The TA Leader's Guide to Employer Branding

Thirty years on, employer branding remains a curious and ill-fitting aspect of business. Spawned from classic product marketing, it is poorly understood and rarely appropriately utilized. Despite the fact that it is designed to drive better recruiting, there is still a lot of debate over where it should live within the organization.

This leads to a major problem. Because it's value can apply to a lot of different business functions, there is rarely one function championing it. It falls between the cracks to languish.

Which is too bad, because employer branding isn't just Talent Acquisition's nerdy little cousin. It is the salt in the food, changing the its very chemistry. The way that salt makes the water boil hotter, the ice get colder so milk becomes ice cream, and lifeless potatoes become addictive chips, so to employer branding makes every part of TA significantly better.

(Also, this is Talent Acquisition's version of The CMO's Guide to Employer Brand, which serves as a pretty useful companion piece to this.)

So here are the ten things talent acquisition should know about employer branding

One. Employer branding is a force multiplier.

In general, so much friction between employer branding and talent acquisition would just evaporate once TA sees that EB isn’t abstract and conceptual. Yes, that part is there, but an employer brand’s value is measured on how it changes prospect and candidate behavior.

To make that happen, the brand needs to be woven into every single touchpoint at every single stage of the candidate journey. It needs to be in the outreach email, the job posting, the career site content, the videos, the descriptions of the benefits and culture, the interview questions, the Glassdoor responses, the event messaging, and even the offer letter (not kidding).

Now, if you have a strong brand, it will increase response rate of the outreach by 10% (making the math easy for political science majors like myself). It will increase interest in the job posting by 10%. It will engage 10% more of the right candidates on the career site. It will be shared 10% more in good fit candidates. It will increase your offer acceptance rate 10% (by itself, the easiest way to measure ROI).

Individually, it will make each touchpoint and tactic better. In the aggregate, you’re looking at a 200% increase in recruiting value (measured however you measure it). That’s multiplying the value of everything you’re already doing.

Two. Your employer brand is the core of your strategy.

I have a long track record of shouting into the void that most of what passes for “talent strategy” is really just a reiteration of the company’s TA stack in “to-do” format. A strategy can be defined as “the means by which you leverage your company’s strength and applying it against a competitor/situation/talent market’s weakness to achieve an out-sized impact. Once TA embraces the idea that strategy isn’t a plan or a set of tactics, but something different, it has the chance to achieve that outsized outcome.

Michael Porter (Harvard prof who teaches business strategy and wrote seminal books on same) says that strategy is as much what you choose not to do as it is what you do. A strategy separates opportunity from a sea of distractions. And brand is a filter that focuses thinking, messaging, and doing. So it stands to reason that a strong brand is the core of your talent strategy. It helps to focus your thinking so you aren’t chasing tactics (and candidates who aren’t ever going to be a fit).

Recruiting thinking is sales thinking. Employer brand thinking is strategic thinking. Embrace it and your own talent acquisition thinking will get sharper in a hurry (Value: make a bigger impact with less resources).

Three. Employer brand is a flywheel.

It is easy to get an employer brand and think, “okay, got it. Let’s post this places and be done with it.” This is especially true if you’ve never gotten branding support before.

But branding (and it’s older sibling strategy) can’t be considered in a single moment. It creates a flywheel.

Example: You decide that the thing your company rewards is a “get it done at any cost” mindset, so you want to attract primarily people with that mindset. So you start building content (social media, videos, job postings, blog posts on the career site, etc) about the people who work there and how they sometimes have to make herculean efforts to get something done. You talk about how they are rewarded (both in terms of monetary compensation, but also, these are the people who get rounds of applause at the all hands meetings) for that kind of thing. People who like to be rewarded for that apply and are hired, reinforcing a culture of “win at all costs,” making those values more tangible because everyone is living them every single day. So you build more content about it (because you have more people with those stories) and you start getting really granular: he’s the story of a female data scientists who gives 110%, the story of a black engineer who worked 18-hour shifts for a week to ship something, the story of a mid-level LQBTQ+ Latina manager who made the call to keep her team after hours to build something amazing. That granularity makes these claims ever more credible, attracting more and more of these people. Eventually, you’re famous for this approach, getting press from impressive sources about your amazing work culture, which in turn, attracts more of the same people…

Good employer branding begets more of the stories that attract the right people, making it easier for your recruiters and hiring managers to hire great fits. And it only gets better over time.

Four. Employer branding better bonds TA to HR.

While TA often lives under the HR umbrella, they aren’t natural fits. Recruiting is about sales: finding, engaging and closing talent. HR is about the creation and application of rules. These things do not go together like chocolate and peanut butter.

In many companies, recruiting and TA is expected to stop the moment a new hire shows up. Sure, maybe the recruiter does a quick check in on day one to make sure things are going smoothly, but recruiters are (VERY) rarely measured on how long their hires stick around. Sure, we might pay lip service to wanting to hire people who will build some tenure to avoid the costs associated with empty seats and a new hiring process, but its not like “average tenure of hire” is a standard metric in a recruiter’s dashboard.

The work of retention (generally expressed as company culture and employee experience) falls on some other wing of HR. Whether its an employee experience team, a culture committee, or just a ragtag band of HRBPs and HR Generalists who know these things lead to longer retention numbers, these things are effectively 100% disconnected from TA.

Employer brand connects the dots. People who stay are people who have great employee stories to tell (this is referred to as “EB catnip”). Great stories are a kind of recognition program to those employees (who then stay longer: see “flywheel” above). EB distills and packages culture into something external people can see as attractive (which makes it more attractive to people internally as well).

Five. Employer branding is cheap

What did you pay in RPO and agency fees this year? I’m gonna say that a strong, articulated employer brand that made specific, attractive, different and real claims (and used storytelling to “prove” those claims), could have cut that number (conservatively) by half.

Half.

Imagine if your ads were 50% more effective? Or your job posts were 50% more effective at attracting great talent (hello, lower Indeed spend!)? Or you increased your offer acceptance rate by 20% (I’ve seen and made bigger increases happen) so you didn’t have to burn recruiter time on “try again” candidate searches? Or if you had warm candidates sold on the company and ready to talk to you the moment 10% of new requisitions were approved?

Think of how much money all those changes would save you.

Compared to all that, employer brand is a bargain. Not, “I got a coupon” bargain, but a “I bought an undiscovered Monet at a garage sale!” bargain.

Six. Employer branding opens up new resources for Talent Acquisition

I have yet to meet the recruiter or talent acquisition leader who had enough resources to do the job. Sometimes its an old ATS that won’t allow for new scheduling functionality or just moves slowly. Sometimes its not enough headcount. Sometimes it’s not enough content to attract talent. To leadership, TA can feel like a bit of a money pit, demanding more and more resources without getting better in any obvious way. And so, TA is the first team to get their budgets and headcount trimmed in a downturn and the last to get budgets and headcount increased when things get better.

Employer brand can change the equation. Employer branding has natural connections to marketing, comms and HR, giving you a chance to tap into their resources. It is nearly impossible for a recruiter to request a branded graphic in most companies, so they either stitch something together in Canva that’s kinda-sorta appropriately branded (and looks like a recruiter designed it, negating most of the impact a nice graphic can bring), or they just stop asking. Employer branding should have connections to make that stuff happen. They should be able to engage creative and legal about the rules around video creation (and maybe someone to knock out a slick title clip). They should be the voice at HR meetings about advocacy that creates more powerful reviews and social user-generated content.

Seven. Employer branding elevates recruiters

Where did this idea that recruiters are like old-timey gold rush miners: All they need is their trusty LI recruiter seat and a requisition or 40, so get out of their way.

This model of recruiters as anti-team players, individuals who play by their own rules, accountable to their hiring manager and boss (and only sometimes) means that recruiters are plumbers: you call them when you need them, you don’t bother them while they work, and you pay the bill when it shows up. No one calls the plumber to engage in strategy sessions. You call the plumber when your basement is flooded.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Managed properly, recruiters can and should be team players, supporting one another and achieving more because of it.

With the addition of employer branding, recruiters can quickly position themselves as talent consultants rather than order takers. They can build meaningful content that keeps recruiters from feeling like their only hope is to span everyone on LinkedIn (again), and instead focus on finding a handful of perfects because they know that the employer brand function to build an ecosystem of information that makes recruiter claims credible.

Employer brand allows the recruiters to see themselves as general contractors who understand and serve the bigger picture than the plumber there to fix a leaky pipe.

Eight. Employer brand generates trust between Talent Acquisition and hiring managers

You know that hiring manager… you know, I don’t even need to finish the sentence. You know who i’m about to talk about. The pain in the ass. The one who makes demands of your team and is the first to threaten to start calling agencies (if they haven’t taken a few lunch meetings already). Yeah. That one.

Employer branding is the way any recruiter can tame that particular tiger. In some cases, it is the SWAT team that can be called in to solve problems (no one sees the job. No one applies. No qualified talent. Etc). In some cases, it is the specialist who can bring new thinking to the problem.

Without employer branding, when a role is getting stale, the only recourse is to bring in the agencies. This puts hiring managers and recruiters in a tough spot, where perceived failure of the recruiter leads to the business incurring tens of thousands of dollars in agency costs. With employer branding, they have a resource to develop content, marketing strategies, outreach plans, and a playbook that to ensure your open role will be seen by the right talent. There is a way to escalate the issue without resorting to outside agencies (and solutions designed can be reused and reapplied to the next problematic hire, leading to its own flywheel effect).

Because of that, the hiring manager can let down their guard a little, knowing that the recruiter has further options if the “standard process” doesn’t work.

Nine. Employer brand transitions you from transactional to relationship-driven recruiting

Imagine a world in which a hiring manager swings by your desk and says, “the requisition for my new XYZ manager finally got approved. You should see the official approval in a few hours. When should we meet to talk about the job posting and how to properly promote the role?” and you get to respond, “That’s great news! But I have five people in the system who have been getting regular emails and content from us who have all the prerequisites for the role and are likely existed to talk to you about it. Maybe we skip the posting and just start talking to great candidates?”

It isn’t science fiction. The advent of the ATS has forced recruiters to work within a transactional model of recruiting: staring from a blank sheet of paper to find people who will accept this role, flush the rest and start again. This model is not optimal for… well, anyone, I suppose. Employer branding supports a shift to relationship-driven recruiting, where you can attract great people and keep them engaged and interested over the long haul until the perfect role is ready for them. Employer branding can build the content that speaks to those individual’s interests and motivations, and can manage the CRM to ensure candidates stay warm.

Not only does this model lower TTF dramatically, it means candidates walk into the interview better prepared for the interview because they’ve had 6-12 months to learn about the company, the team (maybe even the manager herself) and thus have better questions and a more clear sense of what the job really is.

Ten. Employer branding connects Talent Acquisition more closely to the business

Employer branding tells the rest of the business that you aren’t thinking about recruiting the same old way. It shows that (much like the rest of the business) you are outcome-focused, willing to engage new ideas and think about hiring as a system to be developed rather than as someone who does it the same old way. (Honestly, if you looked at everything that’s changed about business in the last 40 years, the two functions that have seen the least change are TA and Accounts Payable.)

Employer branding is your statement of intent, how you tell the company that you come to play, and that your wins are their wins (and vice versa).

At the same time, employer branding should be making connections and creating allies within every part of the business (unlike recruiters who are often focused on a very narrow silo), being your own advocate and shaping expectations of the power of talent acquisition (and how to better use them).

This doesn’t mean that EB has to live in TA. But regardless of who owns EB, talent acquisition is employer brand’s first customer. And with these ten reasons, I hope you can see the kind of value it brings to that customer’s table.

If you'd like to learn more about how TA leaders can build their own employer brand in a hands-on workshop, check out the EVP Masterclass.