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    A Strategic Approach to Employer Reputation

    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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    How Royal Caribbean Group Navigates Employer Branding

    “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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    Expanding your employer brand reach with remote

    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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    How Unilever Integrates Diversity & Inclusion with Employer Brand

    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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    Leading a Company Through an Employer Brand Refresh

    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

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    How Employer Brand Teams Can Respond to a Crisis

    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

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    How to Be a Better Employer Brand Leader

    Where do you start when leveling up your employer branding? An experienced employer brand leader shares the strategies, tools, and skills that can make a difference. Sara Balaban is Employer Brand & Talent Operations Lead at Geller & Company. Have a listen to the episode below, keep reading for a summary and be sure to […] More