What is EB
Employer branding is about shaping how you are perceived as an employer by the audiences you are seeking to attract and retain. Typical audiences are current and past employees and prospective candidates, including current or past applicants.
Commercial brand marketing seeks to engage current and prospective customers and positively shape their appreciation of you and their desire to buy from you. In a similar way, employer branding is about positively positioning your talent offer to current and future employees so that you can attract the very best, more easily.
Recruitment or employee engagement without employer branding is like walking into battle blind-folded. How can you consistently attract the right people if you can't succinctly, creatively and consistently articulate your employee value proposition - why they should choose to work for you? How can you turn your current team into advocates without a proposition and stories to gather around, and a strategy to amplify their voice? Employer branding benefits employers in so many ways, as long as it is done creatively, strategically... and honestly.
If you employ people, you have an employer brand, whether you like it or not!
– Mark Puncher
If you employ people, you have an employer brand, whether you like it or not! It’s essentially the way your talent audiences (current and past employees and candidates, and the ones you want for the future) feel about you as a prospective employer, for good and for bad. And it has a major influence on people’s desire to apply for a job with you, to join you, to stay and to perform.
Your employer brand is constantly changing, and I’m afraid you’re not in charge of it - it lives with your target audiences. The question is, are you actively shaping what they know and how they feel about you? And are you using your employer brand opportunity to its full potential?
EVP definition: a great way to define an EVP is that it’s the core messaging that articulates your ‘Why work for us’. It should also give a flavour of ‘What’s it like to work here’ and even ‘What do we expect from you / What can you expect from us’.
An EVP can take many forms but might often include key pillars which bring to life the main reasons people do / should join you and stay. Ideally, these should be evidenced and illustrated with real life examples. Your EVP framework might also include a core statement which can be deployed / adapted across your marketing channels and campaigns, as well as other messaging and creative components - ask us about our own approach, including ‘The Nutshell’, ‘The Elephant’ and the ‘Sorry Not Sorry’.
Beware, however! As our clients will tell you, if you want it to live, breathe and deliver recruitment and engagement results, your EVP needs to be more than a few words on a page.
As described above, your employer brand lives mainly with your current and past people, and your target talent audiences - it’s about how they think and feel about you as a prospective or current employer, and how that makes them behave.
Your EVP is much more under your control. It’s your talent offer or ‘people deal’ in a nutshell. Beware though - you can say pretty much what you like in your EVP but if it’s more aspiration than reality, you’ll quickly be found out.