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Ashley Cheretes faces a challenge familiar to many employer brand leaders: Her company isn’t top-of-mind for many candidates, despite touching millions of lives. “Cigna is the most well-known unknown company,” jokes Cheretes, Cigna’s Head of Marketing, Talent Acquisition. “When you throw in the fact that we are technically an insurance company, we are often not…
How to Grow Awareness of Your Employer Brand Undercover Recruiter – More
Without strong communication skills, recruiters, especially those in tech, don’t stand a chance when it comes to capturing the attention of in-demand candidates. The tech industry remains highly competitive, making recruiters’ job of attracting top tech talent all the more complicated and communication all the more critical.
When it comes to connecting with top tech talent, sometimes you only get one shot to shoot – and it better be a good one. To help it stick, we’ve put together a list of what you should – and shouldn’t do – when communicating with these candidates.
Want to learn the top messaging mistakes tech recruiters make and how to prevent them?
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In building an EVP for Ritchie Bros, an online auction platform for heavy equipment, Employer Brand Specialist Thomas Reneau drew from his experience with design thinking firm IDEO. Reneau saw an opportunity to marry this innovative perspective with the company’s employer brand strategy and, in the process, enhanced the Ritchie Bros’ voice, values, and culture.
A more traditional approach to EVP might assume your team is already crystal-clear on what your company offers to candidates and what your ideal candidate is looking for. A design thinking approach to EVP, however, flips that on its head.
Design thinking encourages continually asking questions, rather than assuming your employer brand team already has all the data it needs. Design thinking highlights the difference between saying, “We need to attract this specific demographic,” and turning to current employees from that demographic to ask, “Why did you choose to work here?”
“Think of it as reverse engineering,” says Reneau. “We need to enable the team to attract the right candidates.”
Empathy and comfort with vulnerability are critical to this approach. When asking a colleague, “How does it feel to be in your shoes?” employer brand teams must be ready for honest and personal answers. They’re also responsible for creating channels and nurturing relationships where that kind of trust is possible.
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To follow Thomas Reneau’s work in employer brand, connect with him on LinkedIn. To get started on your EVP, get in touch with us. We’ll help you identify the values and culture you want to create in your company.
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One of the big lessons learned in 2020 was to be prepared for the unprepared. With so much uncertainty still in the market, employers should proceed the recruiting landscape in 2021 with caution. Doing so means learning how to enhance and improve relationships with tech talent – prospective candidates and current employees alike. Tech talent is always in-demand, and as such, attraction and retention will be more important than ever before.
With that in mind, we’re here to offer strategies that will position you as the employer of choice for top tech talent, from your initial interaction through to the final offer.
Want to find out how to source and attract top tech talent and edge out the competition?
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When Aaron Kraljev left Wells Fargo in 2019, he left behind many of the comforts that come with working for a large organization: a familiar order of operations, significant resources, the security of knowing where to turn for answers, and the stability offered by a company that’s been around for over one hundred years. Fisher Investments, where he now serves as GVP Talent Acquisition and Employer Brand, was uncharted territory and a fraction of the size of Wells Fargo.
As Kraljev discovered, however, a smaller firm doesn’t always mean leaner resources. In fact, he found a wealth of possibilities and advantages at Fisher. The move has given him valuable insight into leading employer brand at a small firm and building employer brand strategy from the ground up.
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The percentage of employees dedicated to employer brand management at a given organization isn’t universal. Relative to its size, Fisher Investments has a large employer brand management team. This gave Kraljev and his department significant resources and capacity to make a change, despite starting from scratch.
Being small also allows for greater agility and faster growth. “Huge companies, they grow, they change, they evolve, but they don’t grow as quickly,” says Kraljev. Working for a company of 3,700—as opposed to multinational Wells Fargo, which employs hundreds of thousands—means signs of change have been more immediate, more visible, and more exciting to be a part of.
In addition, younger doesn’t always mean inexperienced and untested when it comes to the age of an institution. Though not as old as many finance industry giants, Fisher has been around since the late 1970s and is no stranger to hardship. When Kraljev stepped in to lead employer brand, he learned Fisher’s brand values were not unlike those at Wells Fargo, despite the many differences in their size, age, and client demographics.
To learn more about Aaron’s work in employer brand, follow him on LinkedIn, or listen to his previous episode on working with Wells Fargo. For help building an EVP and identifying the values you want to create at your company, reach out to us.
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Thanks to media and the headline-grabbing office quirks of industry giants like Google, tech culture’s reputation precedes it. Jobseekers perceive tech companies as fast-paced, innovative places to work, and many assume a “work hard, play hard” attitude is a necessity. These preconceptions have a major impact on employer brand, as Klook’s Marilyn Yee knows well.
Yee serves as Senior Manager of Global Employer Branding and People Communications at Klook, a travel tech company. With over 10 years of experience in the industry, she’s an expert on what tech demands from leadership. Employer branding, Yee reminds us, is a long game—even in a field that embraces rapid growth.
Tech culture isn’t a monolith, but there are a few characteristics that unite most tech workplaces. These characteristics inform employer brand, what being a “culture fit” means at a particular company, and who self-selects to apply.
Moving fast is one of those characteristics. “If you’re someone who gets bored easily, or you love a challenge, consider a career in tech,” Yee says. “Change is the only constant. It’s like an organized mess every day.”
Another is the tendency for teams to skew young. At many top tech companies, the median age of employees falls in the late 20s. While those in management positions tend to be slightly older, tech employees above the age of 50 are in the minority.
Tech also has a different relationship to diversity. According to Yee, a diverse team is a must-have, rather than a nice-to-have. “If you’re building global products,” she says, “you need diversity of perspective.”
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To follow Marilyn’s work in employer brand, follow her on LinkedIn. If you want to know how your employer brand measures up to others in your industry, talk to us about the Employer Brand Index.
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At packaging solutions company Sonoco, employer brand management is tackling the “total employee journey,” from candidate to alum. Rather than taking a recruitment-focused approach to employer brand, Global Lead for Employee Experience Kristi Raines embraces a “start to finish” view of the employee experience. In her own words, “We’re looking at opportunities to engage at every stage.”
Retooling the recruitment process at Sonoco started with a question: “How do we get our recruiters thinking like marketers?” Raines observed that recruiters tend to be much more analytical and process-driven than marketers. To serve the total employee journey, however, their relationship with candidates can’t end with the “sell.”
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“Candidates rely on recruiters for much more than just selling them a job,” Raines says. The bond an employee forms with their recruiter may be the closest HR relationship they have during their tenure with a company. When given the opportunity, employees often return to them for career advice, networking opportunities, and more.
To get Sonoco’s recruitment team thinking more like marketers, Raines offered them a curated collection of content to share, along with the freedom to pick whichever resources resonated most and adapt copy to fit their personal voice. This strategy saw results, and the team began forging more connections with new and different people.
“Don’t go in with one idea,” she recommends. “Go in with eight.” That flexibility will pay off in the long run—for your employer brand and your employee experience.
To follow more of Kristi Raines’ work in employer brand, connect with her on LinkedIn. For help developing data-driven employer brand strategies to make real change, talk to us—the right data provides insight that you can act on to improve your company.
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For years, we’ve framed the virtual workplace as “the future of work”—a distant vision, and one many employer brand managers overlooked, despite the fact that more than half of workers worldwide were spending at least half their workweek telecommuting. However, as HubSpot’s Senior Manager of Employer Brand Hannah Fleishman reminds us, “The future is here.”
COVID-19 has forced companies with little experience supporting a remote workforce to embrace working from home. Some were better equipped to make this transition in stride. Before COVID-19 closed offices around the world, HubSpot was already positioning itself as a leader in remote employee experience. Of its 3,500 employees around the world, 400 were full-time remote, making HubSpot’s remote workforce its third-largest “office.” That success wasn’t an accident—a major component of its success was its commitment to remote employer brand.
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If employer brand describes how your values and culture differentiate you competitively, then remote employer brand describes your remote workforce’s place in that culture, as well as the competitive advantage you offer to remote candidates. As Fleishman puts it, “How you market and position your company, not only as a great place to work but a great place to work remotely, is really important as that becomes more competitive.”
Before 2020, the remote employee experience was an afterthought at many companies. For years, HubSpot was no exception. Framing remote work as “the future of work” allowed companies to deprioritize it in favor of more immediate goals and concerns.
However, supporting remote employees is becoming increasingly urgent as more and more job seekers opt to work from home for health and safety reasons. “Because of this pandemic, we can expect that candidates are going to expect more remote work opportunities.”
Employers shouldn’t expect the importance of remote employer brand to subside as the pandemic subsides, either. According to Fleishman, an internal survey revealed that 61% of HubSpot employees are planning to work remotely more even after in-person office life resumes.
To follow Hannah Fleishman’s work on remote employer brand, follow her on LinkedIn. You may also want to check out her previous interview Inbound Recruiting: HubSpot’s Approach to Employer Branding. For help creating data-driven, actionable strategies you can use to make real change in your company, talk to us.
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