprinkling of creativity. Whether in recruitment, L&D/Leadership development, culture transformation, consumer marketing or employer branding and talent marketing (I’ve been around a bit!), I’ve always been close to, and loved trying to understand people. What makes them tick, and how to communicate with them via content and conversations across various on- and offline channels in the hope that they take an action. Whether that be to learn, understand, change, buy, advocate for, or apply to something. My first real foray into EB was c. 2010. I then went on a bit of a career adventure and returned to this world roughly seven years ago. I find more of a fulfilling purpose in using branding and marketing to help people in their careers rather than encourage them to spend money on things they don’t usually need.

EB Insights: Why do you think business leaders should invest in their employer brand??

Ben: It depends how you’re defining ‘employer brand.’ If they think it’s just about creating superficial tag lines and pretty picture for career websites and social media, then I don’t think they should invest in it! However, if they appreciate it’s about understanding and connecting the dots between your culture, EVP, brand, and communication, and then being involved in holding peoples’ toes to the fire to ensure the walk is talked at every touchpoint across your people experience, then 100%. The reasons to invest are abundant. Employer branding has the potential to positively impact so many things across the people experience. The obvious one is always linked to attracting better quality people, faster, and cheaper. But it can contribute to so much more. Internal comms, employee engagement, and retention, as well. At its heart, it’s about knowing who you are as a company and what you offer, and authentically communicating this so existing employees understand, agree, and believe enough to want to advocate. And then communicating the same externally so candidates who are more suited to thrive in your organization sign up in the first place and then want to stay and succeed.

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EB Insights: What are some common misperceptions about this function?

Ben: As I mentioned above - that employer branding is just about the career site and social media content team (YAY! [cue eye rolling]). I’ve recently seen a lot of mid-level job adverts out there looking for an “Employer Brand Manager”. When you read the details you quickly realize they’re not. What they want is a social media and content whizz to come and do some “EB stuff.” Another misconception is that one EB person can do the role of five or more people with deep expertise across a whole host of specialisms. Social media management, social media content creation and distribution (which are very different things), employer branding strategy, media buying, talent marketing including: campaign planning, activation, measurement and reporting - the list goes on. I’m seeing businesses increasingly want 5x the output with minus 5x the investment in people and tech, which just isn’t possible.

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EB Insights: What advice would you give other practitioners about how to increase internal stakeholder engagement in employer brand?

Ben: It depends on who your stakeholders are and what they care about most. Figure that out and then engage them with that at the center of your engagement efforts. For example, if you want to increase engagement with senior leaders, you’ve got to start talking about return on investment (ROI) as if you’re going in to talk to your Finance Director. ROI is a financial business metric. It’s not a content performance one. It’s not a media one. They’re important but ROI doesn’t live there. Show how you will impact the top and or bottom line of the P&L. Demonstrate how you can have a positive impact – better quality and/or speed, and cost.? Saying you want to have an ROI conversation and then leading with “impressions”, “likes” and “visits” etc., does us no favors when wanting to be taken more seriously with the senior decision-makers within our business.

For more insights from Ben, including how to establish and measure ROI with your key leaders, tune into the EB Insights Podcast next week where Ben is our special guest!?

New episodes of the EB Insights podcast launching next week. To catch up on all of our episodes, click here.

Interested in contributing to our blog? Submit your idea here.