The Definitive Guide To Employment Branding

By John Sumser, HRExaminer

EMPLOYMENT BRANDING

THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO

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DICE THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO EMPLOYMENT BRANDING 2

Contents

EMPLOYMENT BRANDING

DEFINED

EMPLOYMENT BRAND?

THE RECRUITINGPROCESS

CENTURY LINK

SELFAPPRAISAL

GETTINGSTARTED

EMPLOYMENT BRAND

IS MADE OF MEDIA

TARGETING AND LABOR SUPPLY

AN INTRODUCTION TO

EMPLOYMENT BRANDING

WHY FOCUS ON YOUR

9 STEPS

CASE STUDY

BUILDING AN

THE EMPLOYMENT BRAND

A WORD ABOUT

Company Values are the soul of the EB

Candidate Experiences are the Currency of the EB

Stories are the Heart of The EB

EMPLOYMENT BRANDING

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There is no single agreed-upon definition of Employment Branding. Like many of

the most useful components of Human Resources, Employment Branding (EB) is

a broad umbrella of ideas with a decidedly local implementation character. In this

Guide, you will learn about the big picture and pick up enough advice to start your

own unique EB implementation.

You’ll also find a number of insights and ideas from the leading practitioners and thinkers on

the subject. While they do not always agree with each other (or the author), their experience

is broad and expansive. Their tips and insights are scattered throughout the Guide.

EB encompasses everything about the company related to what it is like to work there. A

well-managed brand helps the ‘right’ people find their way to the organization as a place to

work. A solid EB initiative can reduce costs, improve workforce quality, decrease recruiting

workloads and increase recruiting productivity.

EMPLOYMENT BRANDINGAN INTRODUCTION TO

ABOUT THE AUTHOR John Sumser is the founder, principal author and editor-in-chief of the HRExaminer Online Magazine. John explores the people, technology, ideas and careers of senior leaders in Human Resources and Human Capital.

John is the also principal of Two Color Hat where he routinely advises Human Resources, Recruiting Departments and Talent Management teams with product analysis, market segmentation, positioning, strategy and branding guidance.

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It’s fair to say that a company has an EB

whether or not it chooses to manage it.

In its unvarnished form, EB is simply the

organization’s reputation as a place to

work. Deciding to manage your EB turns it

from a public reflection into a conversation.

Investing in your EB is a project that

doesn’t end. As business circumstances,

expectations and needs evolve, your EB

has to be maintained to respond to those

changes. Knowing what your target labor

markets understand and believe about

your organization is critical. Responding

effectively in ways that continue to build

your reputation is the name of the game.

EB is a ‘scalable’ concept. It can be

applied to problems of all sizes, from a

specific job to a department to a division

to the company as a whole. Each step of

the scale involves an increase in the size of

the resources involved. This means that the

EB idea can be applied to varying degrees

around the organization.

For instance, your strategy might be to

focus only on mission-critical roles. You

might want to emphasize jobs that are

hard to fill. You might try to focus on the

company as a whole with no reference to

specific jobs. You could help employees

and potential employees understand the

cultural differences between departments.

Since EB involves the way that current

and past employees experience their

relationship with the company, the team

involved with EB will always have a

deep sense of the negative parts of the

company’s reputation. A significant part of

the work of the EB team involves making

sense of this feedback. It is challenging

information that can be a critical part of the

company’s future.

The importance of getting your Employment Branding work “right” can’t be overstated. The message that you’ll be marketing to the world is one that needs to be genuine, transparent and resonates with the type of candidates who will thrive within your organization. That’s why it’s important to start internally when building your employer value proposition and marketing plans.

Connecting with your teams at every level, tenure and location beforehand is key to capturing what really keeps your company alive. When you’ve discovered why your employees are excited to come in to work, what gets their hearts pumping about their job, what your culture enables them to do or to be (both inside and outside of the office!) then you’ve found something that can’t be replicated by an agency or fancy application or upgraded system online. You’ve found pillars on which to build a powerful and honest Employment Brand.

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– Chris Hoyt, Chief Innovation Evangelist, CareerXroads

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for something like “What’s it like to work at

Company X?”

Compare the primary brand and the

Employment Brand. How are they the same

and how are they different? You’ll also

notice that the relationship between brand

and EB is different for different companies.

What you will most likely see is that the

company spends a lot of energy managing

its primary brand. It will respond to and

engage the public who address it in public

forums such as Twitter. But you will also

see that a similar level of engagement isn’t

usually taking place on the EB front.

The most interesting thing about a brand

is that it is a perception. The company’s

primary and Employment Brands exist in

the minds and hearts of individuals. While

they can be measured and influenced in the

aggregate, the primary objective of both is

to understand and influence the perception

of a group of individuals. A central piece of

any EB initiative is a constant testing and

retesting of assumptions and expectations.

Employment Branding DefinedThe difference between

regular advertising and

brand advertising is simple. Regular

advertising is focused on generating a

transaction: “Buy this thing now at this

special price.” Brand advertising is about

differentiation; it tells the story of how your

offering is different.

The same is true of the difference between

job advertising and Employment Branding.

EB is the sum total of a company’s

reputation as a place to work.

That reputation is composed of

things such as:

Online reviews (on Glassdoor, Indeed, Yelp and other business-review sites)

Word of mouth in local and professional communities

Stories the company tells about itself on its website and in other media

Stories told in job ads posted around the Internet (and offline)

Stories that employees tell

Experiences of job hunters and customers

An organization’s EB is related to (but not

the same) as its primary brand. You can

get a sense of this by considering the

corporate reputations of two or three very

popular companies.

Consumer-oriented companies work

hard to make sure that they are seen in a

positive and compelling light. You can see

a company’s primary brand by searching

Twitter for the company’s handle. This will

give you a flow of information, partly what

the company thinks of itself and partly what

the public thinks about the company. This

is the raw, real-time essence of the brand.

Once you have a clear picture of that

operation’s reputation, look up their

employment reputation. There are a

number of good online sources of reviews

of the company as an employer. Search

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Listening. Your recruiting process should have ‘listening stations’ at every step of the way. These mechanisms “hear” what is really going on when candidates:

Research your opportunities

Learn about what it’s like to work there

Apply to openings

Consider selecting you (even why you are choosing them)

Manage disappointment when you don’t choose them

Onboard as a new employee

The more employers ask candidates about their experience at every step of the hiring process, the higher they end up rated by the candidates they didn’t hire.

Setting Expectations. Your recruiting process has been fine-tuned to set expectations about the work. But, for those who don’t get that far, the expectations you set about the recruiting process from the start are crucial. The more employers describe in advance what to expect at every twist and turn in their recruiting process (and deliver), the higher they are rated by the candidates they didn’t hire.

Being Accountable. It’s not rocket science: what you measure as performance, and link

to rewards, impacts behavior. The more employers measure candidate attitudes, provide usable feedback to recruiters and link results to recruiter performance and rewards, the higher they are rated by the candidates they didn’t hire.

Being Fair. The largest variance in candidate ratings about their experience can be attributed to the answer to this question: “Were you able to share to your satisfaction with [company name] and all the reasons why you think you were competitive for this position?” From the moment a candidate is exposed to your process, they receive messages about whether they have a fair shot at competing for the job or whether the fix is in. Everything from unanswered questions, unexplained delays and poorly-trained hiring managers can impact this perception; root those out. The more employers are perceived as having a fair process, the higher they are rated by the candidates they don’t hire.

There are many claims about how to improve the candidate experience. If a potential solution doesn’t impact one of the four categories above, it won’t account for much. Your Employment Brand doesn’t just ride on how you treat the candidates you hire; the candidates you don’t hire must be treated with respect, listened to, have expectations set, believe they were treated fairly, and know that the employer holds itself accountable.

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– Gerry Crispin, Founder and Principled Navigator, Career Xroads

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source: www.TheCandEs.org

Four Things You Know (or Should Know) That Will Change Candidates’ Attitude and Behavior

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In addition, EB helps past, current and

future employees understand the value of

working with (and for) your organization.

Imagine developing a supply of talented

people who are excited and eager to come

to work for you. By starting with a higher-

quality, engaged workforce, you may

expect to grow the engagement levels of

your overall team.

In settings where the competition for talent

is fierce, EB helps you differentiate your

organization. A reputation as a great and

challenging place to work can make you a

destination employer, a place that people

want to head towards.

The discipline required to effectively execute

an EB initiative will put you in the position of

being able to quantify, measure and report

the realities of your employment marketplace.

Since all companies and labor markets have

different supply-and-demand dynamics,

results will vary, but you may rest assured that

a company with a strong Employment Brand

will outperform its competition.

Why Focus on Your Employment Brand?Where’s the payoff? What’s

the ROI? If you are going to have any

real success in your EB project, you are

going to need buy-in from the people who

control resources. Regardless of their

level and yours, they are going to want to

understand why they should invest their

scarce resources in this area.

You are going to want to be prepared with

compelling and persuasive answers well

before you ask for resources. Over time, a

solid EB initiative will reduce the costs and

increase the effectiveness of your recruiting

efforts.

A great EB project will reduce the number

of unqualified candidates who must be

removed from the recruiting process

while increasing the relative quality of

the candidate flow. EB can reduce your

reliance on more expensive sources of data

about prospective employees. – Maren Hogan, CEO, Red Branch Media

Q: How important is content to Employment Branding?

A: Employer Branding cannot exist without content. Much of today’s debate is about which kind. Branding and storytelling go together like peas and carrots. What employee story are you trying to tell, and to who?

Content is the only way to tell that story to more than one person at a time, whether it’s via a video or webinar, a podcast, a website or a laundry list of items that simply appear in a job ad. While none of these are right for every company, all are examples of using content to tell a (true) story about your company and what it’s like to work there.

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The Employment Brand is Made of MediaAnother way of thinking

about EB is that it is composed of four

types of media. Information about the

company as an employer, whether provided

by the company, its employees or other

parties, is always communicated through

some sort of media.

The media types are:

Paid: Job ads, billboards, programmatic advertising, other advertising, traffic acquisition

Earned: Word of mouth, press releases, viral stories, search engine optimization (SEO)

Shared: User-generated content, online reviews, internal social media initiatives. (Shared implies that the company can be proactive in social)

Owned: The company website, employment website, newsletters, job alerts, talent communities, email campaigns, content marketing

The company can’t control all media. The

experience of an individual employee or

prospective employee boils down to which

media they consume and how completely

they digest it.

A world-class EB initiative blends the

company’s narrative about what it’s like

to work at the company with creative

and proactive responses to the flow of

uncontrollable information from the public.

It takes experience and sensitivity to do this

seamlessly. In the early stages of an EB

project, the results will always leave room

for improvement.

Company Values are the Soul of EBThe development of an

EB must include a review of company

values and some level of assessment.

Most companies have some sort of values

statement floating around. Company values

are often communicated in placards and on

the intranet.

It’s rare that anyone inside the company ever

formally checks to see if the company lives

up to those values. Sometimes, employees

report moments of extreme irony when high-

ranking executives do the opposite of the

published values while standing underneath

a poster proclaiming them.

To get EB right, you have to understand

how well the company embodies its

PAIDMEDIA

SHAREDMEDIA

EARNEDMEDIA

OWNEDMEDIA

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– Elaine Orler, Chairman and Co-Founder, The Talent Board

values and whether you want to continue

to promote them. There is always a set

of values that the company embodies,

whether or not a formal process identifies

said values. The closer the EB comes to

communicating the values that are actually

practiced, the better.

Stories are the Heart of EBA list of truisms

accompanying a long list of

cherished ideas is not going to differentiate

your company from another. The EB project

is, from one perspective, a search for great

stories. Imagine that you are building a

library of anecdotes about what it feels like

to work for the company.

Storytelling is one of the ways that EB

differs from more transactional recruiting

and recruitment advertising. The idea

is to conjure a picture in the mind of

the candidate. EB stories are related to

the contemporary idea of delivering an

improved “candidate experience.”

Q: How does the Candidate Experience drive Employment Branding?

A: Candidate Experience is not only an outcome but an input to Employment Branding. As organizations, we create content (branding) to position our companies to the candidates we hope to attract. Branding content is often the first deep content a candidate has exposure to, to best understand the organizations goals, values and opportunities. That content and positioning create response from candidates by joining our communities, or directly applying to our positions.

From the 2015 NAM candidate experience award, 48% of candidates (total of 90,000 respondents), stated they need more time to learn about the company and sought that information before applying. That time spent researching an organization (averaging 1–2 hours) is exactly why organizations need to manage their Employment Brand.

The Employment Branding content found to be the most valuable to candidates, based on feedback in the same survey, were: company values, products/services, employee testimonials, answers to ‘why’ people want to work here, and answers to ‘why’ people stay here.

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you need to reach. The bigger the group

you need to reach, the higher the volume

of responses. The higher the volume of

responses, the more time involved in

processing them. More time always means

more expense.

The ideal recruiting operation only takes in

as much data as necessary. Additional data

always involves some level of expense for

acquisition, processing and storage. That

means that the front end of the recruiting

Candidate Experiences are the Currency of EBThe current thinking about

‘candidate experience’ is oriented towards

the administrative processes faced by a job

hunter. It is critical that the hiring process

minimize the inconvenience and anxiety it

naturally causes. Much of the thinking in

this area centers on hassle reduction.

EB opens the possibility that a candidate

could have a delightful experience,

influenced by the company’s desire to be

great, and marked with examples of the

warmth, nurturing, grace and development

opportunities.

A Word About Targeting and Labor SupplyThe cost of recruiting is

directly related to the size of the audience

Q: What are the best uses of video in Employment Branding?

A: For effective Employment Branding, there is no better medium than video to distinguish yourself from your competition and to demonstrate what is meaningful and attractive about working for your company.

Video dominates our media landscape for good reason, delivering higher entertainment value than text and static pictures. You can leverage video to provide an immersive view of your employee experience. Candidates can envision themselves coming through your doors, sitting (or standing) at a desk in your office, and engaging with your projects and employees. Their family and friends likely won’t have a chance to visit your firm; video can help these unseen decision-makers understand and appreciate working with you versus your more well-known competition.

Popular products can be their own advertisement for careers at your company. But if you’re a young firm, or you’re in a crowded career marketplace, investing in a quality video can attract the candidates you seek and drive them to choose you.

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– Justin Hall, Producer, Transformative Communication Services

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Q: How do you find the right Employment Branding statistics to watch?

A: The easy answer is to look outward at:

Traffic increases (number of eyeballs your efforts drive to your sites through either traffic visits or number of times shared links have been clicked on by your audience).

Reach extension (the ability to capture new eyeballs and prospective candidates)

Brand awareness

However, the “easy answer” isn’t always the right answer. EB also has a big impact on your existing employee population; so many of the metrics you should monitor will actually relate to your internal population. Here are the top 10 metrics for employer branding health:

Goals: Are you meeting your program goals? What percentage of goals are you meeting? For the goals you

aren’t meeting, track what’s lacking and monitor progress throughout the year so you can make appropriate adjustments.

Sentiment: Tools such Iris (Universum’s SaaS program for Brand Monitoring) and Mention are great options to help you track online sentiment. For employee population sentiment, referral traffic is a great indicator of positive sentiment and employer branding health.

Head-To-Head Conversion Rate: When Candidates are getting more than one offer (which you have to assume is a strong possibility), what percentage of those candidates accept your offer over the “head to head” competition?

Shareholder Satisfaction: Internal stakeholder/program shareholder satisfaction, with the results of your efforts.

Intern Conversion Rate: What percentage of college interns ultimately come back to work for your

organization after graduation? Track % offered vs. total intern number, and track interns offered permanent role vs. % accepted.

Top Schools Percentage: Of the schools your program has identified as their “top schools” for finding graduate talent, what % of your hires do each yield?

Quality of Applicant (QoA): This look into applicant quality focuses on the % of your recruitment programs’ applicants (not hires) who meet minimum expectation criteria.

Performance Data: What percentage of your hires are performing to 1) plan, 2) in the top 50%, and 3) identified for leadership development?

Training Failure Rate: Track the number of hires who “wash out” or don’t make it successfully through the training program / probationary period. This includes those moved to other positions in the company to avoid termination, not just straight attrition rate. A high TFR shows you may be attracting the wrong types of talent to your organization, or that

your EB and recruitment marketing messages may be off-point.

Attrition & Retention Rates: We’ve heard about the importance of attrition and retention, but it’s not straight attrition that needs to be the concern: it’s regrettable turnover that matters. Some employees we want to leave; but when we can’t keep the employees we want and/or need, that’s an indicator that there is an EB impact and there is potential messaging that needs to be either tweaked or addressed within the program to improve retention. So track the percentage of regrettable turnover (hires you wouldn’t have wanted to lose) to best monitor employer brand health.

– Crystal Miller, CEO, Branded Strategies

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process is an ongoing endeavor to get the

flow of candidates “just right.”

Since the labor market is in constant flux, with

supply requirements and demand capacities

varying significantly over time, the effort

requires a continuous investment in time

and energy. An EB should be big enough

to address the audience that the company

needs. Any larger or smaller and the costs

associated with recruiting will grow.

Determining the required audience size

and structure is simple in theory and

more elusive in practice. All planning for

Recruiting and Employment Branding

begins with a solid estimate of the hiring

requirements for the next several years. You

need a spreadsheet that lists the types and

numbers of required hires by year.

The spreadsheet should cover no more than

five or six years, and no more than 8 to 12

categories of employee. That’s roughly 50

spreadsheet cells of hiring forecast.

If there is no workforce-planning process in

your company, you can get a solid handle

Q: What’s the first thing to do when beginning an Employment Branding initiative?

A: This first step in building your Employer Brand is asking yourself one question: why? This may sound obvious, but many companies rush to build an Employer Brand for employer brand’s sake without foundational direction. Establishing a clear ‘Why?’ is fundamental in determining how you will go about building, executing, measuring, and iterating your Employer Brand efforts.

The field of Employer Branding is complex, and goes much deeper than social media and EVPs. Without a clear understanding of the problems you’re trying to solve and your ideal outcomes, you can easily spin your wheels and head off in directions that aren’t leading to the outcomes and results you seek.

Starting with a clear answer to the “Why?” will help you prioritize and allocate your resources and time properly. Most importantly, it will allow you to measure and track the success of your employer branding efforts.

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– Lars Schmidt, Founder, Amplify Talent

on these numbers by tallying the current

number of employees in each category.

Then multiply that number by the attrition

rate and the forecast growth rate to build a

defensible forecast of your own.

With those numbers in hand, it is easy to

estimate the audience size. Roughly, for

every open job requisition (assuming one

requisition per job) you’ll need around 10

names on the shortlist. You might start by

estimating that you will need 100 sets of

candidate data to produce those 10.

For a company of 1,000 employees with an

attrition rate of 15% and a forecast annual

growth rate of 10%, the number of hires

would be about 250. In the worst case, you

would need 25,000 prospective candidates

to populate 250 short lists with 10 names

on each.

Since there is significant overlap between

jobs, you might be able to get by with an

audience of half that. Frankly speaking,

the size of the audience required to fuel

a company’s growth is often enough to

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steer the EB initiative towards a variety

of commercial services. Employee data

aggregators and other bulk sources of

candidate information fill the gap here.

Self Appraisal After the basic targeting is

underway, it’s time to take a

good internal look: what you

want to understand is exactly how the world

sees your organization as an employer.

This is not a good time for sugar coating or

hiding from the truth.

Make an inventory of the data from search

engines, social media and review sites.

What are people saying about you as an

employer? Look for detailed info from:

Alumni

Current Employees

Job Hunters

Customers

News Outlets

Competitors

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– Mark Hornung, Sr. Talent Manager, Talent Marketing, Informatica

Q: What are the three biggest mistakes in Employment Branding?

A: The simplest definition of “brand” is a “relationship.” So the employer brand is the relationship the employer has with employees (current, past and potential). It is a two-way connection – the actions of one influence the other.

Employer Branding is the act of communicating the brand, i.e., explaining the value proposition inherent in it (the answer to “What’s in it for me?”).

The three biggest mistakes employers make with Employer Branding are:

Not being clear about the Employer Brand. If you cannot explain it in a simple sentence, it’s not clear. Distill it to its essence.

An Employer Value Proposition (EVP) that misses the mark. If your EVP is about creating value for shareholders, that won’t resonate with employees; there’s not much in that for them (other than more work). Your EB and its messaging must be meaningful to employees, current and prospective.

Not communicating the brand. Even if you have a great relationship with your employees, if you don’t tell anyone it remains an abstraction. Think PESO here: Paid, Earned, Social, and Owned media. Have a good mix of each, appropriate for your industry and markets, in order to make sure people know what your brand is and if it’s right for them.

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One way of evaluating all of this data is to

quantify it by source. For example, what

percentage of reviews in each category are

fundamentally negative? Often the most

negative information involves the practices of

a few managers or a specific location.

Keep an ongoing assessment of the public

perception of the company as an employer.

You can show progress with EB by showing

a change, by category, in the volume of

negativity. (Better spun, it’s the growth in

positivity.)

Building an Employment BrandThe goal of an EB project

is to communicate the

following to the appropriate audience:

What it is like to work for the company

Why someone would want to work there

Why the reviews are wrong

To repeat our earlier assertions, EB is

the combination of both 1.) company

generated and 2.) non-company-generated

information about the company that a past

present or future employee consumes.

EB projects are the way that companies

tell their side of the story. Careful definition

of the audience is required to ensure an

adequate focus.

Some organizations begin their EB

process by formally defining an Employee

Value Proposition (EVP). The EVP is a

series of statements or a short story that

– Rob McIntosh, Chief Analyst, ERE Media, Inc.

Q: How do you capture the essence of an Employment Brand (i.e. how do you capture culture)?

A: Based on my experience running large global talent acquisition functions that have looked to define Employment Brand and value, it always comes down to a few simple-to-follow principles.

First, look through the lens of the customer (the candidate or employee) and answer the question of, “What is so special about the company, its mission/vision, and, most importantly, what is it like to work there?”

I have seen way too many people confuse Employment Brand and culture with some marketing fluff and glossy brochures with stock pictures of happy diverse people. It ain’t that. It’s as simple as being transparent and telling people what it is like to work at your company, and just as important, telling them what you aspire to be.

People want to work with other people who share a similar mission/vision value proposition, but also do it in a work environment that motivates them to leap out of bed every morning. It’s not rocket science, but too many people over-engineer the question-and-answer in my humble opinion.

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describes the benefits employees receive

for the work they do. It is the underlying

‘offer’ on which EB is based.

The alternative approach is to assume that

the basic value proposition is hardwired in

the organization, and get started with the

rest of the process. There are advocates for

both points of view.

The next step is to begin to accumulate

a library of stories about the company.

These stories can range from a video of a

‘day in the life’ of an employee, to a heroic

tale of the adventures of an employee, to

a region-wide marketing campaign. Like

everything EB, the specifics are dependent

on the circumstances and resources of the

organization.

The fundamental principle is that, in

addition to product differentiation, each

company now has the opportunity to

differentiate as an employer. – Bill Boorman, Managing Director, Recruiting Daily, LLC

Q: What’s the best way to innovate in Employment Branding?

A: Employer Branding and employee value proposition (EVP) have become mainstream. Most companies provide more than job ads as part of their talent attraction strategy. They identify and frame an EVP, summed up in 5 or 6 “cool” statements.

As with other strategies, the principles become dated as the general market catches up. Where we are now is a period of “employer blanding,” where one career site or communication looks much the same as the other. For example, the first few hundred companies who launched a “day in the life” video, an Instagram account or content on a hashtag were seen as different.

As recruiters increasingly moved to try to be marketers, their content focused on attraction by making companies look increasingly attractive rather than projecting an honest story, which has a real value in enabling candidates to make a real choice.

EB and EVP approaches are getting tired. To have real value, organizations need to move from an approach of unified single messages to individual messaging that is person-to-person between employees and their peers in the wider industry. This is less about content and more about enablement without dictating the message to the messenger. A good example of this is by sharing what folks are really interested in. How is this company going to make me more employable by another in the future?

It takes some bravery to allow and enable people to connect and talk honestly, but it is the only way individual communication and attraction becomes valuable, with the right people in the right jobs in the right companies.

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THE RECRUITING PROCESS

9 STEPS

EB is woven throughout the recruiting

process. A world-class EB project has

stories, examples and experiences

integrated into each phase of the

process. As the recruiting process moves

towards the hiring moment, the role of EB

is to persuade the candidate that joining

the company is the right decision.

Here is the recruiting process in a nutshell.

Each of the 9 steps of the recruiting workflow

are defined by a series of keywords. (Not all

companies use all of the processes outlined

in the individual steps or even all of the steps.)

1 Target

Supply, Demand, Demographics, Design of

Work, Job Description, Context, Marketing

Plan, Employment Brand Design, Price the

Job, Compensation Philosophy, Interface w/

Workforce Planning, Interface with Business

Development Proposals, Revise if Fail

EB Initiatives: This is where you accumulate

the research, layout the EVP and design

compensation. In Targeting, it is important to

learn about the demographics of each group

you must reach; that way, you can design

messages that are relevant.

2 Attract

Job Ad, Landing Pages, Employment Site,

Employment Brand Execution, Distribute

Jobs, Referrals, Social Media, Data

Aggregation/Collection, Talent Communities,

Talent Databases, Mailing Lists, Email Tools,

Drip Campaigns, Fill the Top of the Funnel,

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Online Events, Physical Events, Physical

Media, Mobile Branding, Landing Page,

Revise if Fail

EB Initiatives: The attraction process is just

like an advertising campaign in traditional

marketing. You are trying to reach specific

kinds of prospects with specific offers that

you want them to accept. This involves a

mix of all four PESO media types. The things

that work best here are ideas, images,

stories, documents and files that can be

shared across delivery mechanisms.

3 Identify

First Match, Early/Aggressive Filtration,

ShortListing, First DeRisking, Skills Testing,

Personality Assessment, Reduce to 10

Candidates, Administrative Coordination,

Revise If Fail

EB Initiatives: Any communications

with candidates who don’t make the cut

should be flavored with EB and executed

in consonance with Candidate Experience

guidelines. Eliminating a candidate from the

shortlist is a good moment to see if they fit

somewhere else within the organization.

THE RECRUITING FUNNEL

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1 Target

Attract

Identify

Convert

Persuade/Select

Close

De-Risk/Final Verification

Onboard

System Analytics & Larger System Feedback

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ASK THE EXPERTS

– Will Staney, Founder, Proactive Talent Strategies

Q: Are there companies that shouldn’t or don’t need to focus on Employment Branding?

A: Having worked on and led Employer Branding at companies ranging from less than 200 to over 75,000 employees in startup and large enterprise environments, I can confidently say there are no organizations I feel shouldn’t focus on Employment Branding. Large or small, well-known consumer brands or unknown startups, every employer should have at least some focus on Employer Branding because every employer has an Employment Brand whether they focus on it or not. By not making an effort to join the conversation and tell their employee experience story, they risk letting others control the perceptions of who they are as an employer. They also risk not attracting the right culture-fit talent by not giving candidates the ability to adequately research their culture before applying.

Now, the focus of their Employer Branding efforts may be different depending on who the company is and what their goals are, of course. For example, a small startup or B2B company who doesn’t have a well-known consumer brand may need to focus on Employer Brand awareness more than, say a Google or Facebook. However, even a Google needs to use Employer Branding to differentiate their culture from their competitors or raise awareness of a particular effort like diversity and inclusion.

So, no. I do not believe there is a company on the planet that shouldn’t use Employment Branding to help them hire, just like I don’t think there is an organization on the planet that shouldn’t use marketing to help sell their product or service.

a clear picture of the process and insert

communications at strategic spots.

5 Persuade/Select

Courting, Deep Interviewing, Interviewers as

Brand Advocates, Risk Assessments, The

Hard Sell, Data Review, Feedback If Fail

EB Initiatives: The conversion process is

a series of communications opportunities.

Each candidate interaction, in person or with

a machine, should be flavored with strains

of EB. From the waiting period before the

interview to the hotel room the night before

the interview, the EB team should make

4 Convert

Final Filtering, Produce 2 to 3 viable

candidates, Interviewing, Interview

Logistics, Schedule Coordination, Travel

Arrangements, Video Interviewing,

Interviewing Process, Data Review,

Revise If Fail

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EB Initiatives: The reason that Employment

Branding is critical throughout the Hiring

process is that you are setting expectations

about life at the company. Well managed,

these can be self-fulfilling and rearrange

the organization’s culture. Continuing

to reference brands and stories in the

persuasion and selection processes means

making sure that each person who interacts

with the candidate is suitably prepared.

6 Close

Negotiate, Settle, Offer, More Negotiating,

Legal Vetting, Revise If Fail

EB Initiatives: This is the moment. The

candidate is able to take in very simple

messages that really stick.

7 De-Risk / Final Verification

Background, Résumé Verification,

References, Offer Letter, Close Out /

Update Files, Rerouting for Non-selected

Candidates, Feedback If Fail

EB Initiatives: This part of the process

can be the most anxiety-inducing for the

candidate. As the final kinks are worked

out of the background investigation,

demonstrating care for the candidate in

limbo serves as a visceral demonstration

of company values.

8 Onboard

Paperwork-Immigration, Tax, System

Passwords, Benefits Enrollment, New Hire

Logistics. Acculturation, Feedback If Fail

EB Initiatives: The transition from outsider

to insider is fraught with complexity and

uncertainty. This is exactly where an EB

program shines. By focusing on the benefits

of joining, the EB team can reduce any

issues generated by waiting.

9 System Analytics and Larger System Feedback

Funnel Close Rates, Quality of Hire,

Hiring Manager Satisfaction, Candidate

Satisfaction, Cross Phase Analysis, Business

Consequence, Detailed Performance,

Benchmarking, Comparative Analytics

EB Initiatives: Most hiring managers don’t

care about the candidate’s experience or the

Employment Brand. Use analytics to continue

to persuade them about the value of EB.

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GETTING STARTEDEMPLOYMENT BRANDING

As you can imagine, there is a

massive range of things you can do in

Employment Branding. By this point,

either your imagination is in overdrive or

you are drowning in possibilities. There

are so many directions you could take

that simply beginning can easily become

a problem.

Here are a few things to get you started:

1 Adopt a philosophy of defining the

problem before you solve it

At each step of the way, in every decision,

it will be easy to get distracted by the

opportunity to be creative. There are so

many ways to express your company’s

culture. Focus on the “Why?”

2 Develop a workforce planning model

It can be as simple as a spreadsheet with 10

types of employees and an estimate of how

many you’ll hire; it can also be dramatically

more complicated. This is the problem you

are trying to solve.

3 Do a demand analysis of each

category of worker

How many are available in your city (or the

cities in which you have offices)? How many

job openings are there? This is the current

demand. Many job boards can tell you this

with a simple search result.

4 Do a supply analysis of each

category of worker

There are generally two or three sources

of data about the supply of different

categories of worker (Department of Labor,

Local Chamber of Commerce, Economic

Development Initiatives). Match your

demand data with research in this area.

5 Identify the most critical positions

you are trying to fill

It’s likely that there are several unrelated

categories of worker who are your hardest

to fill. Compare these categories with the

supply and demand data you collected.

The most critical positions are those that

are hardest to fill and have the weakest

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supply/demand position. (In some cities,

there are two positions available for each

available worker.)

6 Start Here

Solve your biggest problems first. Use things

you already have. Gather your resources.

You’ll need engagement survey data,

company newsletters, promotional videos,

statements of mission, lists of values, blog

postings and other collateral material. One

way of thinking about your first efforts is that

it’s like scrapbooking: plan on taking found

materials and repurposing them.

7 Develop a profile of the kind of

worker you want to hire

Demographics, education level, outside

interests, level of expertise, favorite

hangouts (online and off). You are trying to

create a picture of a target audience. This

is the group to whom you are addressing

the various materials (emails, videos, web

pages, events) you will develop.

8 Begin experimenting with messages

to your audience

In job ads, email and web pages, begin

making the case that your company is a

great place for people in this profession

“because…”

9 Build a values display

Start with a story that you tell in a document

and then move it to the employment section

of your employment page. Give examples of

the values being used on the job.

10 Each week, add a new element

Have a weekly meeting during which you

evaluate your progress to date and then pick

the next projects. Make them bite-sized.

This has been a romp through the issues involved in Employment Branding. If you have read this closely, you should have more questions than you began with. That’s a good thing.

Building an effective Employment Brand involves figuring out how to stay curious about some very repetitive processes and how they are progressing.

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Tina Williams

solves a very tough

problem every day.

As the Director of

Talent Acquisition

at CenturyLink, she

recruits for over

400 locations from an office in Northeast

Louisiana, near the Arkansas border. Her

messages about working for the company

have to be tailored and disseminated

differently in each place.

For each category of worker in each

location, she prepares nuanced individual

materials that describe the company in ways

that matter in that locale for that profession.

She specializes in “working closely with

business leaders to translate business

strategies into human capital needs and

then delivering programs and services to

meet those needs.”

Or as she says: “We tailor (segment

marketing) from skill sets to geography to

demographics. Messaging is tailored and

it gets more so if the position is hard to fill.

You change messaging and tactics based

on the position.”

For some, the challenge would be daunting.

Since Williams cut her teeth on trench-level

marketing for the same firm, she almost

intuitively understands the 400 markets and

their nuances. “We look for every kind of

talent everywhere,” she says.

She worked in marketing at her company

for 16 years before being promoted to run

the Talent Acquisition Department. “We

have a separate organization that focuses

on employment marketing and branding.

We hire from entry level to multiple degree

technical skill set,” she says. “Because we

hire so many who are so different and the

name is new, we knew we had to introduce

or reintroduce ourselves as an employer

of choice.”

CENTURY LINKTINA WILLIAMS, DIRECTOR OF TALENT ACQUISITION

CASE STUDY

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That recruiting problem required a branding

solution. When the company decided to

build a recruiting team, step one was to

develop a staffing operation (all tactics, no

strategy). Step two was the establishment

of a separate employment marketing and

branding initiative.

Last year, she hired an Employment

Branding agency to help with continuous

improvement. The EB firm had a proven

track record. She recruited someone from

the company’s marketing department to

manage the contract.

When asked if EB reduced her recruiting

costs, she says: “You can’t always look

at this from a pure cost perspective. Our

goal is to hire the highest quality people. I

am sure that our approach gets us there.

We can show it with evidence from our

process. But, no, I can’t point to a direct

cost savings.”

One really important key is internal support.

“Brett Blair, our VP of Talent Acquisition made

it possible by removing roadblocks and

making sure I had the resources I needed,”

she adds. “He coached and supported our

team at every step.”

About the most important things to do, she

immediately began raving about the quality

of her team. Then she outlined a basic

process:

First, you must identify and understand your audience.

Second, you must tailor your messages for each audience.

Third, you must use different tactics for each market, tailored to your goals.

Fourth, use your leverage. My employees work in a regulated industry. That makes knowing where to find them easier.

Fifth, take the material through the same process that any other marketing message gets.

Tina Williams used focus and attention

to build a national Employment Brand

in 400 distinct markets. It sounds easy

when she talks about it. She is always

relentlessly moving on to the next big project,

accomplishing it and moving to the next one.

“We tailor (segment marketing) from skill sets to geography to demographics. Messaging is tailored and it gets more so if the position is hard to fill. You change messaging and tactics based on the position.”– Tina Williams, Director of Talent Acquisition, Century Link

http://www.dice.com

The Definitive Guide To Employment Branding

Recruiting & HR

Transcript of The Definitive Guide To Employment Branding