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    Building Employer Brand Awareness with Global Tech Talent

    Everyone’s looking for tech talent, and the competition within this highly in-demand market is steep. This is the challenge Liz Gelb-O’Connor faces as ADP’s VP/Global Head of Employer Brand and Marketing. Here’s how Gelb-O’Connor and her team are tailoring their employer brand strategy to attract tech talent specifically.
    Building Global Awareness
    As a payroll services provider, ADP pays one out of every six workers in the US and is almost a household name. However, outside of the US, it doesn’t have the same level of recognition as major US consumer brands.
    The employer brand team spent 10 months researching the international talent markets that yielded the most candidates and nurturing relationships with partner organizations in other countries. The result was an EVP localized for each country—a monumental effort that turned out to be well worth it, Gelb-O’Connor says.
    Nurture Future Talent
    ADP’s employer brand team also devotes energy to the very top of the tech talent funnel, those that aren’t looking for work right now but may be strong candidates in the future. ADP’s tech blog, a first of its kind for the company, keeps future talent abreast of industry conversations and news while showcasing the brand’s innovation and the thought leadership of its tech employees.
    The results of this tech-tailored approach to employer brand have been powerful. In the five years since Gelb-O’Connor began leading employer brand, ADP has won industry accolades, and earned a strong NPS score for its candidate experience. Cost of hire has dropped, and the candidate conversion rate for the tech career site is twice the rate of its main career site (despite launching during the hiring slowdown of May 2020).
    This rapid change and growth around tech is one of the things that makes Gelb-O’Connor so excited to lead employer brand at ADP. “It never gets old,” she says. “That’s been the most rewarding thing: seeing how far we’ve come.”

    To follow Liz Gelb-O’Connor’s work in employer brand, connect with her on LinkedIn. For help identifying the values and culture you want to create in your company, get in touch.
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    Is Your Employer Brand Helping or Hindering Your Hiring Objectives?

    Most employers agree that great employees are at the heart of every business. To secure the best candidates, hiring managers typically put significant efforts into two key facets of the hiring process: producing an attractive job advert and properly screening the applicant’s CVs.
    The interviews and onboarding that follow must be conducted with the utmost care, managed by members of staff with the knowledge and time to ensure they do not miss out on the opportunity to secure the right candidates.
    However, with 72% of recruiting leaders worldwide agreeing that employer brand significantly impacts hiring, the key to enticing top talent could lie within how attractive your business seems to potential employees.
    So, if you want to meet your recruitment objectives, it might be time to think about the meaning of business branding and how you can use it to gain a competitive edge in the market…
    The ins and outs of company brands
    In short, business branding is a way of identifying your business. It encapsulates what sets it apart, what makes its offering different, and, perhaps most importantly, reflects the company’s values.
    A company develops a positive (or negative) impression of its brand through the quality and competitiveness of what it can offer its employees, including its salary and benefits, management style, culture, and commitments. As such, branding and recruitment go hand in hand — particularly in the digital world, where so much business and hiring activity happens online.
    Organizations around the world are working on nailing their branding — but why? What benefits are employees looking for, and why is it vital to get it right?
    Firstly, it generates cost savings. According to LinkedIn, companies with positive employer brands or favorable reputations within the market can get up to 50% more applications than companies with negative brands. And that is not all; successful employer branding has multiple proven benefits for hiring businesses, including:

    Conversely, companies that fail to focus on branding stand to lose out significantly — financially and reputationally. One study revealed that 82% of prospective employees consider brand and reputation before applying for a job, which could prove disastrous for business growth and bottom lines in organizations that fail to meet expectations.
    So, can you afford to fall short of the mark in the current recruitment landscape?
    Establishing a brand for your business
    A strong employer brand is crucial for securing skilled, engaged, and leadership-bound workers.
    When done well, a branding strategy can deliver multiple functions simultaneously — from defining products and services to showcasing a unique approach to company culture. Consistent, first-rate employer branding should speak for itself, helping to communicate all a candidate needs to know through every interaction with your company.
    Though defining and developing your business brand is a long-term commitment, there are a few key areas you can focus on to improve how your business appears to prospective candidates…
    Refining your employer value proposition
    Branding works alongside employer value propositions (EVPs): an employer’s marketing message and promise to its employees regarding its core values.
    Every company’s EVP is different. It is the sum of everything you offer as an employer — an employee-centric approach that tells the story of your business and why someone should consider joining your team.
    An EVP can be conveyed through consistent corporate messaging and recruitment marketing that helps communicate key messages to the employees you are trying to reach. However, whilst talking a good game is great, you must also walk the walk to ensure your branding comes across as genuine — a key facet to succeeding in your goals.
    Bringing your online reputation up to scratch
    One of the trickiest parts of navigating the job hunt for candidates is working out which companies they would enjoy working for. So, ensuring your business’ reputation reflects well across the board is crucial — from online reviews and staff testimonials to official accreditations.
    Many employers throw out attractive perks and salary offers, but a growing number of workers look for something more. According to research by CareerBuilder, 83% of candidates are willing to accept a lower salary from an employer with an excellent reputation. So, building and maintaining your brand as a business can lead to lower salary responsibilities and attract more interest from serious job seekers.
    In today’s world, social media plays a starring role in business branding, with many candidates basing their employment decisions on the quality of a company’s online presence. Monitoring and updating social media pages and websites are critical to ensuring you put your best foot forward.
    Optimizing your onboarding process
    Candidates often gain their first impression of your business brand during recruitment. As a result, every onboarding stage should be carefully considered to ensure talent is not dissuaded from pursuing an opportunity within your company.
    For employers, this means issuing timely, thorough feedback, remaining organized, and staying up to date with the latest trends — from virtual recruitment and remote working to HR management.
    Of course, this can quickly become an overwhelming task — especially in the current candidate-driven market. So, experts recommend enlisting the support of a specialist recruitment agency to support a successful business branding strategy.
    After all, if you are going to invest time and money in your business brand, you want to do it right.
    By Julie Mott, Managing Director, Howett Thorpe.
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    Crafting an EVP That Serves Multiple Brands

    Some employer brand leaders know how difficult it can be to unify an entire brand under one employer value proposition. That’s the challenge LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group (RSG) faced in 2020.
    Under the leadership of Director for Employer Brand Shelley Jeffcoat, LexisNexis RSG launched an EVP that served each of its eight brands while helping them distinguish themselves as employers.
    Get Brand-Specific as Early as Possible
    As early as the research stage, Jeffcoat’s team was organizing data by brand. With help from an external research firm, LexisNexis RSG explored each brand’s target candidates and demographics, its competitors, its functions, and more.
    Then, when moving from the research stage to the analytics stage, Jeffcoat tagged her colleagues in marketing. Together, they created a unique tagline for each brand that echoed the overarching LexisNexis RSG EVP (“Explore more”) while painting a more specific picture of the individual brand (“Explore our passion for discovery”).
    Think Bigger Than Promotion
    The choice to equip each LexisNexis RSG sub-brand with its own EVP wasn’t simply marketing cleverness. Getting specific made the company more competitive as an employer and continues to impact the employee journey as well.
    In creating these flexible EVPs, “we’re defining our values and culture in a way that’s much easier for our candidates and employees to articulate,” Jeffcoat says. “This improves our competitive advantage as an employer.”
    Invest in Your Employee Advocates
    To generate internal momentum around brand advocacy, Jeffcoat knew she’d need to find employee advocates. She started her search with the talent acquisition team (a natural choice, as they were already skilled and experienced at representing the business to the public). But because of the company’s unique structure, Jeffcoat knew she couldn’t stop there; she’d need to pull in stakeholders from every brand and balance each brand’s representation.
    In an organization that houses so many brands and employs thousands, the best strategy is to “consult and empower,” than surrender control. In Jeffcoat’s words, “Trust the process!”

    To follow Shelley Jeffcoat’s work in employer brand, connect with her on LinkedIn. To identify the values and culture you want to create in your own company, get in touch.
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    A Strategic Approach to Employer Reputation Management

    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? Your answers to these questions paint a picture of your brand consistency, a crucial element of a unified employer brand.

    These are also 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.
    Why Brand Consistency Is So Important to Growth
    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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    Creating an EVP with Design Thinking

    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.
    Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or Soundcloud.

    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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    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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    Your Employer Value Proposition and COVID-19

    A pandemic, or any crisis, will be an acid test for your corporate furniture such as purpose, values, principles, behaviors, etc. In the employer brand world, we have to ensure our EVP is robust and is delivering what it promises, in good times and bad. An EVP positioning will typically consist of three to five […] More

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    Strategies for Attracting Top Talent in a Competitive Industry

    To catch the eyes of top talent, this telecommunications company revisited and revamped its EVP, generating innovative strategies for reaching prospective candidates. Sarah Dovlo is VP Global Employer Branding & HR Marketing at Deutsche Telekom. Have a listen to the episode below, keep reading for a summary and be sure to subscribe to the Employer Branding […] More