Employer branding is critical to the recruitment process. Companies need to differentiate between their consumer brand and their employer brand if they genuinely want to attract the right candidate for them, as well as engage their existing employees.
But before we go into the nitty-gritty of employer branding ourselves, we’ll let our panel of employer branding experts from world-renowned businesses give your their take on what employer branding really means.
Jennifer Johnston
Employer branding is the art and science of building and evangelizing your reputation as an employer. The heart of it is your Employee Value Proposition, which is the story of what your company offers its people in exchange for their time and talents. This is the story a company uses to not only attract great people but also to build pride and loyalty among people already working for you. Our employee value prop is that Salesforce is a place where you can do meaningful work with good people in a good environment and be fairly rewarded for it.
Jennifer Johnston, Senior Director of Global Employer Branding, Salesforce
Shaunda Zilich
Employer Branding encompasses showcasing externally the full journey of an employee at your company. It lends itself to cover from making someone aware of your company all the way through employee experience and career development beyond employment at your company. It is the story that allows the outside world to understand what it is like to work with or at your company.
Shaunda Zilich, Global Employment Brand Leader, GE
Ton Rodenburg
Short answer: building talent relationships. Long answer: to attract, inspire and develop brand advocates. It’s a holistic approach to manage everything that contributes to the total employee experience and life cycle. It’s about building an intrinsic great employer story, with an energetic identity at the core of its brand culture. A distinctive identity based on meaningful purpose, energizing values and with challenging ambitions at its heart. A brand culture that is activated and brought to life / kept alive through brand signature leadership, HR, facilities and working environments, products and services. All-in-all employer branding is about building a great story together and making sure it’s told well.
Ton Rodenburg, Employer Branding Strategy Director, ARA M/V Human Resource Communications
Estela Vazquez Perez
Employer positive influencing. An employer brand is the perception and feelings provoked by your company as an employer. People create mental models from biological reactions at every touch point with your company. These reactions are remembered as feelings. Therefore, Employer branding is the tactical approach to positively influence these mental models either with a well-told story of the truth or designing amazing employee and candidate experiences. While I manage the global employer brand, I can reach into many amazing professionals to execute brand – hence branding – in a diverse portfolio of initiatives internally and externally.
Estela Vazquez Perez, Global Employment Brand Director, Royal Bank of Canada
Sarang Brahme
In my view, the common misconception is that employer branding is how the company describes itself but that’s not the case; employer branding is, in simple words, what employees, past and present, think about the company as an employer and as a place to build their career and develop.
Sarang Brahme, Global Social Recruiting & Talent Brand Manager, Capgemini
Audra Knight
Employer branding is telling your company story to attract people that will excel in your work environment and repel people that will not. There are many ways job seekers will research what it’s like to work at your company and branding let’s your company and employees be an important part of that conversation.
Audra Knight, Recruitment Operations Manager, Tenable
Hannah Fleishman
Your company’s brand can be defined as what people say about you when you aren’t in the room. As employers, we should be asking ourselves: What would candidates say about our culture? How would employees describe our workplace? That’s employer brand, and creating a strong one comes down to storytelling. Employer branding is the story you tell about your company as a place to work. It’s the story you tell about your values, beliefs, and people. That’s why building an amazing culture should be a priority for all businesses. By investing in culture, employer branding becomes about storytelling, not marketing.
Hannah Fleishman, Inbound Recruiting Manager, HubSpot
Jörgen Sundberg
Well, let’s start with ’employer brand’ which I define as your organization’s reputation as an employer. Just like reputation, you can’t own the brand but you can try to define it and manage the messaging. That’s ’employer branding’ to me, essentially the activity of managing the brand.
I should also say that some people are very uneasy with the term ’employer branding’ as it’s sometimes interchangeable with recruitment marketing or advertising. Simon Barrow describes it as ’employer brand management’ which I believe is the best way to describe this activity.
And don’t get me started on ’employment branding’, ‘talent branding’ or ’employee branding’.
Jörgen Sundberg, Employer Brand Consultant & CEO, Link Humans
Jaclyn Campbell
Employer branding is a way of highlighting what makes an organisation a unique and/or great place to work. Using content and creative assets to show what happens behind the doors will help attract quality talent who feel aligned to your brand and core values.
Jaclyn Campbell, Employer Brand Consultant, Optus
Carmen Collins
At Cisco, we define employer branding as how we appear to both employees and candidates as a great place to work. For our team, we make it our mission to make personal connections with future talent.
Carmen Collins, Social Media & Talent Brand Lead, Cisco
