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can be summed up in two steps:

      1. Make your organization a distinctively great place to work.

      2. Make sure the right talent knows how great you are.

      Of course, the process is more involved than that, and it’s more cyclical than linear – a continual process of building brand momentum and making adjustments in response to an ever-changing business and workforce environment. A more detailed summation of the process/cycle looks more like this:

      1. Develop a clear understanding of your organization’s business objectives and the talent needed to meet those objectives.

      2. Evaluate your current employer brand image among potential recruits and the employer brand experience of your current employees.

      Identify how this compares with what your key target talent groups are looking for. (See Chapter 3.)

      3. Define your employer value proposition (EVP), the key ingredients that will make your organization a distinctively great place to work.

      

An effective EVP describes your current reality, as well as realistic aspirations – the employer you want to be and be known as. (See the later section “Defining the give and get of the employment deal.”)

      4. Build your employer brand framework, the creative elements that collectively capture the look and feel you want to convey and the emotion you want to evoke. (See the later section, “Establishing employer brand guidelines.”)

      5. Generate engaging, story-led content and employee experiences that bring your EVP to life in ways that resonate with the talent you’re trying to attract.

      6. Actively engage with prospects through selected channels, including your organization’s career website, social channels, job boards, and programmatic (automated ad placement driven by analytics). (See the later section, “Spreading the Word through Various Channels.”)

      7. Measure your success to determine what’s working and what’s not, from your overall brand strategy down to individual recruitment marketing activities. (See the later section, “Monitoring Your Employer Branding Success.”)

      8. Adjust your employer brand strategy and individual recruitment marketing activities, as needed, to improve results.

      After you’ve gone through the process once, building brand momentum becomes cyclical – shampoo, rinse, repeat.

      

A key step we intentionally omit from this process is getting everyone in the organization, especially leadership, involved in your employer branding efforts. Your C-level executives and managers need to embrace the importance of employer branding, encourage and facilitate collaboration, and commit resources to support your efforts. Various departments, including HR and marketing, will need to contribute their insights and expertise. Employees must help with content generation, engaging with prospects, and serving as brand advocates. Without a coordinated effort, your EVP will be DOA (dead on arrival). (See the later section, “Rallying the troops [and leaders].”)

      Laying the Foundation for Your Employer Brand

      In many ways, branding follows the laws of physics. In physics, vectors represent forces that act on an object to move it, like a pool cue striking a ball. Every vector has a magnitude and a direction. The more vector forces and the greater their magnitude propelling an object in the same direction, the faster and farther that object travels. Forces that act in the opposite direction slow the object, stop it, or reverse its course. Forces that strike the object from different angles move it off course.

      When building an employer brand, everyone in the organization needs to push in the same direction with a force of the greatest magnitude possible. With everyone working in unison, brand momentum begins to build, and you begin to win brand advocates outside the organization who put their weight and force behind the brand, moving it ever faster forward.

      Branding of any kind works best when everyone agrees and all branding activities align. To achieve this alignment, you need to build your employer brand on a firm foundation. In this section, we cover the basics of laying that foundation.

Aligning with business goals and objectives

      Just as forces within an organization advance the employer brand, the employer brand is a force that propels the organization forward by delivering the talent needed for the organization to meet its business goals and objectives. As such, it must align with other forces within the organization that share that mission. Specifically, your employer branding strategy must align with the following three strategies that drive the organization’s success:

      ❯❯ Business strategy: The employer brand must support the kind of talent capabilities required for the organization to compete effectively. In addition to being fit for talent, it must also be fit for business.

      ❯❯ HR and talent strategy: Your employer brand must either reflect or shape the way HR and talent management operate within the organization to ensure promises are consistently aligned with experience.

      ❯❯ Marketing strategy: The employer brand must reflect corporate and customer brand promises to maintain a general sense of brand integrity.

      For maximum impact, all strategies should align perfectly, but in the imperfect reality of a business, different functions will inevitably have their own goals and objectives. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself having to actively reconcile competing agendas and conflicting perspectives among your key internal stakeholder groups.

Fitting in with your other brands

      Employer brands never exist in a vacuum; they’re created in the context of the corporate and consumer brands, and, for the most part, they need to align with their corporate and consumer counterparts:

      ❯❯ Corporate brand: The reputation your company is seeking to build based on its purpose (the reason for its existence, beyond making money), vision (what it’s striving to achieve), and values (guiding principles)

      ❯❯ Consumer brand: Customer perceptions of the company’s products and services and the brand associations that the marketing team is trying to promote

      ❯❯ Employer brand: The company’s reputation as an employer inside and outside the organization

      Aligning the employer brand with the corporate and consumer brands is complicated by the fact that corporate and consumer brands can be associated in several different ways. In some cases, such as Apple and Shell, the corporate and consumer brands are synonymous. In others, such as the Coca-Cola Company, the company shares the same name as its leading product but not the rest of its product portfolio. And in other cases, such as Unilever and P&G, the corporate brand may be only loosely associated, if at all, with its many consumer brands.

      Prior to launching any employer branding initiative, you need to decide how closely and in what ways you want your employer brand to align with your existing corporate and consumer brands. When the needs of consumers diverge from those of employees, close attention needs to be paid to how the brand is communicated to each target group. For example, “Citi Never Sleeps” made perfect sense to potential CitiBank customers, but would have made a particularly poor call to action for potential CitiBank employees.

Rallying the troops (and leaders)

      If you’re in charge of employer branding, part of your job is to make sure everyone’s on the same page, clear about his or her responsibilities, and collectively accountable for doing his or her part. To be successful, you need the backing and support of a wide range of different stakeholders throughout your organization:

      ❯❯ Senior leadership: For the brand to be truly authentic and fully embedded in the organization, it needs to be led by the CEO and collectively owned by the entire senior leadership team. The key

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