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section, “Recognizing the benefits of employer branding.” Senior leadership needs to appreciate the crucial role employer branding plays in securing the talent the company needs to achieve its growth ambitions.

      ❯❯ Marketing and communications: The folks in marketing and corporate communications tend to be very protective of the corporate and consumer brand and resist the notion of a separate employer brand because it can appear to threaten brand integrity. You can make them more receptive to the idea of an employer brand by showing them how it can help to build internal brand engagement and extend the appeal of the brand to external audiences who may not have otherwise considered the brand.

      ❯❯ HR: You definitely need HR on your side. Nobody has more direct accountability for shaping people management processes and more influence over talent strategy. Initially, HR may be reluctant to take on the additional responsibilities associated with employer branding, but making a strong business case and appealing to HR’s desire to keep up with best practice are generally sufficient to win its support.

      ❯❯ Line management: Like HR, line management is likely to be reluctant, at first, to commit time and personnel to employer branding. To rally their support, tailor your presentation to their pain points and aspirations. Highlight the fact that a strong employer brand will help to deliver the kind of talent they need to meet their objectives and ensure they lose fewer key players to competitors.

      Taking an Honest Look at Your Employer Brand

      Regardless of whether you’ve done anything to build an employer brand, you already have one. Your employer brand is written on the faces of the people you meet who ask you where you’re working. It’s present in the gory or glorious detail of your Glassdoor reviews. It’s embedded in the energy or malaise of your everyday working environment. Your employer brand is your reputation as an employer – whether your organization’s work environment is distinctively great, generically mediocre, or exceptionally bad.

      Before you invest time and resources into building an employer brand, perform an honest self-assessment of the brand you have to work with. In Chapter 3, we provide detailed guidance on how to conduct an employer brand health check. Here are the four areas to examine:

      ❯❯ What you already know or perceive: You probably have some sense of what your organization’s employees and people outside your organization think of it as an employer. Add to this knowledge any additional information you may already have, such as feedback from customers and partners, recent employee surveys, or a general review of sentiment across your social media channels.

      ❯❯ Employment experience: The employment experience and how employees perceive it contribute significantly to your organization’s reputation as an employer. Conduct employee surveys and focus groups to find out what current and former employees think of you, and any gaps that may exist between what you offer and what they want. Although compensation and benefits are often ranked pretty high, they’re rarely at the top of the list.

      ❯❯ External perception: You need to figure out what people outside the organization think of you as a potential employer. How well are you known among the talent you’re trying to attract? What are you known for? And how do people feel about you? In Chapter 3, we provide suggestions on how to gauge awareness, brand associations, and sentiment.

      ❯❯ Competition: The organizations you compete with for talent are typically those within your industry from which you hire and lose the most people. Add to that list the top employers attracting the best talent from every industry to learn what they’re doing better.

      

Don’t mimic what other organizations are doing to win the competition for talent. Your goal is to become distinctively great, and you can’t accomplish that by doing what everyone else does. What other organizations do may not work for you. Find ways to capitalize on your organization’s unique qualities. Use your research on other companies as a stepping stone for your own creative ideas.

      Putting the Pieces in Place

      As with most strategic operations, execution of your employer branding initiative requires coordinated and persistent effort, which is best accomplished if you have everything in place prior to launch. With employer branding, “everything” consists of your EVP, brand framework, and compelling communication content. In this section, we describe the three pieces you need to have in place before initiating any employer branding operations.

Defining the give and get of the employment deal

      The purpose of employer branding is to attract people with the knowledge and skills your organization needs to meet its objectives and then convince these people to work for your organization. This purpose can be described in terms of the give and get of the employment deal – you’re offering people something they value (money, recognition, opportunities to be creative or make a positive impact in the world, and so on) in exchange for something you value (knowledge, skills, passion, creativity, and so on). In employer branding, this give and get is distilled and communicated through the EVP. It consists of a core positioning statement (the one thing about your company that sums up how and why it is a distinctively great place to work) and three to five pillars (details that support and expand upon the core positioning statement).

      Here’s a simple example from Facebook whose EVP is shaped by its strong mission and company values, along with the key attributes identified by employees, which make working at Facebook unique.

      Core positioning statement: Connecting the world takes every one of us.

      Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.

      EVP pillars:

      ● Build social value. Facebook was created to make the world more open and connected, not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.

      ● Move fast. Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. We’re less afraid of making mistakes than we are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We are a culture of builders; the power is in your hands.

      ● Be bold. Building great things means taking risks. We have a saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” In a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.

      ● Be open. We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.

      ● Focus on impact. To have the biggest impact, we need to focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.

      

Here are a few suggestions for developing a solid EVP and getting stakeholders to buy into it at the same time:

      ❯❯ Establish your employer brand objectives. Decide what you’re trying to achieve and your priorities (for example, attraction, engagement, retention).

      ❯❯ Do your homework. Find out how current employees and potential candidates think about your company as an employer, either from existing data or commissioning your own research.

      ❯❯ Gather the right people. Invite representatives from key stakeholder groups to participate in the employer brand development process, including representatives from HR, talent management and resourcing,

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