Employee Brand + Employer Brand

Chapter 3, Part 1 - Corporate Brand Personality

Employee Brand and Employer Brand are often confused and/or considered to mean similar things – in reality they are quite different. However, they both come down to the one core element that will project a strong employer brand or a strong employee brand more than anything else – people behaviours. Therefore, they are heavily interlinked and are dependent on each other.

Peter Cheese , CEO of the CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development) in the United Kingdom told me, “Employer Brand and Corporate Brand are the flip sides of the same coin. Employees then need to live that brand consistently. Achieving this alignment may require a significant shift in behaviours”.

In this chapter we’ll be focusing on how you take both employee brand and employer brand collectively to the next level of engagement throughout your organization.  This is not about creating your employer brand strategy (you probably have one in some form in place already), however it may give you some ideas on how to expand yours to reach more effective levels and results. We will focus more on how you maximize the impact of that strategy by strengthening how the employee brand is implemented and realized throughout the company. We’ll look at:

·                 The differences and correlations between employer brand and employee brand;

·                 The missing elements that make the real difference;

·                 How you can assess the level of engagement with your corporate brand amongst your employees;

·                 Ways to improve engagement and effect the changes you need for competitive advantage;

·                 Attracting and retaining Generations Y and Z;

·                 Team branding for deeper engagement.

MAKING THE DISTINCTION

In the simplest of definitions here’s how we could describe both employer and employee Brand:

·                 employer brand – your company’s reputation as an employer;

·                 employee brand – the process by which employees internalize and then project the corporate brand and reputation.

 They are both intrinsically linked because both are projected the most powerfully by your people. This is impacted by how they feel about your organization and subsequently how they therefore behave. As a result of this emotional response, employees project themselves and talk about the company in a particular way to the outside world. So the two are very much interlinked and are ultimately concentrated around people behaviours.

The employer brand is typically portrayed via the media (broadcast, print and social), and advertising and recruitment campaigns; however this medium is now overshadowed by the human element and reality of experience. How your leaders in particular project themselves is becoming more and more central to the employer brand also. New talents are influenced by what they hear from key people in an organization about the company, and their personal brands too. They will ultimately choose the organization they work for based on the ‘personality’ of that company, and this will come across strongly from its leaders. We’ll be covering more on this in Chapter 4. 

 'Employer Brand and Employee Brand are intrinsically linked via people behaviours'.

Within your company, you probably have some sort of focus on employer brand - a term that was first used in 1996 in the Journal of Brand Management by Simon Barrow and Tim Ambler.  (Barrow and Ambler, 1996). You may even have an employer brand strategy.  This academic paper was the first published attempt to "test the application of brand management techniques to human resource management".  This term has been used widely since the publication of the paper, however I believe the strategies and deployment of it internally within organizations frequently stops short of what is needed in order to fully address your corporate reputation today.

RECRUITMENT IMPACT ON EMPLOYER BRAND

Employer brand, as a source of strategic competitive advantage, has been the basis of discussion in recent years. In my experience it is often an area of great focus by large organizations today and as such is talked about frequently in in-house conferences and education programmes for employees.  It is presented externally to all stakeholders at every opportunity. Companies seek to create the perception and sense of this being a great place to work in order to attract the best people, and the people who will be best aligned to the corporate brand and culture.  They do this by using various recruitment and external HR practices that project the brand reputation of the company.  It might be advertisements that show a certain type of person and working environment, or techniques in interviews that demonstrate the values, for example. If you want to attract top talent and hire the best and brightest employees, you need to understand that the best and brightest employees can work wherever they please.

I would imagine you have in place recruitment strategies that take into account finding the right people to support your brand, but how about a strategy or guidelines at least for the actual process for interviewing, personnel conduct during the interview, having the right people to carry out the interview and the follow-up communication? These are all representative of your employer brand to the candidates, and how they feel during the recruitment process will be a reflection in their minds of the culture of your company. This will get talked about. Are you sure you are managing and measuring this element of your employer brand effectively?

I frequently hear about negative interview experiences from contacts and clients.  These experiences are always described from the angle of the people involved. In one recent example from a 22-year-old graduate about an interview process with a large global finance organization, he told me he had felt less than valued because of the way he was communicated with, post-interview.  He had travelled two hours, twice, for a series of interviews with them, but any form of communication in follow-up took four weeks, including a simple and courteous ‘Thank you, we’ll be in touch again shortly’.  Understandably by this time he had started to have negative thoughts about working for the company. It did not feel good to him – was he going to be respected and valued by the people he had met and could potentially be working for? 

'Your employer brand can be damaged by doing absolutely nothing' - Lesley Everett

At times, doing absolutely nothing could damage your employer brand and reputation as a company. Lack of communication during a recruitment process and a situation that is very important to them, is perceived very negatively by candidates and causes them to feel under-valued. This makes your employer brand vulnerable. Guidelines and training for your HR and recruitment teams should be in place to avoid the dilution of the brand in this way and in other ways. You may not remember every candidate that is interviewed, but they will remember you and how you made them feel. Perhaps treating your candidates the same way as you do a customer might not be a bad way to operate.

How recently have you looked at the careers page of your website? This tends to be added on to the main site and little attention paid to how it projects your employer brand. Arguably, a separate site is needed for careers so that the personality of the employer brand can be managed more powerfully.

 Getting your employer branding right is critical in a business environment that needs to maximise investment and reduce costs. The cost of not getting the right people on-board in your business, people who will never be aligned to the culture you want to create or the values you have set, is significant. Not just in terms of replacing them, but also in the less tangible aspects of diluting the employer brand and creating an environment that loses you the right people, and potentially creating a negative experience for clients.  Even though you try to contain comments on social media internally, leakages will happen and dilution of the employer brand occurs. Getting the right people on-board and engaging them in the corporate brand values to a level that makes them proud and committed to working for you, reduces costs, but in addition it retains corporate reputation to a level we can’t easily measure.

According to a study from LinkedIn (LinkedIn, 2012), the stakes couldn’t be higher. When top talent accepts a job offer, a strong employer brand is twice as important as a strong company brand, particularly for candidates under the age of 40. A strong employer brand reduces the cost of new hires by half and cuts employee turnover by 28 per cent on average. For employers seeking to increase productivity and cut costs, these findings indicate that establishing a powerful employer brand represents a sound business investment.

'Getting the right people on-board and engaging them in the corporate values, drives cost-savings'.

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