Employer Brand

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      in Employer

      Leading an Employer Brand Evolution

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      When a business changes, its employer brand must evolve as well, as this professional services brand is learning as it recruits from an increasingly diverse talent pool.
      What does “adaptability” look like when you’re one of the largest professional services companies in the world?
      This is the challenge facing Erin Maxin, Global Employer Brand Leader at EY (also known as Ernst & Young). EY employs well over 200,000 employees worldwide and works with clients in over 150 countries.
      1. Attracting Tech Talent Outside of the Big Four
      Attracting tech workers is one of the most common talent challenges facing employer brand leaders today. Unless you’re a sought-after Big Four employer, you may struggle to fill tech roles and retain tech talent.
      EY has had to shift away from the campus recruiting model it’s used for years, in which internships fed the hiring pipeline. “Our talent models are changing because our business is changing,” Maxin says. Now, EY recruits from a broader range of backgrounds and skillsets than ever before to find the best matches for their tech roles.
      2. Diminishing Employee Tenure
      The “partner track” is less of a draw for candidates than it was in the past when employees preferred to stick with a job for a longer period of time. Job tenures are shortening, and today’s workers are less likely to desire a decades-long relationship with their employers.
      “The experience applicants have from a candidate perspective is really important to our ability to sell and build our brand in the marketplace,” Maxin says. For her and her team, crafting an exceptional candidate experience isn’t just humane; it’s vital to business success, too.
      3. Preparing for a Global Crisis
      The pandemic has forced drastic change onto many businesses, including their employer brand teams. Teams went remote, wellness became paramount, and brand messaging that worked in a pre-COVID world no longer resonated.
      “When things change your world, like the pandemic,” Maxin says, “you can customize it very quickly and get your regions and stakeholders what they need.” It’s an approach that focuses less on policing and more on empowering, educating, and creativity.
      4. Brand Trust Is Thornier Than Ever
      Edelman’s 2020 Trust Barometer report revealed the tremendous role consumer trust in a brand now plays in its success. Meanwhile, employees (both current and former) are turning to platforms like Glassdoor to offer their unvarnished thoughts on the employee experience.
      This means transparency and experience management are now central to a successful employer brand strategy. “You can put out gorgeous videos, gorgeous ads, and great content on your social media channels. But if your people are not having a great experience, they have platforms through which they can share that,” Maxin reminds us. “That is your employer brand, like it or not.”

      To follow Erin Maxin’s work in employer brand, connect with her on LinkedIn. For help evaluating your own employer brand, talk to us about the Link Humans Index, which uses 16 key attributes to measure how you compare with others in your industry.
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      in Talent Acquisition

      Hiring Top Candidates with Today’s Tight Talent Supply

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      With a resurgent job market, demand for talent in specialized roles has surfaced gritty competition between employers seeking to quickly fill positions. Recruiters must harness the same creativity they utilized over the last year to adapt their hiring processes and candidate experience or risk losing out on top talent.
      Emerging from a global pandemic, candidates now have greater expectations from recruiters and organizations. According to Jobvite’s 2021 Recruiter Nation survey, 47% of recruiters cited the lack of skilled/qualified candidates as the biggest concern in hiring quality talent.
      By catering to candidates’ needs and offering an optimized apply process, recruiters can gain an edge in today’s candidate market. Jobvite’s latest e-book, “How to Hire Top Talent Quickly,” dives into how recruiting teams can hire top candidates by shifting their recruitment and application processes to compete for a tight talent supply. Below are ways recruiters can apply these insights to better attract quality talent.
      Begin with your employer brand
      Recruiting for highly skilled roles that require extensive training and specialized degrees means standing apart from the competition. Employers can entice top candidates to complete their applications with a unique employer identity that emerges from the cluster of competitor listings.
      48% of recruiters consider a company’s career site a top tool when it comes to growing employer branding. With greater expectations from candidates regarding recruitment processes and company culture, communicating an up-to-date employer brand will streamline attracting high-quality talent. Companies must ensure every channel – from career sites to social media – conveys a consistent, genuine message about their identity as an employer and company. Organizations with a thoughtfully designed brand spend less on recruiting because they do not have to work as hard to sign top candidates.
      Building and maintaining an employer brand is no small task, but it can provide significant long-term benefits. A company’s career site is a great place to start when cultivating an employer brand. Job postings give candidates an inside look into role requirements and create an opportunity for employers to connect with quality job seekers by highlighting their culture and values.
      Elevate the candidate experience
      Attracting specialized candidates requires engaging candidate experience. According to the 2021 Job Seeker Nation Report, the most essential factors to a positive candidate experience are great communication from the employer (54%), ease of scheduling (47%), easy application process (45%), and a quick hiring process (30%).
      Delivering the right experience can often involve taxing coordination of various aspects of the application process. And, leveraging automation can play a crucial role in a talent team gaining a competitive advantage. For example, AI-powered sourcing tools can automatically tap into resume databases and job boards to build a broader, more diverse pool of talent, identifying the relevant skills and experience needed to excel at any job requisition. Utilizing tools like text-to-apply, self-scheduling portals, and chatbots can further help create a streamlined, personal experience for every candidate without the need for tedious manual processes.
      Glassdoor recently found that 58% of candidates look for jobs on their phones, and 35% would prefer to apply for jobs from their phones. Mobile devices serve as an excellent contact point to meet top talent. Ensuring the career site is compatible with mobile browsers will help recruiters reach candidates on the go and prevent candidates from dropping off from the mobile application process.
      Build your talent pipeline
      Recruiters must also build a quality talent pipeline to promptly fill these roles with qualified employees, staying ahead of their competition when a need arises. As businesses and corporations return to full operation, a talent pool presents a readily available candidate database to tap into without letting quality candidates slip through the cracks.
      To create a robust talent pipeline, recruiters should revisit their database of past applicants, sorting candidates that are a good fit by location, skillset, role, and level of engagement. Maintaining a regularly updated database allows recruiters to generate targeted campaign messages, keeping passive candidates engaged year-round. Utilizing intelligent messaging solutions, recruiters can nurture each audience segment via targeted texts, job notifications, and recruitment marketing content so they aren’t faced with a roadblock when in need of talent.
      To round up a talent pipeline, why not tap into the satisfied majority? 82% of workers are likely to click on a job opportunity posted by someone in their social network. Employee referrals offer speed and quality with hiring skilled candidates – and they’re incredibly cost-effective. Incentives including leaderboards and other automated gamification elements can keep referral programs top-of-mind with employees.
      Highlight key job details
      Remote and hybrid work are here to stay. In the past year, 54% of recruiters have seen candidates turn down an interview or job offer due to a lack of flexibility and remort work options in the workplace.
      Another way to highlight key job details is flagging roles as “urgent” on job titles and descriptions. This helps listings stand out, allowing job seekers to filter for urgent hires. These roles can attract skilled candidates seeking a fast interviewing and onboarding process, quickly filling vacancies for specialized positions.
      As organizations scramble to fill openings in the wake of a recovering job market, competition, especially for roles requiring specialized skills and certifications, can lead to a strenuous recruitment process. Implementing a comprehensive employer brand, utilizing new technologies, and strategies that cater to job seekers’ expectations and needs can help recruiters hire top-of-the-line talent.
      By: M.T. Ray, Customer Success Manager at Jobvite.
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      in Employer

      A Strategic Approach to Employer Reputation

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      What makes your campaigns instantly recognizable as belonging to your brand? When your employees talk about your brand online (and they do), do you know how and where?
      These are the questions Kirsten Bethmann has been asking as Global Employer Reputation Lead for Mars, Incorporated. Mars has set an inspiring goal for itself: to become one of the most attractive employers in the world by 2025. Achieving this goal, Bethmann believes, requires a renewed focus on brand consistency.
      The journey toward greater employer brand consistency supports greater brand awareness—often the biggest ongoing talent challenge organizations face. Unless you’re a beloved consumer brand with widespread name recognition, your employer brand team is likely all too familiar with this struggle.
      Establishing a Shared Vision
      A clear employee value proposition is the cornerstone of a consistent employer brand. For Mars, that EVP is built on three pillars: people, purpose, and development. The employer brand team took this EVP development a step further by adapting the Mars statement of purpose (“The world we want tomorrow starts with how you do business today”) into a tagline: “Your tomorrow starts today,” which personalizes and transforms the Mars mission into a call to action for its employees.
      Standardizing Brand Guidelines
      Companies that operate in multiple markets must walk a fine line between enforcing brand guidelines and empowering markets to represent themselves authentically. Mars began this work by creating a central platform for its guidelines, a “one-stop-shop” for learning how to use color, messaging, and more.
      Leaving Room for Personalization
      Within these brand guidelines, employer brand teams in each of Mars’ markets have the flexibility to make campaigns their own. Brand guidelines dictate certain standards for social media messaging, but Mars’ employer brand leaders recognize that messaging from sales employees may sound different from engineering’s messaging. Bethmann and her team welcome those differences.

      To follow Kirsten Bethmann’s work in employer brand, connect with her on LinkedIn. For help building your EVP, the foundation of your employer brand, get in touch with us.
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      in Employer

      How Royal Caribbean Group Navigates Employer Branding

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      “Adventure” isn’t just something Royal Caribbean Group offers its customers. It’s also a love shared by its employees, as well as the key to the brand’s exceptional success at engaging new and diverse talent.
      How do you find the perfect employee when you’re a company as intrepid as an international cruise line? Royal Caribbean Group’s Talent Marketing Manager, Thea Neal, has done it through practices like investing in team morale, practicing inclusion, taking a holistic view of the employee experience, and careful listening.
      The Challenge of Talent Marketing as a Cruise Line
      Building out an authentic employee value proposition for a single organization is difficult enough. It can be even harder when that organization houses six different brands, as is the case with Royal Caribbean Group. Employer brand leaders may encounter hesitancy, as Neal did, from more senior leaders who are wary of defining an EVP that may not feel relevant to all branches and levels.
      Invest in Morale
      To attract and retain the best talent, Royal Caribbean Group makes serious investments in its culture and employees’ well-being. Even during a pandemic, the company has found ways to preserve and adapt its office traditions, like happy hours (now virtual) and Halloween (a staff favorite).
      Practice Inclusion
      Prioritizing diversity and inclusion has helped Royal Caribbean Group attract employees from a range of backgrounds and identities. This has been a special focus of Neal’s team, which recruits talent from around the globe. Cultural context is always top-of-mind for Neal when formulating her employer brand strategy: “The employer brand that I put out in America needs to resonate just as well as the employer brand I put out in the Philippines or Indonesia,” she says.
      Consider the Whole Employee Journey
      Neal’s team frames the employee experience as a journey—in fact, the “Journey with us” tagline appears across Royal Caribbean Group’s careers site, social media accounts, and internal communications. This framing reflects the emphasis they place on supporting people throughout their time with the company, from candidate to alum, and not just on the recruitment process or the “sell.”
      Become a Better Listener
      Neal urges other employer brand leaders to listen to fellow employees as closely as possible, especially when their feedback disrupts your assumptions. “A lot of times, as employer brand folks, we have these rosy glasses on. Sometimes you need that real perspective from an employee to create something better, listen, and evolve,” Neal says.
      This approach to talent marketing has helped Royal Caribbean find perfect-fit candidates that join the family and stay for years (and voyages). These candidates-turned-colleagues share Neal’s love of seeing the world and helping others do the same. It’s a passion that unites the team, regardless of role; as Neal puts it, “Who doesn’t want to sell amazing memories and experiences?”

      To follow Thea Neal’s work in employer brand, connect with her on LinkedIn. For data-driven insights into your company that you can act on, get in touch. We can help you develop strategies for making real change.

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      in Employer

      Expanding your employer brand reach with remote

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      In light of COVID-19’s impact on the world, remote work will continue to be part of how we work moving forward. As such, insights from candidates in our 2020 Brand Health Report reveal that having a remote work policy or flexibility in how you manage your workforce will impact your employer brand and, further, how job seekers evaluate an opportunity with your company. 
      A company’s employer brand is a combination of a company’s reputation and the value it presents to prospective employees. Without a positive reputation and brand, a company can lose out on qualified top candidates to competitors despite working on innovative products and services that may have set them apart pre-pandemic.
      Given the circumstances, companies such as Twitter and Google have announced their version of remote policies and long-term work strategies for their employees. Both companies remain on our list of the top 20 global employer brands candidates around the world would like to work for. More companies around the world have followed knowing that remote work is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

      By removing the limitations that  city based hiring can bring for companies, remote work enables organizations to hire from a larger pool of quality talent and create a larger impact. Additionally, tech talent agrees that remote work has the potential to help companies build more diverse workplaces (45% said very strongly and another 33% said strongly) which is a consideration for them when joining a company. By incorporating and communicating remote-work policies into your company’s strategy, talent will find opportunities with your company more accessible and attractive.
      Prioritize work-life balance
      In the midst of a global pandemic, many employees may find themselves in difficult circumstances at home or in their personal life while committing to perform their job responsibilities. How your company is supporting employee work-life balance and mental health can impact your brand and of course employee morale which they share with friends and peers in the industry. A major concern for leaders while employees shelter-in-place and work remote is employee mental health, especially as it relates to isolation, anxiety, depression, productivity issues, Zoom fatigue, and burnout. By providing genuine support to employees, this care is recognized as part of the company’s values.
      And while remote work can help companies increase diversity in the workplace, employers should be conscious of how long they expect team members to spend on video calls. 70% of tech talent prefer to spend no more than 1-3 hours per day on Zoom. This provides enough time in the day for team members to perform asynchronous and collaborative work during working hours and still have time for things that matter to them in their personal life, as well. More

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      in Employer

      How Unilever Integrates Diversity & Inclusion with Employer Brand

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      For this consumer goods brand, employer brand and diversity and inclusion aren’t separate initiatives—they work in tandem as vital components of attracting the best employees. Both employer brand and D&I play vital roles in attracting the best employees. Both foreground employee stories, shape company culture and inform its values. As Unilever’s Employer Brand Lead Zakiya […] More

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      in Employer

      Leading a Company Through an Employer Brand Refresh

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      Allianz is a European multinational financial services company headquartered in Munich, Germany. Its core businesses are insurance and asset management. The organization is undergoing major transformations, including a global refresh of its employer brand. Here’s how Kara McLeod, the company’s employer brand head in Asia-Pacific is leading the way. Have a listen to the episode […] More

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Employer

      How Employer Brand Teams Can Respond to a Crisis

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      What happens to employer branding in a time of crisis? In this special episode responding to the global crisis surrounding COVID-19, Jörgen Sundberg and Andy Partridge connect on how employer brand teams can respond and what Link Humans is doing to help clients. Have a listen to the episode below, keep reading for a summary […] More