Employer Brand - Is it on Your 'To Do' List?

Employer Brand – Is it on Your To Do List?

I had a catch-up call with a business friend of mine the other day. She is an HR EMEA Director for a famous global company. She had just returned from maternity leave and in her packed inbox sat an email letting her know she was now officially in charge of ‘Employer Branding’ with some links to logo shape, colour, ‘how to’s and so forth. She was bemused. Not only is she in an extremely demanding and often fire fighting role but how was she going to find the time to give this the attention it deserves, particularly as there is no end in sight?

Most mid to large size companies are aware that employer branding is the hot topic in the talent attraction space. But it is not all about pretty colours, font size and marketing values to the talent pool. The companies who do this right are going to win the ‘war for talent’ and those who don’t pull it off properly, or put it on the long finger, will lose.

Because social media and review sites are so entrenched in our searches for information and form part of our decision making, these are the platforms which are going to be pivotal to building your employer brand. If you dislike them, tough, you have no option but to start utilising them because if you don’t your competition will and you will look like those weird companies with the ‘egg’ avatar on Twitter.

Let’s get a different perspective on why an employer brand is important.

Here are some helpful stats:

75% of candidates research a company’s reputation and employer brand before applying
83% of employers say their employer brand plays a significant part in their hiring
69% of candidates will not accept a job in a company with a bad reputation even if they don’t have a job

Source: Linked In

Pretty startling numbers!

At Talent Optics we help our clients take a deep breath and take this new challenge on with gusto. We take the pain off of your key people who are already overwhelmed with work and we make sure that it is done right and with care, rather than a rush job to tick off the list.

To be clear, this new area of work is a hybrid role straddling two of your departments, HR and Marketing. Employer branding requires a skillset, knowledge and competence from both those departments. This is the problem. At the moment, there really are only a handful of people in the country who have this hybrid employer brand expertise and they are being treated like royalty in their current companies, the chances of you poaching one are zero. It will take another 5 years until true Employer Brand experts are on the market ready to hire. In the meantime, we provide the solution.

I set Talent Optics up due to this very demand. Not only do I have 20 years recruitment experience working in roles such as Head of Recruitment for Deloitte and KPMG and other roles in Intel and Sony but I actually won 'Best Graduate Marketing Campaign' at Deloitte for my brand awareness work, before employer branding became a ‘thing’! But I am joined in my work by an equally impressive Brand Marketer Aisling Bolger who has worked as Head of Marketing for brands such as Computer Associates, Eir, Arkphire and others. Combined with our team of digital media managers and videographers we can deliver real expert solutions by combining our different strengths into one strong employer branding delivery team.

We can help shape your employer brand strategy and execute on it, taking on all the heavy lifting so your HR and Marketing teams can get on with their busy roles.

Importantly, we will ensure that we train your teams in employer branding so that going forward they can use these skills to continue on with your employer branding efforts, as that work will never end! Employer branding is here to stay, just as product/service branding is. We provide ongoing support to the team as needed, after the initial phase of employer branding work is implemented, as well as providing a full on-shore team if you wish to outsource it all to us for the immediate future.

2022 is going to be the year of the employer brand don’t let your company get left behind.

For more information contact me Clare Reed to discuss how we can help you.

#employerbranding #talentattraction #creativeemployerbrandsolutions