Take Control of Your Employer Brand

The term “Employer Brand” is a comparatively recent arrival.  But, for many organizations, it has become critical very quickly.

While all brands should set out to communicate a company’s values, marketing brands often don’t spend much time thinking about that end.   Marketing and sales leaders are more anxious to associate satisfaction and specific positive experiences with the brand imagery as pre-conditions to sales and competitive advantage.

The Employer Brand, on the other hand, communicates what it is like to be an employee at that company, what kind of a lifestyle it offers and what kind of future it presents.

These are the top-of-mind issues for the thousands of candidates who are going to come across your job offer.  And they are going to formulate their own opinions and reach their own conclusions based on almost exclusively internet-driven search and research.

In other words, your employer brand happens with or without you.

If you are letting it happen without you, you risk a form of suicide by increasingly shrinking the pipelines bringing fresh talent within your scope.  The biggest danger lies in the complacency that conflates and confuses the company business stature, as represented by its Corporate Branding, with the attraction of working for the company, as perceived from the Employer Branding.

For that reason alone, one of the first tasks in building the employer brand is to undertake perception gap studies involving your current staff and customers and potential employee candidates.  There can be lots of surprises there.

In the current issue of the online recruiting intelligence media ERE, there is a case history of CDW. The company is a leading technology solutions provider in the UK and North America.  Its assets are its people and CDW hires 1,000 people every year.

Although it is #56 on the Forbes list of America’s Best Employers, its B2B focus meant that potential prospects and hires have little idea who the company is and what it stands for.

You can read the case history here.