A How-to Guide to

Employer Branding
 Introduction

A strong employer brand is a window into your business. It determines how you
present your organisation at every touchpoint across the employee lifecycle,
from hiring to retiring and beyond.

It also helps people outside your business understand what it’s like to work for
you. It makes you stand out in a crowded marketplace and makes it more likely
you’ll attract those who share your values. They’ll also be more likely to join,
engage and stay.

Get your employer brand right and you’ll also strengthen your relationship with
existing employees, drive engagement and improve the bottom line.

This guide explores what employer branding is, why it’s important and how to
do it. Be aware that this a commitment, not a one-off project. Your employer
brand will develop, grow, and at times, transform to reflect the development of
your organisation.

2 | A How-to Guide to Employer Branding

 What Is Employer
Branding?

We’re all familiar with the concept of branding in marketing terms. While your
company brand makes your business attractive to customers, your employer
brand makes you attractive to employees.

But it’s not just about a nice logo and pretty brand colours. It should replicate
what your business is like internally and should inform and be informed by the
company’s strategy, values, behaviours, goals and objectives.

Internal communication specialists, Ortec, provide this well-rounded definition:

“Employer Branding refers to the branded

communication activities involved in reaching and
retaining that special, authentic and distinguished
position as an employer in the minds of your
potential, current and alumni employees and their
influencers with the primary goals to attract,
recruit and retain ideal employees.” 1

In line with current marketing trends, authenticity is central to employer branding.

Cut an organisation and it should bleed its brand values because they are integral
to the business.

As with all marketing, employer branding influences a wider audience than the
intended recipients. Employees will be influenced by the perceptions of those
around them when it comes to making their next move and deciding whether to
stay with an organisation.

1 Ortec, https://www.orteccommunications.com/, 29th June 2017

3 | A How-to Guide to Employer Branding

 Employer
Branding Benefits

Establishing your employer brand might feel like yet another task on an already
extensive list. But, as Andrew Brown-Allan, Group Marketing and Propositions
Director at Trak Global, says,

“A strong employer brand is important and it’s only going to grow in importance
as the market becomes more competitive.”

The advantages of employer branding far outweigh the investment in time and
effort. These five benefits illustrate the positive impact of a good employer brand.

Benefit # 1 - Attraction

Did you know that 75%2 of job seekers consider an employer’s brand before
applying? Developing an effective employer brand can help you stand out in a
crowded marketplace and keep your organisation top of mind. Which will give
your company an enviably wide talent pool to choose from.

What’s more, a strong employer brand can present

compelling reasons to join your company, not your
competitors. With a predicted world-wide shortage of
18 million skilled workers by 20203 , standing out will be
critical.

But you want to attract more than a skillset; you want

to attract a person who will fit with your organisational
culture. Which is where your employer brand comes in.
It can act like a filter getting applicants to self-select (or
de-select) resulting in fewer, better quality applications
for your team to review. Brown-Allan says,

“Salary will always be an extremely important factor in attracting people. People

don’t just do it for the love. Once you’ve got that box ticked it comes down to
what else differentiates you.”
2 CareerArc, http://www.careerarc.com/blog/2015/06/38-percent-of-employees-who-were-let-go-share-
negative-views-of-employers-new-careerarc-employer-branding-study/, 29th June 2017
3 McKinsey and Company, http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/employment-and-growth/talent-
tensions-ahead-a-ceo-briefing, 29th June 2017

4 | A How-to Guide to Employer Branding

 Employer
Branding Benefits

Benefit # 2 - Engagement

Use your employer brand to inform recruitment and you’ll attract candidates
who will fit with your business. They’ll also be more likely to engage with your
organisation’s mission and be motivated to greater levels of productivity.

Ric Brooks, Operations Director at Tuna Fish

Media believes that recruiting new hires who
align to the organisation’s culture “allows
a new starter to embed themselves into
company culture rather than pushing them in
a certain direction.”

Your employer brand can also engage existing

employees by reflecting the embedded
values, personality and behaviours of your
organisation. Since the 1950s, the annual
employee engagement survey has been the tool of choice to assess employees’
engagement levels. However, the demise of this approach is an emerging trend4 .

In its place is a more holistic, integrated, real-time approach to measuring employee

commitment and passion using social media for instant temperature checks. And
employer branding forms part of this shift because, to remain authentic, employer
brands must adapt to reflect sustained internal changes.

Benefit # 3 – Retention

Better employee engagement means improved loyalty and higher retention rates.
This builds knowledge and skill within your business which, ultimately, improves
your bottom line. Keeping hold of your best people also improves your competitive
advantage and reduces the costs associated with recruitment and on-boarding.

4 Engage For Success, http://engageforsuccess.org/show-163-death-annual-engagement-survey, 29th

June 2017

5 | A How-to Guide to Employer Branding

 Employer
Branding Benefits

Benefit # 4 - Strategic Cohesiveness

An employer brand should sit at the centre of your people activity. It should
provide an overarching way of communicating with employees at every touchpoint
across the employee lifecycle.

This means you can link every element of people management to your employer
brand. From improving the employee experience throughout the recruitment
process, to developing an aligned reward brand, to making people redundant and
communicating with alumni and pensioners.
However and whenever you are communicating with your employees, your
messaging should be on-brand.

Benefit # 5 – A Better Bottom Line

A strong employer brand can drive recruitment efficiencies

and retain employees which saves time and money and frees
up resources to focus on other work. It’s also closely tied to
customer experience because the quality of service offered by
employees is closely linked to engagement levels.
Happy employees = happy customer = better bottom line.

A strong employer brand that’s managed effectively can also help protect
employers from poaching, something that’s on the rise according to Avensure
HR5 . In 75% of such cases, organisations make a counter-offer pushing costs up
unexpectedly.

Too many instances like this and one of your business’ major costs will spiral.
If employees’ heads are turned by a competitor, a strong employer brand that
is regularly and positively reinforced is likely to reduce the level of counter-offer
required. And it can even prevent employees’ from looking elsewhere in the first
place.

As mentioned previously, employer branding is a process, not a one-off projectand

there are a number of steps involved in the cycle.
5 Avensure HR, https://hr-24.co.uk/industry-news/staff-retention/, 29th June 2017

6 | A How-to Guide to Employer Branding

 How to Develop
Your Employer
Brand

Build Your Branding Team

Employer branding isn’t a top down exercise but it does

need buy-in from the CEO. While it’s often managed
between HR, Internal Communications and Marketing, you
can also include line managers to create a cross-function
taskforce. Limit your team to around six people; invite
many more and things can get messy.

Establish Your Goals and Parameters

A briefing document will clarify your aims, outputs, in- and out-of-scope activities,
risks, key stakeholders, KPIs and project plan. Consider the main challenges your
business faces now and for the foreseeable future, define what success looks like
and consider who you want to attract and retain.

Establishing KPIs allows you to assess the effectiveness of your project in terms
that are meaningful for your business. Common KPIs include:

- Employee satisfaction, pride and engagement

- Increased referral recruitment (reducing recruitment costs)
- Improved candidate response to job adverts
- Reduction in turnover, particularly in key jobs or top performers
- Reduced cost-per-hire
- Enhanced company reputation

You will need to ensure you have the tools in place to measure and track these
metrics.

7 | A How-to Guide to Employer Branding

 How to Develop
Your Employer
Brand

Establish Where You Are Now and Where You Want to Be

Research

Your taskforce should start by understanding the mission,

values and behaviours at the core of your employee value
proposition. Review your current business strategy and
five-year plan, employee engagement survey results and
data on external trends that may impact your business in
the future.

Engage

While it might be tempting for your taskforce to design your employer brand
based on your research alone, you’ll get a much better result by understanding
your workforce’s existing perceptions.

Take a cross section of the business at different organisational levels to get a

handle on your current position and seek their views. The following questions
give you a good starting point:

- What are the most and least attractive features of the

organisation?
- How do you feel about working for the organisation?
- How do you think the business is perceived by current
and potential employees?
- How do these perceptions impact your ability to recruit
top talent?
- What are the typical characteristics and attributes of
current employees?
- What attributes and characteristics do we require
from employees for our business to be successful in
the future?

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 How to Develop
Your Employer
Brand

Decide on Your Positioning

There are two aspects to the positioning of your employer brand:

1. Internal alignment

Your employer brand needs to align with your

company brand otherwise there will be a clear
disconnect between how you present your business
to the public and how your employees perceive the
business from the inside.

2. Position in comparison to other organisations

You need to consider what’s different about your

business. There’s no point having an employer brand
that’s exactly like your competitors; you need to
establish what’s unique about your organisation. The
strongest employer brands are authentic; they reflect
the experience of their employees while aligning to
the company brand, mission, vision and values.

As Trak Global’s Brown-Allan says,

“We are constantly developing our employer brand. Once someone is in our
organisation they very quickly understand the culture and that is something we
are working on demonstrating externally.”

However you position your employer brand, the internal and external perspectives
should be mutually reinforcing.

9 | A How-to Guide to Employer Branding

 How to Develop
Your Employer
Brand

Draft Your Employer Brand

Using the data gathered and your decision regarding your positioning, you can
draft your employer brand. It doesn’t need to be complicated. L’Oreal6 established
three main pillars to their employee brand:

1. A thrilling experience
2. Inspiring company
3. School of excellence

These pillars will likely be supported by an additional layer of detail and supporting
information but all their employee messaging will be based on this branding, from
recruitment adverts to promoting new benefits and internal communications.

Establish the look and feel of your brand at this stage. L’Oreal’s careers slide
deck7 demonstrates a strong and consistent use of vibrant colour to reinforce the
thrilling and inspiring aspects of their employer brand.

Test and Finalise

Test your draft with your employees. People love to feel

that their views matter and they’ll help you to finesse
your final product.

You should create a single employer brand that will

work across the different segments of your employee
population. However, you may have slightly different
messaging or emphasis for different sections such as
talent, geographies, gender, age or business unit.

6 Link Humans, http://linkhumans.com/blog/loreal-employer-value, 29th June 2017

7 Link Humans, http://linkhumans.com/blog/loreal-employer-value, 29th June 2017

10 | A How-to Guide to Employer Branding

 How to Develop
Your Employer
Brand

Consider What This Means for Your Business

Your employer brand shouldn’t be a document that you publish and forget about. It
should live and breathe in your processes, communications and at every employee
touchpoint across the employee lifecycle.

Here are the areas that internal communications experts Synergy Creative8 say
you will need to review and align to your employer brand:

• Brand perception and attraction

• Online presence
• Application, interview and acceptance
• Keeping in touch through the notice period
• Induction and onboarding
• Team bonding
• Leadership and management
• Vision and strategy
• Performance and learning
• Career development
• Reward and recognition
• Exit
• Staying in touch
• Re-joining

Living your brand should be about more than processes, documents and
communication. Brooks says Tunafish Media’s commitment to being a social place
to work is central to their brand. Which is why new employees are invited to do
“something outside of the office as soon as possible…It’s important to start as
we mean to go on with something as simple as a team lunch or going to a social
event.”

8 Synergy Creative, http://www.synergycreative.co.uk/images/Finders_Keepers_whitepaper.pdf, 29th

June 2017

11 | A How-to Guide to Employer Branding

 How to Develop
Your Employer
Brand

Plan Your Launch

Now you have your employer brand, start communicating it to employee and
mangers; explain what the brand is, and how they can use and sell it. You should
also have a range of documents and tools, both off and online, for employees to
use. These will help retain brand integrity.

Take opportunities to demonstrate your brand to your team. Kate

Howell, CEO of social media agency Immediate Futures, positions
her employer brand as one that’s open and honest. Which is why
they place a huge emphasis on sharing information and knowledge.

“We have a quarterly review meeting where we share the numbers on the bottom
line, our successes, and our areas of improvement. We are open about where we
are and how we will be moving forward.”

Build Your Brand

Now you need to decide on some campaigns, establish specific KPIs and make a
base measurement so you can track your successes.

Target your first campaigns at the most important audiences first and work your
way through your plan, tracking what works, what doesn’t and learning as you
go. Your communication channels will need to be strong, both internally and
externally, and you’ll need to establish the optimal communications mix to get
your message across to the right audience at the right time.

12 | A How-to Guide to Employer Branding

 How to Develop
Your Employer
Brand

Manage Your Brand

Measuring your results against KPIs is at the heart of good brand management.
In the short term, this should be an ongoing process of evaluation, tweaking
and improving your campaigns. In the long term, you should adjust your overall
employer brand to reflect changes in business plans, the external environment or
within your workforce.

Use employee engagement surveys, exit interviews and employee workshops to

track perceptions internally and evaluate media reports to gain insights externally.

In Conclusion

Like a stick of rock, a strong employer brand looks good, has a

clear message and, wherever you delve into it, the message is
consistent.

Establishing and maintaining an employer brand is about being

a curator, not a dictator. By accurately reflecting to the outside
world what the business is about, you’ll attract, engage and
retain across the employee lifecycle.

Monitoring your employer brand will give you competitive

advantage in the long term. Instead of throwing money at short-
term recruitment campaigns or paying people more money to
stay, invest in your employer brand. By being authentic, you’ll
differentiate yourself from your competitors and ensure your
business success for the long term.

13 | A How-to Guide to Employer Branding

 Our roadmap for
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14 | A How-to Guide to Employer Branding

 How to Develop
Your Employer
Brand

Sources

https://www.realstaffing.com/employers/recruitment-guides/building-a-compelling-
employer-brand

http://www.careerarc.com/blog/2015/06/38-percent-of-employees-who-were-let-go-share-
negative-views-of-employers-new-careerarc-employer-branding-study/

https://www.mercer.com/content/dam/mercer/attachments/global/webcasts/gl-2016-talent-
reimagining-candidate-experience-enhance-employer-brand-expand-talent-pool-mercer.pdf

http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/employment-and-growth/talent-tensions-ahead-a-
ceo-briefing

https://hr-24.co.uk/industry-news/staff-retention/

http://www.synergycreative.co.uk/images/Finders_Keepers_whitepaper.pdf

http://www.synergycreative.co.uk/latest-articles/employer-brand-10-step-action-plan

http://img.en25.com/Web/OrtecBV/%7B9e8f5746-f688-473f-b89c-22472f8292fb%7D_018-
employerbranding.pdf?utm_source=Eloqua&utm_campaign=IMGZINE%20Download%20
Email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=&utm_term=

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-brown-allan-207334/?ppe=1

15 | A How-to Guide to Employer Branding