Employer Branding: Lower Recruitment Costs & Boost Employee Retention

What is Employer Branding?

Where to start?  
There are so many definitions.  
You have product branding, and you have employer branding. 

Employer branding is branding the spirit and the culture of the company from within and also to the outside world. They should correspond. Otherwise, you don't have an employer brand, just a fake employer brand. In essence, it is the art of showing who you really are and what your values are.

Is Employer Branding primarily important for recruitment, or is it more for customers, as well as people who could join the company?

That's an excellent question. 
The first thing you can measure is recruitment. 

Corporate Social Responsibility is also part of the employer branding journey where the company is implicitly saying: “We take care of our people, and we take care of the world.” 

A good example is Cepsa in Spain, a large oil company. They were struggling with hiring, especially in an age when growing swathes of young people care about the environment. Cepsa was creating lots of green initiatives, and thus, they needed an employer brand that reflected this. However, they needed their own employees to talk about it, not just the company itself. If the company talks about its green initiatives, it's perceived as greenwashing, but if their own employees talk about these initiatives, it is completely different, and in two or three years, they were able to completely change the perspective of Tepsa.

Employer branding is also much wider than just something HR does. 

Doing it right helps to future-proof the entire company. If it is just corporate spin, it will be inauthentic and ineffective.

So, I guess what I'm picking up from you here is that the employees are actually the key people in Employer Branding. Is that correct?

Yes, indeed, and you just pointed out something else. Since employer branding is at the center of a company, everybody, including the CEO and the shareholders, needs to support it. They also need to be involved in the employer brand. The CEO has to be heavily involved in the process.

How do you create an Employer Brand?

There's a bottom-up and a top-down approach. 

My view is that they meet somewhere in the middle, for example there are values that should be aligned with everybody. A common mistake I encounter is that companies create employee brands based on values that everybody has, for example: “We are customer driven”. 

I've never had a company that says, “We are not customer-driven”. 

Everybody is customer-driven, but the real question is: “How much do you value this on a continuum or range? Is it a 10% weighting or a 100% weighting?” 

You also need to identify some values that are unique.

The aim is to try and identify the values that match everybody’s, but also add some extra spice on it, as long as people know that this is that, this is what they stand for. 

Where do you showcase your Employer Branding? 

It can be on the About us page or a culture page on a website or can be on posters in the office, but that is only a part of the story. 

The key point here is that there has to be alignment between the company and the actual values. You'll often find people go to the Glassdoors page of a company to see what the employees really think about the brand. With companies that are not true to their values, you're going to have a lot of angry employees giving out, whereas if they are very aligned with the brand, you tend to get a very good Glassdoor score.

The more interesting thing is when smaller companies start with employee branding because they have their needs to attract new people as well, where you can't hide as much, where if you have a dark side, it's visible immediately.

We know that it takes a lot of time, but the first thing you need to do is to create these authentic voices without needing to have a big budget to source a film crew to make a slick video about who you are. Just make it yourself, and then you will see that it will be supported by people within your company. This authenticity is very powerful.

Is Employer Branding just for big companies? 

I think the point is that smaller companies may not have the budget to do high-production polished videos, but by being transparent and authentic, that will appeal to certain people and it will help you attract the right people.

Employer Branding is an initiative that mostly starts in HR. Most HR departments are pretty busy, they already have too much work, they are very stressed, and then you see that they fail with employer branding initiatives because they don't get any support. Hence the importance of C-suite support as I mentioned previously.

So that's why I also think that next to software, you need to offer genuine support. 

• How do you do it step by step? 
• How do you create an employee brand? 
• And once you have your employee brand.

That's an area of personal strength for us here at Ambassify. We’re very strong believers in this marriage between the software, the tech, and support.

The strange thing is that budgets can be an issue with smaller companies. Some companies don't have a problem paying €25,000 euros to a headhunter once somebody has been found, but they haven't got the mandate to invest first in their employer brands so that their recruitment costs are being reduced. You have to swap the way you manage costs in these departments, and invest in your employer brand instead to make the hiring process cheaper and better. 

But that can be difficult, it's a cultural thing, and that's why having the support of the CEO is crucial in smaller companies because they can decide on budgets and they can advocate for this new approach. 

Employer Branding helps with existing employee retention because you're engaging your staff and making sure you understand that the values are aligned. It also means you're being thoughtful about recruitment and making sure that you're clear and upfront about what you stand for, which makes it easier to attract the right people who share these values. This then translates into not needing to spend as much money on headhunter fees because you've got a strong brand, and therefore, even though you're a small company, people can relate to it.

Can you share some examples of smaller companies that are not as well known, that you think have strong Employer Brands?

There's one great example of a Belgian brand called Colruyt. They have always had a very strong employer brand. One of the things that they have had since the start was this real authenticity (even before the name employer branding existed as a concept). They have always worked with their own staff on posters and advertisements, and it works very well. They have a really strong culture. 

Another great example is Dstny, a Belgian company that has become a European leader and innovator in business communication solutions. The CEO strongly believes in work-life balance. People need to be happy because if they are not happy, they will quit. The company has a very high number of employee ambassadors, and that is a great way to assess whether your colleagues are bought into the culture.

How do you think remote working ties in with Employer Branding? 

We've seen a lot of hybrid working and remote working growth in the last few years, especially post-COVID. It means there are fewer offices where you can go in and really feel the culture, and you can really do a strong job in employer branding in an office setting. 

In some ways, it is more difficult to build an employer brand remotely, because people are less connected to each other, and so there's less possibilities to just show who you really are. 

It's so important that there are strong role models. We need to interact, and interaction through a screen is always different from in-person interaction. So for me it's a challenge. If you have lots of remote work, it's even more of a challenge. And therefore, the stronger your employer brand is, the better your remote work will be. 

What's the link between culture and Employee Branding? Are they the same thing, or are they different?

They are slightly different. But they are very much interlinked. 

Culture is often present but not always very visible or outspoken. However, with employer branding, you need to be able to show what your culture is through images. So, Employer Branding makes your culture visible, and the key is to get your own employees to be the ambassadors.

How does Ambassify help companies with employer branding?

Ambassify’s employee advocacy platform makes it possible for colleagues to share content via their own individual social media networks. It is a perfect solution for busy people as it offers a frictionless approach to sharing.

It also provides many valuable insights. The marketing team can create a lot of content, hoping that people will read and share it so that it has an impact outside of your own company. Ambassify can show you the impact in black and white, and thus, it has great value in empowering your team and your company.