What is Your Employer Brand?

The following is an excerpt from Employer Brand Communications: Promoting Who You Are to Your Future Employees.  The complete eBook can be downloaded here.

Deciding where to work is an emotional decision.  According to LinkedIn, the most important factors for accepting a new job are compensation (49%), professional development (33%), and work/life balance (29%).   Each of these factors are emotional because they have a massive impact outside of the office. Compensation determines whether someone is able to send their child to college or go on vacation. Professional development determines how successful you can be and how far you can go in the company. Work/life balance is essential for mental health and burnout.

When articulating your brand as an employer, begin with the feelings you want your employees to have.  Our chart highlights the most basic emotions, such as joy and anger, and then breaks them down further into more complex emotions.  Debate the pros and cons of each one and how they fit into your business.  At the end of the day, you should agree on three to five feelings you want to create.  These become similar to values.  The best companies will evaluate everything they do internally and externally based on whether they create these feelings. Every photo, every job description, and every social media post should help connect with potential employees emotionally.  These become the “true north” for the employer brand.

Once you have the feelings, it’s time to create the messages that hopefully create the intended emotions.  Messaging should have three parts:

• Positioning Statement – This is the one thing that makes you different than competitors as an employer.  Remember that your competitors for talent may be very different than your competitors for customers.
• Point-of-View – This is what you believe as an employer.  It might be about your industry or society or how people should develop professionally.  People will almost always make the emotional choice and work with people who believe the same things  they do.  Unfortunately, companies almost never articulate this.
• Supporting Messages – These are the other things that your highest priority potential employees must know in order to want to learn more.  There should be no more than five on the list.  The simpler the messages are, the more effective you will be in communicating them with feeling.

Congratulations!  You’ve done the basic work of creating the employer brand that will help your company grow.  This will ensure that your company is aligned around your priorities and everyone is aligned on how you will communicate. 

Need help articulating or communicating your employer brand?  Download our full eBook, full of best practices on how HR and marketing can work together for recruitment marketing, or learn more about how Slice can support your team.

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