How to build a strong employer brand?

In the competitive business world, companies strive to protect their most precious asset, talent. Talent shortage is a major challenge across industries where employees with suitable technical competencies and qualities are difficult to obtain and retain in the competitive employment market. In addition, as Baby Boomers who possess substantial valuable experience for the companies retire, Generation Y became increasingly vital in the company’s workforce; study has shown that 1 in 5 worker will be above 55 years of age by 2021 compared with 1 in 7 in the year 2005. Companies not only struggle to replace the positions of the retired workforce with younger candidates with similar capabilities, they also realize that the two generations have different workplace expectations and values. Candidates are looking beyond the basic wage and benefits; factors such as career prospect, reputation, international mobility and company values also play a significant role in candidate decisions. Therefore companies need to adjust their conventional hiring method to position themselves strategically in order to capture the awareness and commitment of the top candidates.

In order to attract and retain young talents, companies need to differentiate themselves from their competitors with their employer brand. Unlike product brand names that can be managed with marketing to manipulate consumer perception, employer brand needs to be cultivated through time because it is reliant on word of mouth and links directly with the company value and culture. In addition, it needs to be thoroughly evaluated from top to bottom so that the values that make up the employer brand can be put into action on a daily basis.

Developing an Employer Brand

Like all of company’s core competencies, talents need to be cultivated. A well-established workforce eco-system will assist organizations in gaining competitive advantages: enhance talent pipeline, increase employee retention, workforce diversity, strengthen culture and increase shareholder value. Moreover, employer branding plays a crucial role in any economic situation a company faces because it needs to be competitive both internally and externally. Companies need to build trust with the employees to retain loyalty and employee perception at the same time, remain competitive in the market because company performance also influences employment perception.

In addition, a strong employer brand will help the organization to attract, nurture and retain talents that are able to align the business objective with the skills and knowledge. Employer brand is an ongoing process that requires well-rounded recruiting strategy, communication of the employer brand and long-term vision.

Recruitment
A strong employer brand has the ability to turn your employees into brand ambassadors and gain positive reputation so you can outperform competition in recruiting talents. A strong recruitment strategy will help you position yourself as a desirable company to work for so that it is on top of mind for candidates to apply to.

Employee behaviors are becoming progressively similar to those of consumers when they choose their employment opportunities. Before the recruitment process, the company needs to define a clear objective on who their target candidates are and apply empathy to determine the key factors as well as understand what they go through during a recruitment process. The value propositions for a candidate includes organizational reputation, leadership, job scope and tangible rewards.

Employment reputation has direct relationship with the company culture. company needs to understand its own culture and what it can offer. Many companies during this stage perceive their culture in terms of what they wish it could be instead of what it really is. Companies need to be able to look at themselves objectively and determine the strengths and weaknesses. A false presentation of company culture can easily be revealed and will backfire as an even worse impact on company reputation. Therefore, companies need to recognize and resolve the internal problems before communicating to the potential candidates as their employer brand identity. When an employee feels integrated into the culture and company values, he or she will be more willing to commit and contribute to company’s success.

Motivation is a key factor in employee performance and satisfaction. In order for an employee to be motivated, the company needs to provide great leadership that will provide both external and internal incentives to optimize employee performance. Study has shown that leadership is crucial in employee motivation and generate their sense of belonging. A strong leadership can constantly improve employee’s capability as well as assist them in building their career to reach their self-actualization. At the same time, a strong leader will take time to understand employee’s personal goal and seek ways to align it with the company goal so that the employee’s personal growth is related with the company growth. A good leadership will provide its employees with freedom of autonomy and development opportunities. At the same time, extrinsic motivation is just as important as intrinsic motivation. While intrinsic motivation provides organizational synergy and cascading down of objectives, extrinsic motivation such as tangible rewards is also an important factor in which individuals use to measure the company’s perception of their value. A misalignment between self-perception and reward will have negative impact on employee commitment.

A strategic recruitment is not only about increasing the amount of application, it is about attracting candidates with the good organizational and technical fit. An effective branding will trigger the desire for candidates to learn more about the company. In order to attract a diverse group of candidates, companies need to cater their recruitment branding to appeal to different groups of individuals and understand their motivations in order to provide the accurate employment value propositions.

Communication
Companies need to communicate their brand identity truthfully and concisely. This is not only reliant on the companies branding efforts, but also on current employees’ word of mouth. As a result, companies need to maintain strong interaction and credibility with employees in order to stay up to date with their feedback and needs.

An effective approach to communicate employer branding will be for employees to tell others about their experience in the company. Study has shown that real examples and stories are more likely to be listened to, believed and passed along. Moreover, a one to one relationship will allow more in depth and personalized information. Interactive information or referral program can also be implemented because it provides a portal for candidates to further understand the company and opportunities for emotional attachment.

On the other hand, companies also need to channel their employer brand identity to increase candidate awareness. It is important to find the channels that reverberate the most with the target candidate, but also a variety of channels should be used to attract diverse set of candidates. The channels include the workplace ranking and awards, world-class employee referral program, editorial placement, competitor benchmarking, website and academic case studies. These channels will reach talents who find intrinsic motivation in working for top companies at the same time providing insights on what the company does and what can be expected to achieve from working in the company.

A successful communication of employer brand can reinforce the internal perception of the current employees and the external perception of the prospective employees. For new recruitment and prospective employees, the company’s mission, vision and values became the first impression fundamentals in which their brand communication is built upon along with the advancement opportunities and rewards. However, for current employees, actions speak louder than words. It is not about developing taglines similar to advertising campaigns, it is about truthfully delivering value promised. Current employees need to be communicated interactively in order to successfully retain talent. Employers need to continuously communicate through direct engagement that reflects company’s core values. Employee engagement can be classified into two important parts: cognitive and emotional. Cognitive refers to employees’ clear understanding of his/her role that is expected while emotional engagement refers to continuous feedback and interactions from peers that will provide them with a sense of belonging to the organization. Corporate Leadership Council has provided a study which shown that engaged workers are more motivated to increase effort and improve performance. In addition, a clear employee development path needs to be defined so employees are kept focused with a forward looking goal. Companies need to deliver a positive employee experience within the organization to retain employees because no matter what the company say its brand identity is, the brand is only as good as what is delivered from the value proposition promised. Employer brands are built upon integrity and experience, both of which needs to be conveyed concisely through communication and interaction in order to achieve employee attraction and retention.

Long Term Vision
Although human resource is a key in ensuring employee satisfaction and productivity, it requires commitments and involvements from top management of all business functions including Marketing and Finance. Human resource and employer brand is a long-term investment that will pay off because it not only enhances talent pipeline and employee retention, it also captures value for the shareholders. A study conducted by Harvard Business Review has shown that employers investing in employee training and development tend to perform better in stock markets by up to 35%. Even during the dot com bubble, companies that value employee training and developments were able to increase their stock value. The reason is because employee satisfaction can be reflected in customer satisfaction. A company needs to take care of the needs of employees in order for the employees to take care of the needs of the customers. By fulfilling employees’ expectation, better financial and corporate value can be generated. The implementation of employee training and development program will also increase employee loyalty. This program will be perceived as the “gift” to employees and it is likely that the employee will be more devoted and loyal to the company in return. It is a mutual relationship that the companies need to build with its employees.

Very often, Human resources are asked to provide measures to justify their return on investments based on the effectiveness of employee developments on organizational performance. Employer branding metrics can be used to help track the expenses involved in these activities, however, it requires alignment from all business functions to set up an agreed standard. Not all companies are the same, therefore there is no universal standard of measurement, instead metrics are determined by the top management. Some of the measurements in calculating the return on investment of employer branding are cost per hire, engagement levels, time to fill, retention rates, turnover rates, absenteeism, headcount, time to productivity, total costs of labor to revenue and employee satisfaction. These are the conventional ways of measurement, however, companies are increasingly looking to adopt measurements that allow them to forecast employee performance and behavior as well as measurements that determines the most effective ways of recruitment and retention. Forecast performance measurements include promotion readiness rating, external vs. internal hire ratio, quality hire ratio, performance rating of promoted managers and failure rates. For companies that want to measure their recruitment performance may measure by each channels using cost per qualified candidate, cost per hire, total yield in terms of quantity and quality, candidate retention rate, interview to offer ratio and offer to acceptance ratio. All of the above metrics will provide human resource with measurable data in aligning their investments with company goals and assure the company. In addition to providing financial data that analyzes resource capabilities and competencies, human resource department also needs to ensure involvement and commitment of all other business functions.

Cross-functional expertise will help human resource in delivering employees with value proposition that is promised. Even though every department has their own job description, most of the job involves interaction and communication with other functions. As a result, every function influences employee experience and shapes the overall company culture; this will not only provide support for human resource that will effect the organization culture, it will also keep human resource up to date with feedbacks so immediate adjusting measures can be taken if activities deviate from company goal. The coherence of workplace reality and messages delivered for employer branding is essential in brand identity. Human resource department needs to think of employee branding as a long-term development that entails cross-functional collaboration so that the expertise and dedication will translate into prominent execution and improvement in various economic conditions.

Real Life Examples

Google
Google has built its employer brand as the best company to work for. The culture was also communicated through various media channels including CBS news, The New York Times as well as Hollywood hit movie, The Internship. Moreover, Google’s career tagline accurately reflects the work culture and environment within the company. “Do cool things that matter” is reflected in Google where employees can spend 20% of their work time to work on whatever project they like as long as it may advance Google in some ways. As a result, many of Google’s most successful products were created using those 20% of the time including AdSense, Gmail and Google talk. Google not only communicate the concept of openness to innovation to the public, it only works because it is executed internally and it is embedded in the company values. In order to trigger the desire of working in Google, Google understands the importance of intrinsic motivation because it will make your job not feel like a job. Moreover, to increase employee retention and employer brand, Google implemented items such as nap pods, free meals, and Google bicycles.

Starbucks
Starbucks being one of the Fortune 100 companies was also listed on Ethisphere Institute’s World ‘s Most Ethical Company. Starbucks not only build its employer brand through employment ranking and company performance ranking, it also build its brand identity through its employees. Starbucks refer their employees as partners and treat them equally so the hierarchy is flattened. During the hiring process, Starbucks took specific note of individual’s behavior and personality because it is important for their “partners” to deliver the same value as the management. They sought for candidates who value making connections with the customers as well as the community. One thing Starbucks value particularly is its employee experience. They recognized the fact that competitors can easily replicate Starbucks’ coffee because it is a commoditized product, but the “Starbucks experience” involves people and their people are company’s core competencies that cannot be replicated. Starbucks’ philosophy has always been to put employees ahead of its customers because employees who are treat well will treat customers well in return. Starbucks was able to build a customized experience for every customer and this is not something that a company can do with the digitization of the society, it requires personal engagement and efforts that is embedded in company culture to influence the employee behavior.

Even though Google and Starbucks are successful in establishing their employer brand, it does not mean only big companies can achieve such high results. It may be true that these companies have budgets that allow them to invest in these kind of activities, but it is the core value that Google and Starbucks continuously believe in that drove their success.

Some of the common pitfalls in establishing employer branding includes rushing through the self-evaluation process. In order to do this thoroughly, companies need to not only talk to happy employees, but also the employees who have negative opinions. It is the negative opinions that will help you move forward and improve, not the compliments from the happy employees. Moreover, employers need to make sure the channels to convey their messages are working effectively and also conduct follow-up activities. As a result, to establish employer brand, companies need to stay true to their values, understand the reasons why they are doing what they are doing, and translate the company goal with the individual goals. Moreover, treat employees as competitive advantages that need to be cultivated in order to achieve optimal efficiency.

Sources

“Build Your Employer Brand: a strategic approach to recruitment and retention” – Randstad

“Building a Strong Employer Brand” – Kelly

“The employee value proposition: How to be an employer of choice” – Insead

“Win the war for talent with employment branding” – NAS Recruitment communications

“Strong employment brands bring recruiting and retention success” - HRFocus

“Starbucks Employee First Philosophy” - http://www.brandautopsy.com/2007/01/the_starbucks_e.html