TA from the Ground Up “Employment Branding”

?by K.C. Donovan

This is a series of posts on crafting a talent acquisition program for an emerging company from the earliest stages. My experience is rooted in the biotech sector, but these strategies are suited to any industry.

In this post, I focus on Employment Branding…

As an emerging start-up company grows beyond hiring former colleagues and talent known to them, their options become a bit cloudy. Most begin relying on job posting sites and recruiting agencies or bring in a consultant or contract recruiter. If they continue to grow, the time spent hiring begins impeding their efforts to meet company objectives. At this point with perhaps 40-50+ employees (the size can vary), it’s time to consider a more permanent solution.?

Having built internal Talent Acquisition (TA) functions from scratch and consulted with 30+ companies on TA process, I never found a Recruiting Bible or Roadmap to follow. Each company is different, but through trial and error, several recruiting commonalities and best practices have surfaced. To build a successful talent program for an emerging company, a recruiting leader will need the capability to assess a company’s objectives and adapt these core TA processes.

Previously, I’ve outlined 12 TA processes and actions that are essential for recruiting success, and I’ve included them below:

Here are the Essential TA Processes:

1.?????? Company Values, Voice of the Employee, and EVP

2.?????? Workforce Plan and Company Evolution

3.?????? Build TA Staff and Recruitment Training

4.?????? HRTech & TA Systems (Automation)

5.?????? Candidate Experience

6.?????? Engagement Technique (Internal and External)

7.?????? Sourcing and Talent Pipeline

8.?????? Employee Referrals & Inner Mobility

9.?????? Recruitment Marketing (Career Page, Job Posting, LinkedIn, etc.)

10.?? Employment Branding

11.?? Assessment Program (TOF Screening)

12.?? Recruitment Process Analytics and Metrics

To be successful, organization, prioritization, and multi-tasking are critical core competencies for a TA leader since most all processes are integrated and need to be implemented at the same time while you fly the TA plane. To complicate matters, one has to also build the TA plane (jet?), while staying focused on filling foundational roles for multiple divisions and hiring managers (whew!).

10. Employment Branding (EB)

EB needs to be baked into all the steps listed before it, because everything touching employees, prospects, or candidates impacts your brand. Unless in stealth mode where all employees are sworn to secrecy, by the time a company finds it needs a permanent TA team, your current employees will have established an employment brand of sorts. As with any branding, EB reflects what the marketplace thinks about the company. The footprint may be small, but with 50 or more employees, there is already a notion of what your company is like. The good news is that this early-stage industry impression can be adjusted to reflect the brand a company wants to convey with a well-managed EB program.

It is very important for the TA leader to have a firm grasp of what the company leadership wants the core values of its employees to possess. These core values represent the Employment Value Proposition the exec wants to convey, and an employment branding program creates the desire for future employees with these values to want to join the company.

Develop Your Employment Persona

Once your values are established, then it’s important to build a persona of your atypical employee type. It’s important to note that a persona is focused on core attributes that determine behaviors and not characteristics that can limit diversity. People from all walks of life should be introduced to your persona, and values like tenacity, collaboration, curiosity, sense of urgency, and boldness will guide people who are attracted to a workplace like this to your company.

Once you understand your persona, then all the rest will flow from it. Your career page and external career site content (LinkedIn, Glassdoor, etc.), the language used in your job descriptions and postings, your candidate experience methods, and the story used by recruiters to engage with prospects and candidates all are derived from your persona messaging.

There are myriad ways to market your company’s EB desire, such as social media, paid ads, and employee-generated content, just to name a few, but I’ll leave that to another post. The objective here is to map out a plan for your emerging company to establish an employment brand.

A final note, it is important that none of your EB development is done in a vacuum. Developing a relationship with your Corporate Communications team (or exec team if none exists yet), is a must. This team will be focused on crafting the right message for investors or potential business development partnerships, and this needs to align with your employment branding efforts.

Here is the playbook for building your initial Employment Brand:

1.?????? Create the persona, molding the values and cultural characteristics that capture the flavor and vibe of the company. The persona is the key marketing element that will be the pillar of all our branding efforts.

2.?????? Craft and give voice, tone, and atmosphere to the persona in text, visuals, and video content for the career page, in content shared on career sites, job postings, event collateral (signage, etc.), conference speaker bios, etc.

3.?????? Partnering with your company's exec leadership (or corporate communications team), create a campaign to fully link your branding with the aligned industry market segment, binding the two so one is synonymous with the other in the career consumer mindset.

4.?????? Populate and emulate career page content on external career sites such as LinkedIn, Glass Door, Indeed, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others that make sense to your industry (for Biotech: MassBio, Fierce, BioSpace, BioCentury, etc.).

5.?????? Engage Employer Review rankings to obtain “best place to work” attributes (BuiltInBoston, BBJ, Comparably, Glass Door, etc.).

6.?????? Create a calendar of event engagements with academic clubs and campus events (In Boston Biotech: MIT, Harvard, Tufts, Northeastern, etc.).

7.?????? Incorporate voluntary and shared “top of the funnel” behavioral assessments (Arctic Shores, Harver, etc.) on the Career Page that are aligned with your core values (Employment Value Proposition) for cultural alignment.

8.?????? Share the dominant cultural attribute of “new hires” with company Brand ID clothing or backpacks that demonstrate their core trait (can extend to all employees if they take the assessment to enhance employee engagement).

9.?????? In biotech, create sponsored Poster Events to invite only target groups of talent to introduce them to your company’s scientific approach (target academic clubs, specific talent needs, etc.).

10.?? Build Talent Pipelines of core recurring needs based on the workforce plan and create a calendar of recurring send-outs that illustrate what it is like to work at your company and other content of interest.

11.?? Implement a feedback loop for each stop in the candidate journey that keeps applicants engaged and aware of what to expect in the hiring process (ensure that the tone of the feedback emulates the core values persona).

12.?? With an analytical approach, constantly measure the results and effectiveness of your branding efforts, double down on what works, and realign the aspects with less impact.

?

Hope you found this post helpful!