Categories
Employer Branding

How Experian Boosts Its Employer Brand

Like most of us in 2020, this credit rating company has experienced its share of challenges; subpar Glassdoor reviews, a pandemic, confronting workplace bias, and more. The strength of its employer brand helped weather them.

Lena Lotsey’s role was born out of need. Social media management was becoming too much of a full-time job for Experian’s employee acquisition team, and they needed someone to focus solely on employer brand.

Over the next two years, Lotsey grew employer branding’s ranks to include 30 brand managers in each of Experian’s regions around the globe, expanded Experian’s social reach, transformed its onboarding process, and much more. Along the way, she encountered many of the most common challenges employer brand leaders face: engaging stakeholders, scoring those first quick wins, proving growth, and attracting niche talent. Here’s how her employer brand team tackled them.

Identifying Employer Brand Stakeholders

When Lotsey stepped into her role as Global Employer Brand Director, she knew a key to kickstarting Experian’s employer brand strategy was identifying internal stakeholders. Knowing where to turn for advocacy and resources was essential if her small team was going to be successful.

Scoring Your First Wins

Lotsey knew that early wins would be key to building momentum and proving the importance of employer brand to Experian’s executive leadership. She also knew going too big too fast could lead to disappointment. “You can get lost in the details in employer branding,” she says. “You can spend all day working on a social post.” Instead, Lotsey started with small goals—ones that were simple to execute but would yield the most visible, significant results.

Demonstrating Growth

An internal survey told Lotsey that 96% of her fellow employees were happy at Experian. That satisfaction, however, wasn’t reflected accurately in Experian’s Glassdoor rating, which sat at 3.4 out of 5 stars in January 2019. Lotsey knew this was one metric her employer brand team needed to prioritize.

Attracting Specific Talent

When competing for the attention of tech talent, Experian (like many companies) faces an uphill battle. “It’s hard to reach tech talent. They’re not responding to LinkedIn—they’re hardly even on LinkedIn anymore,” Lotsey observes. To attract these highly sought-after candidates, Lotsey turns to storytelling.

To follow Lena Lotsey’s work in employer brand, connect with her on LinkedIn. For help measuring your employer brand, reach out to us about the Employer Brand Index. Our EBI uses 16 key attributes that measure how you compare with others in your industry.

By Jörgen Sundberg