What is an Employer Brand?

This is your company’s reputation and the promise you make to employees. It reflects your company's culture, employees' sentiments, employee voice, and endorsement. Essentially, it’s how the organization is perceived as an employer by clients, employees, community, and stakeholders.

You have an employer brand, whether you manage it or not.

What is Employer Branding?

This is the ongoing process of building and maintaining your employer brand. Technically, it involves creating candidate personas, defining employee value propositions, and implementing campaigns to attract and retain top talent. Bringing it to life, it is the orchestration of creatives, producers, marketers, researchers, recruiters, staff, and leaders to live and demonstrate the brand design through daily behaviour and expression of work.

Why is Employer Brand a competitive advantage?

Employer Brand is a lasting competitive advantage in a landscape where the quality of hires is a priority. By crafting and reinforcing positive associations for their brands, companies can generate organic inbounding; meaning that candidates will apply and self-select for the jobs you are trying to fill. This long-term strategy ensures sustained success, fostering a deeper connection with candidates, inspiring loyalty with current colleagues, and driving growth through engagement. It is your authentic expression and people who connect with it will support you as an employer and service provider.

Remember that an employer brand's competitive advantage and authentic expression can only be described by the target audience, not you as a brand manager.

The business of a strong employer brand and efficient talent acquisition.

12% increase in customer satisfaction

40% internal referral rates

$2400 increased annual profit by employee

50% decrease in cost per hire

2X better performance

40% increased engagement

* Read more here

Examples of employer brands and their positive associations

1. Innovation: Being known as a cutting-edge company that encourages creativity and new ideas (think Google).
2. Employee Wellbeing: Promoting a culture that values mental health and work-life balance, like Lifemark Health Group or Headspace.
3. Social Responsibility: Demonstrating a commitment to sustainability and community involvement, as seen with Patagonia.
4. Professional Development: Providing ample opportunities for learning and growth, akin to LinkedIn.
5. Inclusive Culture: Celebrating diversity and inclusion within the workplace, a hallmark of companies like Microsoft.

These associations attract top talent and enhance the overall brand perception, creating a ripple effect of trust and loyalty among clients too.

How to Become an Employer Brand Leader?

Being an Employer Brand leader takes several layers of expertise such as recruitment, marketing, psychology, big data & analytics, and human-centre design while also being the best ambassador of the brands one gets to grow. The best leaders show great command between strategic and creative approaches.

You will need an understanding of marketing sciences, HR technologies, and Human-centred design, as much positive psychology, and business acumen.

How to get started with Employer Branding?

Find out what makes the company culture different and how this uniqueness aligns with what candidates and employees want. Once you understand both, the differentiation and the gap to meet your target market, ensure you communicate the brand intentions going-forward. The audience will determine if you are a worthy employer to help them reach their aspirations.

Once you know what makes you unique, you should find out how your company can deliver on the promises made to people at work. That is, what value proposition can they use to improve their quality of life at home and at work.

What is an Employee Value Proposition?

Imagine a picture in time, where you audit the company offers and programs to employees. The full set of programs and employee services is your employee value proposition. This is in constant evolution as the company continues or discontinues employee programming.

An Employee Value Proposition is written in an employee-centric approach, eliminating all HR jargon and process mindset. It is written in employee or candidate terms according to the personas selected.

I have gone through multiple exercises of EVP globally and found that many employee programs were sitting at the HR desk that never impacted the staff. Consider that a badly implemented programme that does not have a critical mass of employees adopting it, is not part of your value proposition, instead, a simple good intention.

Common pitfalls of Employer Branding

• Confusing the employer brand with the client brand
• Doing regular HR process work and calling it employee experience. Hint, if you have a shared services model, you are not doing employer branding. It is simple a processing function.
• Not being clear about Employer brand, branding and experience design. Brand is the vision, branding is the tactical approach to change perception, and employee experience is focused on behavioural change at all levels.
• Nesting employer Brand into recruitment, communications or marketing. These groups are all executors of the Employer brand so it does not make sense to reduce the stature of employer branding to the size of one silo's impact.
• Doing some creative work and calling it employer brand. This is the extreme lack of thinking and the most junior approach to it.
• Not listening; therefore, not understanding your audience, and not having an audience. Get on the employee voice insights to get your footing first.
• Going all in to recruitment tactics, with career pages, Linkedin, etc., and not having a consistent message and visual approach.

Notable employer branding organizations in Canada

Presented in no particular order, each one with a unique approach.

• Drift Consulting │ Love Your People. For authentic representation, and inclusivity designed to deliver value across all core drivers of the employee experience.
• Employee Experience Institute It provides remarkable insights, innovative employee experience design frameworks, and employer brand education that attracts and engages your people - led by yours truly, Estela Vázquez Pérez, M.Sc , Prosci?, CHRL Cand.
• Powerhouse Talent Inc. - Employer Brand and Culture Strategy An employer branding agency that builds award-winning strategies to transform cultures
• Talentscopic | Recruitment Marketing We create and package an irresistible employee offer that brings healthcare candidates to your hiring process.
• Blu Ivy Group : An employer branding agency and employee engagement consulting team that drives award-winning cultures.
• ADVANCE Human Capital Solutions, an Employer Branding Agency Where Employer Brands Go from Invisible to Irresistible

Did I miss any other Employer Branding organization? Tag them in the comments for everyone to know.

What is Employer Brand Thought leadership?

Employer brand thought leadership is having the capability to do systems thinking to deliver insight that advances the workplace experience for the long-term benefit of people and the planet. - Estela vazquez Perez

I have delivered numerous award-winning employer brand strategies end employee experiences that helped transform teams around the world. Companies attained awards for the first time and were able to reposition their brands, giving them a renewed opportunity to impact the community and the bottom line.

Where can you learn more about modern employer branding?

For research, visit Universum Global

For general information, join this group Employer Branding

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