The CMO’s Guide to Employer Brand

Why should marketing care about its company’s employer brand?  

It may suddenly feel like “employer branding” is everywhere. Even before we got hit with a pandemic, the number of people and job openings listing ‘employer brand’ has been growing exponentially for at least the last year. Maybe even two.

But employer brand “standards” have not yet been established. From what department it usually lives in, how budgets are apportioned or even what metrics should be applied, every company’s employer brand function seems to have been conceived in a vacuum, with few similarities from one to the other.

So in a world where nothing seems “settled,” why should marketing care about its company’s employer brand? If we examine what employer brand is currently and what it is becoming, then yes, marketing should care. But you might be surprised by the ways marketing and employer brand can support one another to achieve their own goals.

What Is Employer Brand, Really?

It is important that we take a moment and set a common definition of this term, because it is not yet standardized, even within the employer branding industry. Establishing this definition creates the clarity that negates the straw man arguments that plague business press on the value of this new business function. 

An employer brand is what an individual perceives it would be like to work at your company.

Those individual perceptions are built on any number of experiences and touch points, many occurring before they even look for a job. This means that every part of the business, from recruiting to product to customer service to leadership plays a role in shaping those perceptions, which are aggregated together to establish your brand. 

There are a lot of ways this sense of employer brand impacts and is impacted by marketing. There is even some overlap, but an employer brand is a different monster solving different problems, even if those problems are solved with classic marketing thinking and tools. 

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s spell out what the modern CMO needs to know about employer branding. 

One: Employer Brand Is a Unique Kind of Branding 

One of the core, though often unspoken, tenets of branding and marketing is that more is always better. More eyeballs, more awareness, more leads, more conversions, more engagement, more shelf space, more share of voice, more clicks, more sales, it doesn’t matter. More is always better. 

But employer branding is one of the few (if not only) kinds of marketing where more isn’t better. In fact, applying the same methodologies as consumer brand marketing leads to worse branding. If you’re marketing something like donuts, more ad interactions lead to more sales. Build a campaign that sells a million donuts and you’re getting a bonus. But in recruiting, if your marketing leads to a million people applying, you’ve done something wrong.

The name of the game in employer branding is quality over quantity.

Recruiters don’t want more leads and applications, they want fewer, so long as there are enough quality candidates to fill the role.  

Whereas consumer marketing wants to sell as many of a thing as it can, recruiting only can only put one person in the role, so it’s not about finding the most people, but identifying and attracting the best person for the role. In fact, the more people you attract to the role, the harder it is for the recruiter to find that quality candidate because you’ve made the haystack bigger without necessarily creating more needles. And if you attract more people to apply, that means you’re finding more people who will be disappointed because they didn’t get the job.

How long would your consumer marketing last if it made 100 people disappointed for every 1 sale? 

Now, stating that employer branding is “different” because it values quality over quantity suggests consumer marketing doesn’t care about quality. That’s not true. Of course you care about focusing your efforts on people most likely to buy. Of course you care about the quality of your creative and planning. But if someone who isn’t “qualified” to buy your product shows up with a check, are you turning them away? Of course not. Recruiters turn dozens of people away every day. 

This isn’t a purely academic point. While employer branding can use the same tech and tools as your consumer marketing, you have to keep in mind that all these tools were built with “more” in mind. You can’t just point them all at talent prospects and expect to solve the problem. Every time you think to apply a tool and tactic, you must consider if it is supporting quality or quantity and proceed accordingly. 

Two: Employer Brand Is Connected to the Corporate Brand 

Since employer branding started as a function of recruiting, it might make sense to consider it separate from corporate branding. Something that happens “over there” in the world of talent acquisition. But that would be a mistake, both in terms of scope and reach.  

In many ways, the employer brand is the most human aspect of your corporate brand. Your investor brand is why people should invest in your business, which is connected to your consumer brand, which is why people should buy the thing you make. Employer brand is the missing part of the puzzle, showing who makes the product and staffs the business.

Who you hire is who the business is and what products you sell.

Companies like Facebook make a big deal of how much they pay their core staff to suggest that they are only hiring the best, which leads to Facebook being a company you can invest well in.  

Your corporate brand, the core concepts and values that propel it, its reason for being, is true for all aspects of the business. It drives the products you make and how you market and sell them. You can’t be a company without people, so the people drive the company and the brand. Its people who take a great idea and make it worth investing in and buying. 

Don’t think of them as discrete brands, just the same concept of the brand looked through to different audiences with different needs. In fact, the better integrated the brand is, the stronger each team can lean on it. Employer brand can tap into the consumer brand halo, and consumer marketing can talk about the wonderful people making their products. Investor marketing can talk about the amazing new hire away from a competitor and the recruiter can talk about how strong the stock price is.

Three: Employer Brand Is Evolving Beyond Recruiting 

Historically, and in most companies still, the employer brand lives in the recruiting and talent acquisition function. It is the marketing ying to the recruiter’s sales-focused yang. And for most employer brand teams, the first and primary metric is to attract and fill the top of the talent funnel.

But seeing employer brand as a means of filling a funnel is a limited view. A strong employer brand increases referral rates which leads to better candidates hired faster and at a lower cost. It can increase offer acceptance rates to the same impact. It increases staff retention and tends to limit the overall growth of salaries.

A strong employer brand is a strategic business asset with clear impact on the bottom line. 

As employer brand practitioners connect the dots from their work telling stories and fanning flames of desire to these business objectives, they start to realize their own value and impact to the company. These might be TA metrics but they are driving the bottom line of the company just as much as anything operations or administration does. And they are leveraging that value to play a bigger role in the company.

Four: Employer Brand Is Already the Current Go-To for Crisis Marketing 

The classic three-step process of managing a PR crisis was perfected by Tylenol in the 1980s: The problem must be accepted and addressed, the most senior person in the company should take accountability and ownership, and the problem must be over-solved. But in the past few years, a fourth step has emerged: employer branding. When the CEO says something racist, push them out and wheel in the front line staff and team managers closest to the customer. When the bank makes fake accounts, put away the marketing messages and bring in the tellers and local bank managers. 

What do they talk about? How much they love their job and who they do it for. 

As we are now deep into the biggest global crisis of many of our lifetimes, the pattern follows. Leadership is coming out, not to talk about how they will save market share, to announce price savings or new features and strategies, but to talk about everything they are doing to keep their employees safe while working. When things get bad, companies are learning how to wheel out local managers and staff to show the human face of your brand. And that is even more true when it’s unclear what is safe to talk about and even if anyone is ready to buy. 

Five: Great Employer Branding Is Political (More So Than Consumer) 

Michael Jordan once quipped, “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” At the time he was being pressured to take a stand on social issues of the day, but he held back publicly to avoid offending anyone who might second guess buying one of his products.  

Consumer marketing knows that politics is the third rail they try to avoid at all costs. In today’s hyper-partisan world, where the color of a coffee cups sparks protests, you can’t maximize sales and play politics at the same time. 

It is only rarely that companies can wade into politics, and they do so only when their consumer brand and employer brand are integrated.

Look at REI, closing all their stores on Black Friday and asking staff and patrons to go enjoy the outdoors instead of going shopping. While they certainly lost revenue on that day, they were showing how the people who worked there weren’t just there for the paycheck, but because they loved the outdoors. And because the people inside REI were willing to make the “sacrifice” of fewer sales, because they and the company held similar values a stance could be taken. 

And as the Black Lives Matter movement is forcing companies to pick a side, companies are couching their language not in terms of market share or product features, but in the lives and morals of their staff. 

Watch what happens when a large company attempts to take a stand when its own people aren’t aligned. A massive company like Google is a great example, as its staff takes great pride in their motto of “don’t be evil.” But when Google begins to build censored search engines and apps for China, that might be extending the market share, but internally it seems to go against how staff understand what it means to not be “evil.” Because the employer brand isn’t reinforcing core values (by who it attracts and who it rewards), misalignment begets protests and friction.

Six: Employer Brand Matures As A Function In Every Business

While employer brand as a function hasn’t been codified, it does tend to follow some common paths in its evolution. This is important to note because it means that issues, concerns and processes are something of a moving target for marketing leadership. 

More specifically, if means that the CMO can’t see the employer brand function as a static function, but one that is actively evolving and growing within the organization. It is assuming more responsibility as they move from helping recruiting fill the talent funnel, to helping hiring managers connect offer letters with the bigger brand promise, to influencing every part of the business to add employer brand perspective and language into everything it does. 

What was once a part-time recruiter with a flair for social media is now a data-driven strategic team with the resources and relationships to get things done.

But as these functions grow, they will go from awkwardly trying to dance without stepping on marketing’s toes, to a full-fledged partner listening to the same music and sharing the lead.

Seven: The Goal Is Integration to Create a Brand-Driven Feedback Loop 

Companies that do employer branding well are not those with the biggest creative budgets or the most clever tag-lines. The best employer brand is invisible because it doesn’t feel like branding and marketing as much as it feels like a natural and organic expression of who works at the company and why.

No one (and everyone) owns the brand.

This is why the platonic ideal of employer branding is to not have an employer brand function, but to have an equal seat at the BRAND table, right alongside consumer marketing, investor relations, internal communications, product marketing and market branding. The brand is no longer seen as something one team controls, but as a shared responsibility wherein each expert takes the concept of the brand and translates it to their target audiences in the parlance and channels that will resonate most. Individually, they serve their own audiences and metrics, but collectively, they are maintaining something bigger, something that serves all partners.

This leads to a cohesive brand that is deeply woven into the very DNA of the people, products, values, and strategy of the company. You can’t pull them apart because they exist intertwined to support each other, but that yields far deeper credibility across all functions than trying to build siloed sets of expertises.

So I hope this serves as an invitation to CMOs around the world, to talk to employer brand functions, to see them not as “poseurs” or “dilettantes,” but as potential partners who can help you achieve your own marketing goals. 

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