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      Building Employer Brand at a Manufacturing Brand

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      Ball Corporation is a leading figure in the aluminum manufacturing industry: It manufactures 50% of aluminum cans in North America, along with household products and aerospace technology. However, it hasn’t released a new customer-facing product in 25 years.
      That’s changing with the launch of its new, infinitely recyclable aluminum cup. This new product offers an alternative to the plastic cup and can be recycled as you would an aluminum can. The company’s hope is that consumers will reuse the cups when refilling their drinks, reducing plastic waste.
      Leading employer brand through these historic changes is Heidi Myers, Director of Global Talent Acquisition at Ball. Myers and her team have embraced this spike in visibility as an opportunity to frame the brand as part of something bigger. This framing, Myers hopes, will attract the next generation of great talent to Ball.
      Putting the Brand on the Map
      Ball’s product launch coincides with another monumental event for its brand visibility: It’s just received the naming rights to a sports arena (formerly the Pepsi Center) in Denver, Colorado, where Ball is headquartered. The move is part of a partnership with Kroenke Sports & Entertainment and another outgrowth of Ball’s sustainability efforts.
      Ball Arena’s presence in Denver is a huge step for brand awareness. Myers and her team see a tremendous opportunity to cultivate name recognition during home games and other events and sharpen their competitive edge as an employer.
      A Spike in Visibility Leads to a Spike in Growth
      What has all this headline-grabbing change done for Ball’s growth? A lot: The company is experiencing a 200% growth increase in North America alone and recently opened three new manufacturing plants. Ball’s team now encompasses roughly 18,000 employees around the globe.
      This rapid expansion poses some exciting challenges for Myers and the talent acquisition team. New plant openings mean attracting talent to locations where Ball hasn’t recruited before. The secret to keeping pace with all this growth, according to Myers, is activation. “Don’t underestimate activation,” she says. “Any resources you can dedicate to it, do it.”
      Myers recognizes the central role that employer brand and talent acquisition play in Ball’s future as an innovative, rewarding employer: “Talent acquisition is the backbone of an organization. Without good people, your organization is not going to grow.”

      To follow Heidi Myers’s work in employer brand, connect with her on LinkedIn. For help gathering data and insights you can act on to improve your own company, get in touch.
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      How Google Does Employment Branding

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      When your employer value proposition is to “build for everyone,” you need an employer brand strategy that centers on authenticity.
      Leading employer brand at one of the world’s tech titans means grappling with a reputation of legendary proportions, supporting a network of 120,000 employees around the globe, and staying sensitive to the needs of one billion users.
      It’s what Mary Streetzel faces every day in her role as Head of Employer Brand at Google. And though Google’s scale sets it apart from most other employers, the lessons Streetzel and her team have learned about employer brand strategy have universal relevance.
      The Need for More Data
      Data has played a starring role in the evolution of Google’s culture and employer brand strategy. Its mission to “increase the world’s knowledge” includes the company itself—Streetzel and her team are constantly gathering more data to help make Google a better place to work.
      You may have heard legends about the notorious Google interviews of 10 years ago. Hiring committees tested candidates with trick questions (“How many ping pong balls could you fit in a school bus?”), graduates of high-profile alma maters seemed to receive preferential treatment, and one candidate allegedly went through 16 interview rounds before receiving a decision.
      These hiring practices, Streetzel insists, are relics of a bygone era. There’s been a culture shift toward a more empathic, broad-minded, and diverse Google, thanks in part to data.
      Let Your People Do the Talking
      Streetzel refuses to let the buzzword status of “authenticity” cloud its meaning and importance to employer brand. “Brands have to go ahead and admit it: You’re a business. Tell the truth,” she says. “Then, let your users tell the story a little bit more. That’s authenticity.”
      User- and employee-generated content is one of Streetzel’s favorite ways to let people, rather than brands, do the talking. Most recently, Google handed the storytelling reins to its interns for International Intern Day and filled its employer brand channels with personal perspectives on life as a Googler, directly from the mouths of interns experiencing that life first-hand.
      Streetzel and her team want future Googlers to see themselves in these authentic stories, seeding a new and diverse generation of employees. “We really want everyone to see themselves at Google,” she says. “We want to build a Google that reflects the world around us.”

      To follow Mary Streetzel’s work in employer brand, connect with her on LinkedIn. For help identifying the values and culture you want to create at your own company, get in touch.
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      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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      The Impact of Sustainability on Your Employer Brand

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      At Link Humans, our goal is to help you understand why someone would want to join and stay at your company. The better you know your reputation as an organization, the easier it will be to attract the right people and get them to stick around.
      To do that, we do research and analysis to transform sentiment into data, analyzing over one million employer brand data points to create the Employer Brand Index. At its core, the index measures what current and prospective employees care about and how likely they are to say something about it.
      We also use this methodology to research trends in employer branding and talent attraction that may have implications for the industry’s future. We’ve previously looked at the role of diversity and inclusion at 20 top US tech companies, the state of innovation and technology at the top 10 US banks, and how employer brand values have shifted during the pandemic.
      For our newest study, we’re looking at how Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles impact employer brand and why they’re more important than ever, especially as we begin to recover from COVID-19. In our recent podcast, I caught up with Olivia Thompson, our Account Manager, to discuss the study results.
      What Our Data Tells Us About ESG
      In creating our Index, we go through a pervasive process of categorizing commentary according to positive and negative sentiment,” Thompson says. “From these comments, we categorize them even further into our sixteen employer brand attributes.”
      As we’ve been looking over our data for Q1 2021, we’ve noticed that ESG has been a significant driver of positive commentary. “85% of commentary towards this attribute is positive,” Thompson reports, and it’s also the second-highest mentioned attribute on social media. This combination of something likely to be talked about positively and widely shared is potent when it comes to your employer brand. This makes ESG a great driver of positive impact towards your overall Employer Brand Index score.
      Why Sustainability Should Be a Key Part of ESG Initiatives
      In her research, Thompson found that sustainability, in particular, formed 23% of the total number of positive ESG mentions in Q1 2021. Whether you’re talking about reducing plastic use, aiming to be carbon neutral, or starting initiatives to combat climate change in other ways, both employees and candidates are taking notice.
      ESG initiatives also have a strong link with another high-scorer from Q1 2021: mission and purpose. Candidates, employees, and alumni were likely to talk about an organization’s mission and purpose, and the commentary was overwhelmingly positive.
      “From a talent attraction and productivity perspective, maintaining a strong ESG agenda generally is important for both keeping your current employees motivated and attracting new ones,” Thompson says. The Future of Work study from PwC backs up this sentiment, finding that 65% of people worldwide want to work for an organization with a powerful social conscience.
      Activating Your Sustainability Message
      Our data also enables us to contextualize this information regarding who is saying what, which can help you understand how to make a plan for activation and impact. 46% of positive commentary on sustainability has come from senior management, and 90% of it happens on social media.
      Senior management needs to lead the charge in discussing sustainability and ESG initiatives on social media. Meanwhile, your team should look to leverage a range of channels, hashtags, and campaigns to boost activation—and track your success. “It’s people’s stories that are going to be of interest,” Thompson says, “and if the conversation is positive, you should try to boost it as much as possible.”

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      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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      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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      Attracting Tech Talent in a New Location

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      When reaching out to a new talent market, your existing recruitment marketing strategy may not cut it. New markets bring new competitors, new biases, and new questions to answer with your messaging. How can leaders in recruitment marketing and employer branding do it? That’s what Appian and its Recruitment Marketing Strategist, Chris Fitzner, are figuring out.
      Appian, a US-based tech brand that offers an automation platform to businesses, recently acquired a small company in Seville, Spain. Rather than simply absorb the Seville team, Appian decided to grow its presence in Seville—“to capture that spirit there, and capture that culture,” as Fitzner puts it.
      Research Your New Talent Market
      Fitzner’s team started with the facts: They researched tech professionals in the Seville area to build data-centered profiles of who they needed to reach. Using LinkedIn’s Talent Insights platform, Appian identified the market’s main hitters, broken out by title, industry, and experience.
      Learn What You’re Up Against in Your New Market
      Appian’s approach to sketching out its growth challenges provides a useful framework for other teams hoping to enter new talent markets. First, using the list of major players they’d built when researching their new talent market, Fitzner’s team categorized their competitors: home-grown Seville companies, companies (like Appian) that had recently acquired Seville companies, and large consultancies that hire remote talent from Seville.
      Then, to understand their biggest recruitment hurdles, Fitzner’s team returned to their data, specifically location data. Their website analytics revealed almost no visits from local talent, and Appian’s only Seville-based LinkedIn engagement was from the local employees they’d just acquired.
      Build Your Recruitment Marketing Strategy
      When entering a new talent market, posting a job listing to Glassdoor or Indeed isn’t enough. “You have to get into where they’re actively looking,” Fitzner advises, which means devoting more attention to local job boards.
      “Who is Appian?” was still an obstacle for Appian’s recruiters on LinkedIn, so they began serving ads to targeted audiences in advance of reaching out via InMail, which earned them higher open rates.
      Adapt What You Already Know About Good Marketing
      When building a recruitment marketing strategy, innovation is great, but Fitzner cautions against reinventing the wheel, especially for those coming from a recruiting background. “There are already a lot of existing resources out there,” he says. “Look at existing marketing principles. Learn email marketing. Learn content marketing. Learn the basics of SEO. Learn how to establish a good PR/media program.”

      To follow Chris Fitzner’s work in employer branding, connect with him on LinkedIn. For more strategies and data-driven insights that you can act on to improve your company, get in touch.

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      Building Employer Brand at an Inclusive Tech Workplace

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      Salesforce, the US tech company responsible for one of the world’s most popular CRM platforms, has earned more than 80 awards for its workplace culture. Its team has more than tripled in size in the past five years. Employer brand metrics may be infamously elusive, but these numbers paint a clear picture: Salesforce is doing something right.
      What makes a company an exceptionally good place to work? Chrissy Thornhill, Salesforce’s Global Senior Manager of Employer Brand and Recruitment, has identified a few of the characteristics that have helped its employer brand thrive.
      Intentional
      The environment at Salesforce isn’t a happy accident or convenient byproduct. “We are super intentional about our culture,” Thornhill says. “We write it down. We prioritize it. We build programs around it. We measure it. We constantly innovate on it.”
      Globally Aware
      Salesforce’s headquarters sits in the US, but it operates global offices on six continents. An innocuous piece of social media content may not strike the same tone from one region to the next. The past nine months, Thornhill says, have driven that fact home.
      Inclusive
      Workplace equity not only impacts employees who’ve already joined the team, but also those still in their recruitment journey. It’s why Salesforce made Tony Prophet its Chief Equality and Recruiting Officer, who works closely with Thornhill’s team.
      Accountable
      Thornhill’s team promises candidates big things during the recruitment process. Then, they hold themselves accountable for delivering.
      Frugal with Time
      Sometimes, the success of the Salesforce employer brand team lies in what they don’t do. Rather than spreading their small team thinly across as many efforts as possible, they’re choosy about where they invest their time.
      These traits have kept Thornhill at Salesforce as its employer brand team has doubled. If her own enthusiasm for her workplace is any indicator, that growth is just getting started: “It’s been quite the journey, and I don’t think it’s going to let up any time soon.”

      To follow Chrissy Thornhill’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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