Employer branding

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Employer brand is branding and marketing the entirety of the employment experience. It describes an employer's reputation as a place to work, and their employee value proposition, as opposed to the more general corporate brand reputation and value proposition to customers. [1] [2] The term was first used in the early 1990s, and has since become widely adopted by the global management community. [3] [4] [5] Minchington describes employer brand as "the image of your organization as a 'great place to work' in the mind of current employees and key stakeholders in the external market (active and passive candidates, clients, customers and other key stakeholders). The art and science of employer branding is therefore concerned with the attraction, engagement and retention initiatives targeted at enhancing your company's employer brand." [3]

Contents

Just as a customer brand proposition is used to define a product or service offer, an employer value proposition (also sometimes referred to as an employee value proposition) or EVP is used to define an organization's employment offering. Likewise the marketing disciplines associated with branding and brand management have been increasingly applied by the human resources and talent management community to attract, engage and retain talented candidates and employees, in the same way that marketing applies such tools to attracting and retaining clients, customers and consumers. [6]

Origin

The term "employer brand" was first publicly introduced to a management audience in 1990, [7] and defined by Simon Barrow, chairman of People in Business, and Tim Ambler, Senior Fellow of London Business School, in the Journal of Brand Management in December 1996. [8] This academic paper was the first published attempt to "test the application of brand management techniques to human resource management". Within this paper, Simon Barrow and Tim Ambler defined the employer brand as "the package of functional, economic and psychological benefits provided by employment, and identified with the employing company". By 2001, of 138 leading companies surveyed by the Conference Board in North America, 40% claimed to be actively engaged in some form of employer branding activity. [9] In 2003, an employer brand survey conducted by the Economist among a global panel of readers revealed a 61% level of awareness of the term "employer brand" among HR professionals and 41% among non-HR professionals. [10] The first book on the subject was published in 2005, [1] and the second in 2006. [11] In 2008, Jackie Orme, the Director General of the UK Chartered Institute of Personnel Directors confirmed the growing status of the discipline in her opening address to the CIPD annual conference, with the observation that: "When I started out in the profession, nobody talked about employer branding. Now it's absolutely integral to business strategy—resonating well beyond the doors of the HR department". Similar recognition of the growing importance of employer brand thinking and practice has also been recently in evidence in America, [12] Australia, [11] Asia, [13] [14] [15] and Europe, [16] [17] [18] [19] with the publication of numerous books on the subject.

Review Sites

Just as sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor have sprung up to review restaurants and hotels, there is a menagerie of websites dedicated to allowing current, past, and future employees to review employers.

While companies can encourage their employees to leave reviews, the reality is that many of these sites are populated by former employees who've had a bad experience. This is evidenced by the average Glassdoor rating of 3.3, [20] whereas an Uber rating below 4.6 [21] will result in a driver being let go. This difference is driven by everyone rating in the case of Uber, versus a more biased group reviewing employers.

Beyond encouraging employees to leave reviews, employers can also pay a fee to have sponsored profiles on each of these review sites which allows them to post job ads, and add employer branding related content, amongst other ways of controlling their profile.[ citation needed ]

Employer Branding ROI

Similar to brand advertising, the return on investment from employer branding efforts can be hard to measure. Many companies struggle with ways to measure the money saved or earned from efforts such as creating a culture video, having a better career site, or developing talent pipelines.

The simplest ways of measuring a return on employer branding investment are:

  1. Increased awareness that leads to more applicants, and tracking how these applicants translate to hires
  2. Increased conversion rates of interested applicants after implementing employer branding tactics
  3. Decreases in time to fill, and the progress this allows a business to make
  4. Decreases in third party recruiter spend

Employer Branding and Tools

There are now an emerging group of tools that can assist HR and Marketing teams in their employer branding efforts. Some of these tools were originally designed for marketing purposes. Others are existing HRTech that have evolved to have employer branding capabilities such as the newer generation of applicant tracking systems and job boards. There is also a small group of software providers that focuses explicitly on employer branding such.

Many companies value positively that their employees develop their personal brand so that it has a beneficial impact on the company's reputation. According to Alberto Chinchilla Abadías "it is advisable that the company train its workers and managers in communication and digital skills in order to effectively use these technologies." [22]

Employer brand management

Employer brand management expands the scope of this brand intervention beyond communication to incorporate every aspect of the employment experience, and the people management processes and practices (often referred to as "touch-points") that shape the perceptions of existing and prospective employees. [1] In other words, employer brand management addresses the reality of the employment experience and not simply its presentation. By doing so it supports both external recruitment of the right kind of talent sought by an organization to achieve its goals, and the subsequent desire for effective employee engagement and employee retention.[ citation needed ]

Employer brand proposition

As for consumer brands, most employer brand practitioners and authors argue that effective employer branding and brand management requires a clear Employer Brand proposition, [1] or Employee value proposition. This serves to: define what the organization would most like to be associated with as an employer; highlight the attributes that differentiate the organization from other employers; and clarify the strengths, benefits and opportunities of the employment offer.

Internal marketing

Internal marketing focuses on communicating the customer brand promise, and the attitudes and behaviours expected from employees to deliver on that promise. [23] [24] While it is clearly beneficial to the organization for employees to understand their role in delivering the customer brand promise, [25] the effectiveness of internal marketing activities can often be short-lived if the brand values on which the service experience is founded are not experienced by the employees in their interactions with the organization. [26] This is the gap that employer brand thinking and practice seeks to address with a more mutually beneficial employment deal or psychological contract.[ citation needed ]

Brand-led culture change

Compared with the more typically customer centric focus of Internal marketing, internal branding / brand engagement takes a more 'inside-out', value-based approach to shaping employee perceptions and behaviours, following the lead of the 'Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies' study published in the mid-1990s. [27] This sought to demonstrate that companies with consistent, distinctive and deeply held values tended to outperform those companies with a less clear and articulated ethos. While brand-led culture change is often the stated desire of these programs their focus on communication-led, marketing methods (however, involving or experiential) has been prone to the same failings of conventional internal marketing. [28] [29] As Amazon.com's founder, Jeff Bezos, asserts: "One of [the] things you find in companies is that once a culture is formed it takes nuclear weaponry to change it". [30] You cannot simply assert your way to a new culture, no more can you assert your way to a strong brand, it needs to be consistently and continuously shaped and managed, which is one of the primary reasons many organizations have turned from the short term engagement focus of internal branding initiatives to more long term focus of employer brand management. [26]

Use

Strategic in nature with a focus on the whole employee lifecycle from hire to retire, employer branding can also become a medium to hire. It can be used to hire through employee referral or referral recruitment.

Employer branding since its inception has become an important metric for companies and their employee value proposition. For instance, there is an annual World's Most Attractive Employers ranking established by employer branding company Universum which defines top 50 companies in the world by employer branding. [31] [32]

Related Research Articles

Human resources (HR) is the set of people who make up the workforce of an organization, business sector, industry, or economy. A narrower concept is human capital, the knowledge and skills which the individuals command. Similar terms include manpower, labor, personnel, associates or simply: people.

Staffing is the process of finding the right worker with appropriate qualifications or experience and recruiting them to fill a job position or role. Through this process, organizations acquire, deploy, and retain a workforce of sufficient quantity and quality to create positive impacts on the organization’s effectiveness. In management, staffing is an operation of recruiting the employees by evaluating their skills and knowledge before offering them specific job roles accordingly.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Recruitment</span> Process of attracting, selecting and appointing candidates to a job or other organization

Recruitment is the overall process of identifying, sourcing, screening, shortlisting, and interviewing candidates for jobs within an organization. Recruitment also is the process involved in choosing people for unpaid roles. Managers, human resource generalists and recruitment specialists may be tasked with carrying out recruitment, but in some cases public-sector employment, commercial recruitment agencies, or specialist search consultancies are used to undertake parts of the process. Internet-based technologies which enhance all aspects of recruitment are now widespread, including the use of artificial intelligence (AI).

Human resource management is the strategic and coherent approach to the effective and efficient management of people in a company or organization such that they help their business gain a competitive advantage. It is designed to maximize employee performance in service of an employer's strategic objectives. Human resource management is primarily concerned with the management of people within organizations, focusing on policies and systems. HR departments are responsible for overseeing employee-benefits design, employee recruitment, training and development, performance appraisal, and reward management, such as managing pay and employee benefits systems. HR also concerns itself with organizational change and industrial relations, or the balancing of organizational practices with requirements arising from collective bargaining and governmental laws.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Employee engagement</span> Relationship between an organization and its employees

Employee engagement is a fundamental concept in the effort to understand and describe, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the nature of the relationship between an organization and its employees. An "engaged employee" is defined as one who is fully absorbed by and enthusiastic about their work and so takes positive action to further the organization's reputation and interests. An engaged employee has a positive attitude towards the organization and its values. In contrast, a disengaged employee may range from someone doing the bare minimum at work, up to an employee who is actively damaging the company's work output and reputation.

In marketing, a customer value proposition (CVP) consists of the sum total of benefits which a vendor promises a customer will receive in return for the customer's associated payment.

Brand engagement is the process of forming an emotional or rational attachment between a consumer and a brand. It comprises one aspect of brand management. Brand engagement will impact brand attachment and has a positive influence on customer purchase intentions. Brands can form these attachments through different strategies that will promote their brand and overall customer satisfaction.

A chief human resources officer (CHRO) or chief people officer (CPO) is a corporate officer who oversees all aspects of human resource management and industrial relations policies, practices and operations for an organization. Similar job titles include: chief people officer, chief personnel officer, executive vice president of human resources and senior vice president of human resources. Roles and responsibilities of a typical CHRO can be categorized as follows: workforce strategist, organizational and performance conductor, HR service delivery owner, compliance and governance regulator, and coach and adviser to the senior leadership team and the board of directors. CHROs may also be involved in board member selection and orientation, executive compensation, and succession planning. In addition, functions such as communications, facilities, public relations and related areas may fall within the scope of the CHRO role. Increasingly, CHROs report directly to chief executive officers and are members of the most senior-level committees of a company.

In marketing, a company’s value proposition is the full mix of benefits or economic value which it promises to deliver to the current and future customers who will buy their products and/or services. It is part of a company's overall marketing strategy which differentiates its brand and fully positions it in the market. A value proposition can apply to an entire organization, or parts thereof, or customer accounts, or products or services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Customer experience</span> Interaction between an organization and a customer

Customer experience (CX) is a totality of cognitive, affective, sensory, and behavioral consumer responses during all stages of the consumption process including pre-purchase, consumption, and post-purchase stages. Nihat Tavşan and Can Erdem bring an extensive elucidation to the customer experience, encompassing the dimensions of consciousness, subjectivity, and interactional nature and define customer experience as the sum of subjective ideas regarding a product or service that occur at a conscious or subconscious level due to direct or indirect interaction of a customer with brand-related stimuli. Pine and Gilmore described the experience economy as the next level after commodities, goods, and services with memorable events as the final business product. Four realms of experience include esthetic, escapist, entertainment, and educational components. Tavşan and Erdem divided the customer experience into four categories based on the levels of cognitive and physical involvement of customers. These four categories are euphoric experiences, captive experiences, mellowing experiences, and conductive experiences.

The employee value proposition (EVP) is a part of employer branding, in that it is one of the ways companies attract the skills and employees they desire and keep them engaged. It is how they market their company to prospective talent, and also how they retain them in a competitive job market. It is meant to communicate the values and culture of the organization, as well as take the focus off remuneration as the sole reason for working there. The benefits, when done correctly, are a more committed, happier, and productive workforce at a cheaper cost, which are the main goals of any employee-centered strategy. It may also have the side benefit of improving the company's perception in the eyes of consumers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development</span>

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) is an association for human resource management professionals. Its headquarters are in Wimbledon, London, England. The organisation was founded in 1913 - it is the world's oldest association in its field and has over 160,000 members internationally working across private, public and voluntary sectors. Peter Cheese was announced in June 2012 as CIPD's new CEO from July 2012.

E-HRM is the planning, implementation and application of information technology for both networking and supporting at least two individual or collective actors in their shared performing of HR activities.

Along with the notion of experience economy, employee experience is defined as a set of psychocognitive sentiments about the experiential benefits of employment. Employee experience is formed when an employee interacts with careers’ elements that affect his or her cognition and attitudes and leads to particular behaviors related to the employee's job and company.

Enterprise engagement is a sub-discipline of marketing and management that focuses on achieving long-term financial results by strategically fostering the proactive involvement and alignment of customers, distribution partners, salespeople, and all human capital outside and inside of an organization. Enterprise engagement is distinct from the traditional sub-disciplines of financial management, marketing, sales, operations, and human resources in that it seeks to achieve long-term success by integrating these various traditional business disciplines to consistently focus the organization on identifying and meeting target audience needs. Enterprise Engagement is related to brand engagement, a term developed in Great Britain in the 2000s to describe an integrated external and internal marketing approach to achieving long-term success for a brand. Enterprise Engagement applies similar principals to the achievement of an organization's overall financial objectives.

Experience management is an effort by organizations to measure and improve the experiences they provide to customers as well as stakeholders like vendors, suppliers, employees, and shareholders. The concept posits the notion that experiences comprise distinct economic offerings that create economic value and competitive advantage.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Corporate social media</span>

Corporate social media is the use of social media platforms, social media communications and social media marketing techniques by and within corporations, ranging from small businesses and tiny entrepreneurial startups to mid-size businesses and huge multinational firms. Within the definition of social media, there are different ways corporations utilize it. Although there is no systematic way in which social media applications can be categorized, there are various methods and approaches to having a strong social media presence.

Employee experience design is the application of experience design in order to intentionally design HR products, services, events, and organizational environments with a focus on the quality of the employee experience whilst providing relevant solutions for an organization. EED is one of the core components of Employee experience management that emphasizes understanding and fulfilling employees' experiential needs.

Recruitment marketing refers to the inbound strategies and tactics an organization uses to find, attract, engage, and nurture talent before they apply for a job, also called the pre-applicant phase of talent acquisition. It is the practice of promoting the benefits and value of working for an employer in order to recruit talent. It is analogous in many ways to corporate marketing, and is extremely similar to employer branding except recruitment marketing relates to trackable initiatives that drive awareness, engagement and conversion of applicants versus someone's impression of working at a company. Of course others see employer branding as a subset of recruitment marketing, in addition to extending the reach and exposure of career opportunities through search engine optimization (SEO), building and nurturing candidate relationships through talent communities, and the management of messaging and advertising of talent acquisition efforts.

A social employee is a worker operating within a social business model. Following an organization's social computing guidelines, social employees use social media tools both for internal workflow and collaboration purposes and for external engagement with customers, prospects and stakeholders through a combination of social media marketing, content marketing, social marketing, and social selling. Social employee programs are considered to be as much about culture and engagement as they are about business processes and best practices. In addition to increased leads and sales, social employee best practices are said to improve business outcomes important to social media marketing, such as increased connections and web traffic, improved brand identification and "chatter", and better customer advocacy.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Barrow, S. and Mosley, R. The Employer Brand, Bringing the Best of Brand Management to People at Work, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester.
  2. ↑ Mosley, R. (2015) Harvard Business Review.
  3. 1 2 Minchington, B (2010) Employer Brand Leadership – A Global Perspective, Collective Learning Australia.
  4. ↑ Martin, G (2009) Employer Branding and corporate reputation management, The Peak Performing Organisation, Chapter 13, pp 252, Routledge, London.
  5. ↑ Edwards, M. R., (2010), An integrative review of employer branding and OB theory, Personnel Review Vol. 39, No.1, pp.5-23
  6. ↑ Mosley, R. (2014) Employer Brand Management, Practical Lessons from the World's Leading Employers, Wiley.
  7. ↑ Barrow, S. (1990), 'Turning recruitment advertising into a competitive weapon', Paper delivered at the CIPD Annual Conference, Harrogate, UK.
  8. ↑ Ambler, T and Barrow, S. (1996), The employer brand, Journal of Brand Management, Vol. 4, pp. 185-206.
  9. ↑ Dell, D and Ainspan, N (2001), Engaging employees through your brand, Conference Board Report No. R-1288-01-RR, April, Conference Board, Washington, D.C.
  10. ↑ The Economist (2003), Employer Branding Survey.
  11. 1 2 Minchington, B (2006) Your Employer Brand – attract, engage, retain, Collective Learning Australia.
  12. ↑ Sartain, L and Schumann, M. (2006), Brand from the Inside, John Wiley & Sons, San Francisco.
  13. ↑ Baid, P and Rao, A.R. (2006) Employer Branding, Concepts and Cases, ICFAI University Press, Hyderabad.
  14. ↑ Budhwar, P.S. and Bhatnagar, J. (2008) Employer Branding as a differentiator, The changing face of people management in India, Routledge.
  15. ↑ Zhang, Liu & Zhao (2008) 张学良 / 刘长春, 赵杰 [Employer Branding], Beijing.
  16. ↑ Schuhmacher, F and Geschwill, R. (2008) Employer Branding – Human Resources Management für die Unternehmensführung' Berlin.
  17. ↑ Petrovic, M (2008) Employer Branding, Rainer Hampp Verlag, Munich.
  18. ↑ Engelund, H and Buchhave, B. (2009), Employer Branding Som Discipline, Samfunds Litteratur, Copenhagen.
  19. ↑ Rosethorn, H (2009) The Employer Brand – Keeping Faith with the Deal, Gower, Farnham.
  20. ↑ "Glassdoor Myth Busters: Setting the Record Straight | Glassdoor for Employers". 6 June 2019.
  21. ↑ "Uber is finally making riders explain themselves when they rate a driver below five stars".
  22. ↑ "The tools to increase productivity in teleworking". El País . 2021-05-06. Retrieved 2022-03-22.
  23. ↑ Papasolomou, I and Vrontis, B (2006), 'Using internal marketing to ignite the corporate brand', Journal of Brand Management, Vol 14, Nos 1/2, pp177-195.
  24. ↑ Kotler, P. et al (2005), Principles of Marketing, Fourth European Edition, Pearson, Harlow, England.
  25. ↑ Mitchell, C. (2002), 'Selling the brand inside', Harvard Business Review, Vol.80, No.1, pp99-105.
  26. 1 2 Mosley, R (2007) 'Customer experience, organisational culture and the employer brand', Journal of Brand Management, Vol 15, October Issue pp123-134.
  27. ↑ Collins, J and Porras, J, (1995), Built to Last, Random House, UK.
  28. ↑ Martin, G. and Beaumont, P. (2003), Branding and People Management, CIPD Research Report, CIPD, London.
  29. ↑ Machtiger, B. (2004) 'Beware the pitfalls that kill branding efforts' Marketing News, Vol.38, No.4, pp21.
  30. ↑ Smith, S. and Wheeler, J. (2002), 'A new brand of leadership', Managing the Customer Experience, FT Prentice Hall, UK.
  31. ↑ Hoff, Madison. "The 50 most attractive employers for business students around the world". Business Insider. Retrieved 2022-10-28.
  32. ↑ Sunil, Priya. "World's most attractive employers 2021: Google, Microsoft, Apple, and more". www.humanresourcesonline.net. Retrieved 2022-10-28.
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