Companies invest heavily in building strong brands for their products and services, but if they want to have the people to deliver them, they must also build a strong employer brand. Research by Randstad shows that 75% of job seekers investigate a company’s reputation before applying, and half of employees say they won’t work for a company with a bad reputation. If companies want to attract and retain talent, they need to get employer branding right. To better understand how to achieve that, I reached out to employer branding expert Charlotte Jones.
Charlotte Jones is an expert on employer branding with over twenty-five years of leadership experience and has been a driving force
in leading and transforming teams across various domains, including HR, talent acquisition, diversity, communications, and marketing. She has worked for Lockheed Martin, Stanley Black and Decker, and Indeed and is currently the Director of Associate Experience and DEI at Rite Aid.
What is Employer Brand?
When asked to explain what employer brand is and why it’s important, Jones shared, “Employer brand is part of your company brand, but specific to what talent candidates, prospective employees or even the public see. It is what their perceptions are, what their beliefs and thoughts and feelings are about working.” But it goes far deeper. Employer brand is the amalgam of topics such as perceptions about the leaders, the company culture, and what it feels like to work there every day. It includes diversity at the company, the treatment of employees, employee perks, discounts, pay, benefits, work-life balance, and whether they’re working remote, hybrid, or in-office. Employer brand is made of and based on individual experiences. It is a company’s reputation, shared through ad campaigns, word of mouth, and employee sentiment sites like Glassdoor or Indeed.
Who Inside the Company is Responsible for Creating the Employer Brand?
According to Jones, everyone at the company is responsible, “from the CEO to the CHRO, to the CFO, down to the VPs, the employees, recruiters, everyone has a responsibility.” Equipping employees with an easy-to-remember thirty-second elevator speech to open discussion about their work and company is a great way to get everyone to participate and share their personal stories related to the employer brand. During an activation of the employee value proposition, she recommends presenting key speaking points to teams, leaders, and anyone recruiting talent. Many times, consumers end up as employees. So, in a business-to-consumer c, it’s essential to equip the sales and marketing teams with that language.
How Do You Get People on Board?
If everyone is responsible for owning the employer brand, how do you get them on board? This comes down to understanding the experiences, needs, and goals of different teams and departments and how they intersect and come together as a whole. Jones says, “Connect the employer brand to each person or department’s tangible outcomes.” If the employer brand is connected to what they’re already working to achieve, they’re already on board and working on common ground. What this looks like for each company requires getting data around employee experiences, like employee engagement scores, diversity indexes, or net promoter scores.
How Can People Build Their Employer Brand?
Jones offers the following three tips for building a strong employer brand:
Tip 1: Collaborate with Stakeholders
Since employer brand is built on individual experiences, discussing those experiences is vital to composing a cohesive employer brand. This includes understanding roles, aligning on key messages, sharing ideas, and discerning pain points. Whether it’s called a forum, meeting, or council, bringing people together monthly or quarterly to share initiatives around the employee experience and employer brand is critical. Discuss what their needs are, work to provide them with resources, and connect people from different areas.
Tip 2: Create Resources that Support Success
Once you understand people’s pain points, you can create resources that help them succeed and check in regularly to ensure they have what they need to accomplish their goals and, thus, the brand goals as well. Jones says, ““It’s important to have a one-company messaging framework that brings everything together in a consistent way for external views and perceptions.” Creating a resource center in addition to meetings and frequent touchpoints was the key. A resource center promotes brand consistency when corporate brands or business areas are segmented or working independent from one another.
Tip 3: Empower Employees to Share Authentic Stories
A resource center can also make it easy for employees to tell their individual stories and how they align with the employer value proposition (EVP) or employer brand message. Ensuring that sharing stories is convenient and accessible to everyone can boost participation. For example, create an internal resource such as an intranet page to provide the employer brand messaging framework, a form that employees can use to tell their stories, video capture tools, guidelines on how to take photos and submit them, and social advocacy tools to encourage employees to share company content with their networks. When Jones first rolled out this resource to a company, it made such a profound impact that she collected hundreds of stories within a year.
After getting employees to share their experiences, it’s important to ensure their lived experiences mirror the EVP, as this affects the employer brand. This includes employees, customers, suppliers, and the public—anyone who touches, sees, or experiences that brand. When developing and communicating an employer brand, ensure that most of the employer brand truthfully reflects the employees’ culture and lived experiences. If it’s not accurate, candidates/new hires are sold on a story they will not experience, resulting in high turnover, low employee engagement, disconnected employees, low output and productivity from employees, low customer satisfaction, and a negative brand. Jones says, “People want to work for a company that does what they say they will do. And it’s very prevalent now that employees will leave because the company doesn’t have the values they preach.”
To ensure authentic messaging, begin with in-depth research of the employees’ lived experiences (interviews, focus groups, employee engagement survey results, and social sentiment analysis). Extract the consistently positive experiences from that data and create messaging. Utilize neutral to negative experiences to make improvements, which can become aspirational messaging. Jones’s formula for crafting EVP/EB messages is based on 80% realistic lived experiences and 20% aspirational.
Employer brand is not only the key to a company’s success, it is also a conversation, “a full holistic story of how we all impact each other, how we all influence each other…it’s made of individual experiences,” says Jones. Ask questions, invite people into discussions, and strive to understand all the employee experiences within an organization—their needs, desires, and goals. Figure out how to support them. Create environments for an optimal employee experience, deploy a listening strategy that continuously curates stories that exemplify the employer brand to get everybody rowing in the same direction—this builds the kind of brand that draws people in and ensures they stick around long-term.