Employer branding is all about keeping your promises
The only way to recruit and retain the right people is by aligning your external and internal communication efforts. Successful employer branding is truthful: it realistically conveys the way employers and candidates experience the company, but does so in a creative way that speaks to the imagination. It’s all about making the right promises – and keeping them.
Not just a matter of HR
That is why an employer brand involves management, marketing and HR. Here lies your first challenge: all three players have to agree on the company’s one and only true image as an employer. If not, you risk communicating an employer brand that does not correspond with how employees experience you as an employer, and you risk losing good new employees.
3 rules: intake, intake and intake
So start by getting to know them: HR, marketing and management. Get to know the company through them by making the time for a decent intake. Workshops are ideally suited for this. Spend one day with the right people at the table to get to know the company’s culture, its history, its playing ground, its ambition, its heart – clearly define its strengths and weaknesses as an employer.
This intake is pure gold for your new employer brand – and your project. Because a workshop also helps align different views at the table at an early stage of your project. It’s hard work, but the right kind of exercises guarantee the right information.
The output of your workshop is the perfect input for strategy and creation.
Workshop intake exercises
These exercises challenge companies to truly define themselves as employers:
- fact finding
gather statistical data about the company’s employees: age, gender, degree, turnover… - semiometrics
pick 10 words out of a word cloud that define your company as an employer - chinese portrait
imagine your company as a person: describe his or her life, personality, qualities, ambition… - candidate personas
describe your ‘ideal’ candidate’s personality and life based on real employer profiles - your company makes the news in 2060
Define your ambition by writing a newspaper headline about your company in 2060
Effective employer branding with BBC
Contact us if you want to find out more about how we make employer branding work.
Explore these English and Dutch cases of succesful employer branding by BBC.
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