Employer Branding in Recruitment: What It Is and Why It’s Important
We’ve heard it said that a brand is what your audience thinks you are; branding, then, is your opportunity to guide those thoughts in the right direction.
Tracy Clark, Brand Strategy Director at Matchstic, takes this further when she says that Employer Branding is the strategy and tactics used to attract, engage, and retain ideal employees.
Employer Brand: Your reputation among the workforce + the perception of your own employees
Employer Branding: Your efforts to guide your reputation as an employer in a positive manner
In other words, Employer Branding is how a business tells the story of what it’s like to work there. But to be effective, it needs to be more than hollow words on a website.
Why is Employer Branding important?
We generally think of our audience as our customers, and our branding efforts are therefore directed at those paying for our products or services. However, as the competition for talent intensifies, growing businesses are realizing that appealing to existing and potential employees is just as important as attracting customers.
As Tracy notes, companies can no longer afford to treat employer branding as a side project. When done well, it becomes a strategic bridge between internal culture and external perception to create a fully-realized radically relevant brand.
The importance of employer branding should not be underestimated. In fact, a recent study found that only 19% of employees globally feel that what their employer says about itself publicly matches what it’s like to work there.*
So, how can we guide thoughts - from both current and potential employees - in the right direction to attract and retain top talent?
Enter Employer Branding; an emerging discipline that will soon be a standard practice for growing businesses.
Employer Branding Examples
Employer Branding is MailChimp’s incredible 18-week parental leave policy—yes, for both mothers and fathers. It’s the “Top 100 Places to Work” seal Carmax plasters to their billboards. It’s BELAY’s vision and values that resonated so deeply with a friend she cried upon reading them. It’s Zapier working fully-remote (before it was a thing), Chick-fil-A being closed on Sundays, and YNAB’s human-voiced job posts.
Of course, Employer Branding is also the high-paying Wall Street firm’s reputation for 80 hour workweeks, Teach for America’s offer to join and do work that is “hard and never done”, and the military’s offer to put your life on the line to serve your country.
There is no “right” employer brand and the truth is that every company already has some degree of Employer Branding in place. The question is, does your employer brand match what you say it is? And do you like what it says?
There are dramatic examples of this incongruity, such as the “value statement” once plastered on Enron’s website: “We do not tolerate abusive or disrespectful treatment. Ruthlessness, callousness and arrogance don't belong here.”
But this misalignment is often less egregious.
Flippantly telling candidates they can change the world and then stuffing them in a cubicle to do grunt work once they are hired or pushing back when someone wants to use their “unlimited vacation” are surefire ways to erode belief in the public Employer Brand.
It’s best to be upfront and honest, but what if your brand is telling a story you don’t like? After all, the goal here is to attract and retain ideal employees. If you continually attract the wrong people, you may need to craft a stronger Employer Branding strategy.
Your Promise to Employees: The EVP
The Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is a core part of employer branding in recruitment, but is worth being viewed as its own distinct concept.
While the Employer Brand is how your business projects itself and its values, the EVP is the specific promise you make as an employer to employees in exchange for their work. Your EVP is made up of everything from compensation and benefits to perks and opportunities for growth.
Tracy suggests thinking of your EVP as the heart of your employer brand story. When distilled clearly, it helps unify your messaging and sets expectations for both prospective talent and current team members.
In short, it’s the sum total of everything an employee gets in exchange for their commitment to the business. According to a study by the Hinge Research Institute, a good fit with company cultures and values was just as important to job seekers as a competitive salary. The survey results also show other criteria job seekers use to evaluate employers, like a clear vision, opportunity for growth, and doing challenging work.
How to Execute an Employer Branding Campaign
Employer Branding usually falls on the shoulders of whoever is responsible for human resource management. Applying employer branding in recruiting, engagement, and retention requires both clarity and transparency. Defining an aspirational culture or employee brand might be a helpful part of the process, but that should never be presented to employees or candidates as the current reality.
According to Tracy, the most successful employer branding efforts begin with internal clarity. That means starting with leadership alignment and engaging employees early, so they feel ownership in the story being told. As a starting point, Matchstic offers a free employer brand health assessment.
A company must take an honest assessment of their current culture and EVP and then make any necessary changes. This is best developed with the help of a third-party, as team members are unlikely to be fully transparent when communicating directly with their superiors about gaps in the EVP.
Same Page recommends Matchstic as an employer branding partner, and a typical project looks like this:
1. Project Planning & Kickoff
Before diving into research, the project starts with collecting existing materials, aligning on goals, and setting the stage for collaboration. This includes:
Scheduling key meetings
Compiling exist research and materials
Clarifying organizational structure, offerings, and cultural nuances
Outlining the approach for discovery
2. Discovery
This step is all about research and listening to understand the current state of the brand and identify opportunities. It includes:
Discovery sessions and stakeholder interviews
Internal focus groups
Competitive audits
3. Strategy
Insights from discovery are synthesized into a clear employer brand foundation. This includes:
Key insights and recommendations
Development of an Employee/Associate Value Proposition
Creation of a brand strategy brief to guide creative execution
4. Identity Development
The visual and verbal expression of the employer brand is created and refined. This step includes:
Brand voice and messaging development
Visual style concepts (color, typography, imagery)
Concept testing and refinement based on stakeholder feedback
Finalization of identity through sample applications (e.g., homepage, swag)
5. Launch & Activation
The final step ensures the brand is shared, understood, and applied consistently across touchpoints. It includes:
Developing identity guidelines and training stakeholders
Conducting internal workshops
Creating branded applications (e.g., recruiting materials, videos)
Providing consulting support post-launch as needed
If you are wanting to take some first tactical steps on Employer Branding try this toolkit which includes time saving help for HR leaders.
Common Mistakes with Employer Branding
Mistake #1: Misalignment
By now you’ve probably heard the cautionary tale. Enron, before its infamous collapse, proudly displayed four core values in their lavish lobby: Respect, Integrity, Communication and Excellence.
These were literally chiseled into stone!
An extreme example to be sure, but it's tempting for any company to paint a picture on their Careers page that isn’t reality.
The problem with this is your employees are too smart. They know when you aren’t practicing what you preach and doing so will only further disengagement.
Your employer brand can be somewhat aspirational, but should be grounded in reality.
It can be easy to overlook what makes your company special, Tracy says, especially if it feels “normal” to you. But what seems standard internally might actually be a powerful differentiator to future employees.
Mistake #2: Failure to communicate an already strong EVP
Many growing companies can’t yet afford to pay top of market salaries or provide catered lunches in a shiny new office.
But they can provide growth opportunities for employees that they would never get at a larger, more established company. Or maybe the EVP is more autonomy or the chance to earn an ownership stake in the company via stock options.
Unfortunately, many growing companies don’t even try to articulate their value proposition, worried they could never compete with larger, more established companies.
Every viable business has something of value to offer its employees.
Figure out what it is and share it with your current and prospective employees—clearly, loudly, and frequently.
Mistake #3: Assuming your culture is your brand
Philosopher Will Durant says “We are what we repeatedly do.”
At it’s most basic level, your company culture is what your employees actually do over and over again. And while it is a critical component of your employer brand, a strong company culture should not be mistaken for a strong employer brand.
Remember, your employer brand is the perception of your employees and your reputation amongst the workforce at large.
If you have a strong company culture but no one outside of your organization knows about it, you have a weak employer brand. (Conversely, a weak company culture and strong employer brand would be another example misalignment.)
Building a strong company culture is hugely important (and arguably the most challenging part of employer branding), but you can’t stop there.
If you want a truly strong employer brand, you must actively tell that story.
How to Improve Employer Branding
First, you must honestly confront your current brand.
This generally requires engagement surveys or focus group interviews with your team. It might also include auditing what social media and the internet have to say about the employee experience at your company.
Next, you will want to define your EVP, being transparent with yourself and your team about which pieces have been realized and which are aspirational.
Questions to guide you when crafting your EVP include:
What do you hope that employees might say about you to their friends?
What would you hope their exit interviews say?
How would they rate their experience working on your team on Glassdoor?
Using what you learn in the steps above, you would then take intentional steps to bridge this gap between your current culture and your aspirational employer brand.
Concrete deliverables in this stage include building a strong employee onboarding process, cultivating learning and development opportunities for your employees, and diversity and inclusion initiatives. Externally it includes things like adding video and images to your careers page, writing blog posts, and sharing what it is (actually) like to work at your company.
If you want to learn how to improve employer branding, you must adopt a growth mindset—employer branding is never “done” and will evolve over time. However, starting with a foundational employer brand strategy will help you take more intentional action toward telling the story you want to tell.
For a practical guide to get started, check out Matchstic’s free Employer Brand Toolkit.
The ultimate goal of all of this is to build a successful company.
The easiest way to do this is to engage and retain your employees while attracting more talented people to join the team. The best way to do that is with a strong employer brand.
*Employees Rising: Seizing the Opportunity in Employee Activism, Weber Shandwick & KRC Research, 2017
Need help implementing your employer brand across your employee experience? Same Page HR can help.