Employer branding, while still relatively new, is constantly changing. It is a space that promotes innovation and creativity. So if it is changing this much now, what will it be like in the future?
In the final employer branding panel piece, we discuss the future of employer branding and what direction the industry is heading into.
Hannah Fleishman
Employer branding today is more of a press conference than a dialogue. Companies publish content about the best aspects of their workplace and culture, and then wait for top talent to come to them. There isn’t a whole lot of power given to the candidate. I think that will change soon. We can already see the impact sites like Glassdoor have on the recruiting process; candidates want to get and give honest feedback, and ask questions of employers. We have to not only make ourselves accessible to talent, but make the experience engaging, personalized, and relevant. Thanks to more and more technology being introduced into the recruiting space, I think this will become the norm. So for companies who are ready to embrace that shift and put the candidate in the driver’s seat, it’s an exciting time to be doubling down on your employer branding.
Hannah Fleishman, Inbound Recruiting Manager, HubSpot
Jennifer Johnston
The future of employer branding is taking a holistic approach to creating an engaging employee experience across every stage of the employee journey. It starts with building a solid employer brand that attracts the best talent. Next your onboarding process needs to help new employees adopt your culture and ways of working. Then comes the hard work – making employees feel deeply engaged and set up for success on an ongoing basis. If you do that well, you win their loyalty and their advocacy while they are employees, and beyond to when they become alumni.
Jennifer Johnston, Senior Director of Global Employer Branding, Salesforce
Sarang Brahme
The evolution of AI, machine learning and digital will have a positive impact on employer branding technologies as they will provide an opportunity to personalise the experience in the employer branding journey. Also, big data is a great tool to aggregate, listen and analyse employee feedback to improve the strategy. As humans move towards wanting more personalised approaches in everything they do, big brands will need to align their messaging to suit each individual, using all of the aforementioned tools to enable that.
Sarang Brahme, Global Social Recruiting & Talent Brand Manager, Capgemini
Carmen Collins
It’s meeting candidates where they are, and creating content the way they consume it. The Alpha generation has never NOT had mobile devices, so how you’ll communicate with them will change how you think about employer branding. For them, it won’t be enough to have a mobile-friendly Careers site – you’ll need to have a mobile-FIRST website. If they build their networks on messaging platforms, you’ll need to develop a strategy for messaging platforms. If they speak in emoji and text, you’ll need to adapt to their language. It’s not about what you want to say and how you want to say it, it’s about them and the skills they have to bring to the future of work.
Carmen Collins, Social Media & Talent Brand Lead, Cisco
Estela Vazquez Perez
The future is for CEOs to embody the the employment brand. As employment brands become most relevant in business, there is no revenue growth without humanity. Here is why, the business has realized that operational excellence can be achieved by partnering with artificial intelligence but critical and unusual questions are always made by humans so culture becomes a high priority in opening and sustaining markets. If you want the right results, you need the right people and culture. Your employment brand will draw the best out of everyone and their special kind of discretionary effort and non-scripted behaviors will be differentiators in business. The future of employer branding is to be recognized as a lever for culture transformation.
Estela Vazquez Perez, Global Employment Brand Director, Royal Bank of Canada
Ton Rodenburg
The future is expressed in my former observations. An integrated, holistic approach to build the talent community that builds great companies. In that sense it will be interwoven and part of all other strategies: identity, corporate brand, marketing brand, HR strategy and other. The employer brand will be the most forceful, because it will generate the true energy; passion, dedication, inspiration, and performance of people that make the difference.
Ton Rodenburg, Employer Branding Strategy Director, ARA M/V Human Resource Communications
Jaclyn Campbell
Two things. People today are comfortable posting on their social media accounts about their personal life, but not their work life. I believe we’ll start to see a massive increase in careers related content, especially from employees of companies that actively encourage and support team members to share their experiences. Secondly, I think more marketing professionals will start to make the switch into employer branding. I see a lot of talent acquisition specialists move into this space, but from my perspective this work is much more of a marketing role than it is recruitment. Marketers are starting to realise this is the place to be.
Jaclyn Campbell, Employer Brand Consultant, Optus
Audra Knight
Recruitment content is going to continue to get more advanced and more valuable to the seeker. We will see less spammy “We are hiring a XYZ” and more personalized useful content delivered based on user behavior. Video storytelling will also continue to rise but I think phone videos and live videos with less production will be preferred over expensive ones that look like commercials.
Audra Knight, Recruitment Operations Manager, Tenable
Shaunda Zilich
BIG! Employer Brand will be the center of Talent Acquisition or Recruiting as we currently know it. I see an evolution happening already to Talent Marketing where it is Employer Brand + Data/AI + Coach. No more job descriptions or even ‘jobs’. We will have project work in the gig economy and brand will be everything! Not only will it be the center of TA but it will also be the more important brand for the company. If you don’t attract and keep the top talent you cannot provide top solutions.
Shaunda Zilich, Global Employment Brand Leader, GE
Jörgen Sundberg
Well I’d like to think that the employer brand function could broaden its scope beyond talent attraction/retention and act as a change agent for improving the workplace across the organisation.
Jörgen Sundberg, Employer Brand Consultant & CEO, Link Humans
