Given that, right now, one day blurs into the next week which merges into the next month which in turn glides into the next quarter, it’s perhaps little wonder that we find ourselves having repetitive or circular conversations.
The old trope within our industry as to who owns Employer Branding has been generating hot air since, well, probably the establishment of the construct itself. It’s a debate that has no end because there’s probably no definitive answer. The answer varies significantly from organisation to organisation, sector to sector, country to country. Some observers would advocate ownership within the C-suite, the marketing department, HR or talent acquisition. Take your pick.
The conversation took an interesting turn recently with research from LinkedIn which suggested that “58% of Chief Marketing Officers believe that their role will evolve to increasingly support other functions, such as employer branding, internal comms, learning and development”.
Frustratingly, the quality and topicality of metrics which point to the relationship between employer branding (in all its guises) and organisational performance isn’t entirely overwhelming. We’ve all come across the Virgin Media case study, which highlighted a significant cancellations of customer subscriptions following a poor candidate experience. I recently came across a fascinating story from Disney which pointed to a measurable sales uptick in the stores closest to those assessment centres which provided the most comprehensive applicant feedback. And we clearly shouldn’t forget the Richard Branson quote, “Customers do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the customers”.
It’s a great quote but one we’ve been reading for very nearly 30 years.
However, the events and experiences of the last year, I think, have been influential in rendering the relationship between employee experience and brand and customer impact much more tangible.
Hence why we are increasingly coming across examples of the following more recent pointers – 48% of consumers consider how an organisation treats its employees when determining whether or not they are ethical, according to research from Edelman Trust; and 62% of consumers have stopped buying from an organisation which treats its employees poorly for CareerArc.
And we have seen such sentiment in action just this week. Two major investors, Aberdeen Standard and Aviva declined to get involved in the forthcoming Deliveroo flotation because of their concerns over workers’ rights. And both Nike and H&M are facing much criticism in China over the apparent use of forced Uighur labour in the production of Xinjiang cotton.
I’ve been making the point for most of the last 12 months that your Employer Brand is how you have treated your people during Covid and lockdown. And there’s a lot to be said that such treatment influences not only your reputation as an employer but your reputation full stop.
The owners and leaders of certain volume pub chains and sports outfitters are unlikely to have enhanced the reputation of their respective businesses as a place to work or to shop over the last year. If we have spent the last decade focusing on the CSR and community impact efforts of organisations, I think there will be an increasing interest in how organisations reach out to support those of their employees who have suffered loss and/or emotional and mental scarring during Covid. There will undoubtedly be residual damage left behind within employee groups and simply stocking up on workplace hand sanitiser will fall some way short of an appropriate response.
And there are some very positive examples of exactly that. Many organisations have publicly committed to permanent working from home initiatives – Nationwide, for example, just this week. Citibank have announced Friday as a reset day, when employees are not expected to undertake a Zoom call. A number of employers are paying their people a Covid-related ‘thank you’, including BT, Lidl and Sainsburys.
“So, we are not a consumer facing business in the UK but we are very well known and we have a large consumer base in the US. Our Employer Brand has always been intrinsically linked with our corporate brand in terms of look and feel and messaging, as well as execution. I think that as an organisation we have treated our employees exceptionally well during the pandemic. Based on recent engagement scores, they seem to agree and praise us for our compassion, care and flexibility. I would then hope that this will reflect well on us when we go to market to recruit”, Catherine Schlieben, HR Director – Talent, National Grid.
Perhaps more positively, the brand of the NHS has effectively been the commitment, passion and, sometimes, the sacrifice of its people. The work, the hours and their dedication has been little short of staggering. We view the NHS through the lens of their people. Such individuals form and shape the NHS’ employer brand and how we perceive them as an organisation.
And there is a circular relationship to such branding messages. The Herculean efforts of NHS people have enhanced its organisational reputation, which has, in turn, reinvigorated its employer brand, to the extent that there has been a 32% rise over the last year of people registering for nursing courses. “The tireless and outstanding commitment of all our nurses over the past year is the best possible advert for the nursing profession”, Professor Mark Radford, Chief Nurse at Health Education England.
I suspect the events of the last 12 months have provided greater impetus for marketing to have a greater influence over and involvement in employer branding.
For many organisations, their people have been its difference. They have been the face, voice and tone of an organisation’s brand when customers have had the greatest need. At a time when so many interactions are remote, aloof and digital, reaching out for help, for service, for a voice, for a smile has been more important than ever before.
So, there is much merit in employer branding becoming subsumed within marketing.
Having more than one brand feels like a recipe for dilution and confusion. A tighter alignment of all messaging feels more logical.
In the words of Dave Trott, “Communicating two strong propositions is like welding a JCB to a Ferrari”. Neither are enhanced by their proximity.
If we’re being honest, budgets within the marketing function are likely to be more generous. A function that combines both consumer and employer branding might too be capable of extracting better deals from agencies and media channels. Branding assets could be more easily shared across consumer and employer marketing. And access to enhanced metrics and dashboards may well be more forthcoming. There will clearly be exceptions, but placing employer branding within marketing may bring it closer to the top table, giving it a higher profile both internally and externally.
There is a sense too that housing employer branding within marketing creates more sense of objectivity. The marketing function is less likely to be consumed in a potential tug of war between tactical recruitment and strategic employer brand building activities.
All points with some merit. But what’s the other side of the debate? Why should employer branding remain out of the clutches of marketing?
Perhaps cynically, we might wonder how much priority employer branding activities would attract within the marketing area? Would top marketing teams be fighting to work on such projects? Or would it be left to more junior individuals?
Would some of the key metrics used to measure the impact of employer branding – and they clearly vary from organisation to organisation – mean much to marketing colleagues?
Whilst there are plenty of employers in which there is clear correlation between their customer base and their candidate base, this isn’t always so. For investment banks looking to target hedge funds, pension funds or the M&A community, would they be used to pushing messages out to apprenticeship or undergraduate careers audiences? We might pose a similar question to law firms or business services organisations. There feels little or no common ground.
Would reaching out to internal employee audiences via a more organisationally focused branding message feel impersonal and clumsy?
Consumer and candidate audiences typically confront institutional and employer brands with different decision-making processes. Calls to action vary. The magnitude of buying one FMCG product over its rival probably has fewer life-changing implications than a career move.
“Handing over total control of employer branding to a consumer marketing team is a bit like asking the ice cream man to sell you a freezer. They have knowledge and that knowledge is, no doubt, valuable but they are not experts in employer branding. The employer brand and the consumer brand should have synergy but the two are not always inextricably linked and there are nuances to consider. For an employer brand to fly, you need a truly collaborative team effort starting from the top down. If there is no appetite at the top, you might as well forget it, because all you are likely to end up with are theoretical values and physical brand assets. Beautiful employer branding only happens when every manager in every part of that business understands what an employer brand is, why it is there and how to engage their teams to live it,” Adele Swift, Talent Attraction and Recruitment Manager, Toolstation.
Or is it simply the case that the way organisations engage with people audiences has become too important to be owned by anything other than its own function? That the people landscape shifts so regularly, so unintuitively. That employer branding has become so important, so specialised, so nuanced, that to hand its creation, articulation and delivery over to a different part of the organisation, albeit a parallel one, risks alienating candidate and employee audiences?
That employees have never been so front of mind, so central, so influential in terms of how external audiences perceive and process an organisation than over the last 12 months.
We increasingly analyse and evaluate employee audiences in order to decide whether we want to invest, buy or indeed work with such brands. Employer branding absolutely has to work with areas such as marketing, whilst at the same time having the confidence, the purpose and the realisation to appreciate that its people have never been so important. Those people deserve branding that considers them an absolute focus and priority. Like never before.
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 