Keywords

What Is Employer Branding?

The terms employer brand and employer branding are both in common use within the field of human resources. However, an understanding of the subject and the practical application of tools and methods necessarily means having a good grasp not only of the origins of these terms, but also of the differences in meaning.

An employer brand refers to the reputation that an organization has as an employer.

An oft-used quote from Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, encapsulates this nicely:

Your brand is your reputation. It’s what people say about you when you’re not in the room.

Employer branding , on the other hand, refers to the tools and practices by which an organization manages its brand, or reputation, as an employer, among certain, specified audience groups.

In other words, it is everything you do deliberately – through policies, recruitment advertising, induction programs, training, management, and other means that exert an influence on how the organization is viewed and perceived by those that come into contact with it: employees, peers, parents, and more.

A simple way to think of the difference between the two is that while you can certainly exert influence over your company’s employer brand, your employer branding can be directly controlled and managed.

Introduction and Overview

Origins and Evolution of Employer Branding

The terms employer brand and employer branding have their origins in the early 1990s and have been applied with increasing enthusiasm ever since they were first aired.

Tim Ambler, senior fellow of London Business School, and Simon Barrow, chairman of People in Business, introduced the term in the Journal of Brand Management in December 1996, following on from its first mention at the CIPD Annual Conference in 1990.

The early intention was to apply brand and consumer thinking to the fields of HR and talent management. Whereas it was already commonplace to apply marketing ideas to the attraction and retention of customers, clients, and consumers, this was the initial step in seeing if such techniques could be successfully replicated when trying to attract, engage, and retain candidates and employees.

Ambler and Barrow defined the employer brand as “the package of functional, economic and psychological benefits provided by employment, and identified with the employing company” (Ambler and Barrow 1996) – a definition that is widely recognized by industry practitioners as the official definition.

It was perhaps the attention drawn to the psychological and emotional benefits that gave the employer brand idea momentum.

In 1997, McKinsey & Co coined the term “war for talent” denoting a global marketplace in which it becomes ever more difficult for organizations to attract and retain top talent.

Against such a background, employers realized that simply paying more to talented employees was not going to produce sustained success. Instead, they began to make serious efforts to rethink what they could offer over and above the “functional and economic” benefits Ambler and Barrow would later codify.

The McKinsey report created the ideal conditions for employers to engage in employer branding wholeheartedly.

By 2001, of 138 leading companies surveyed by the Conference Board in North America, 40 % claimed to be actively engaged in some form of employer branding activity (Dell and Ainspan 2001). And in 2003, an employer brand survey conducted by the economist among a global panel of readers revealed a 61 % level of awareness of the term “employer brand” among HR professionals and 41 % among non-HR professionals (The Economist 2003).

The topic continues to be high on the agenda of organizations, large and small. But how to manage their employer brand, how to define it, to understand it, and to use it to their advantage require more than just an understanding of where employer branding began.

It requires an understanding of the tools and techniques that Barrow and Mosley were trying to apply in the first place, tools and techniques that continue to evolve.

People Perspective

First Things First: You Already Have an Employer Brand

Many organizations that begin to grapple with the idea of the employer brand and who want to begin the process of employer branding start with a simple question: “Do we already have an employer brand?”

The answer, always, is yes.

Returning to the idea raised by Bezos, your employer brand is your reputation as an employer.

It is something you can heavily influence, but it is not something you can completely control. And every company has one – from the two-person start-up to the multinational corporation with hundreds of thousands of employees.

Your employer brand is influenced by everything you say about yourselves as an employer and by everything that you do. If one person has an opinion of what it might be like to work for you, then that is your employer brand – it is what employees and others think of your company as a place to work.

Other important questions to consider at the outset are:

  1. 1.

    How do you know what the employer brand is?

  2. 2.

    Can an employer brand be bad as well as good?

  3. 3.

    Why should you care about any of this?

  4. 4.

    How can you manage your employer brand?

How Do You Know What Your Employer Brand Is?

If your reputation is the collective opinion of what people say when you are not in the room, finding out what they are saying requires you, or someone else, being in that room and listening.

There are a number of tools that are appropriate for this, and any HR professional attempting to take on the role of employer brand manager needs to have a good understanding not only of what is being said, but who is saying it – and why.

So Who Should You Listen to?

The simple answer to this question is everyone – but not necessarily all at once.

One of the most basic tools to be adopted in employer brand management is that of audience segmentation . At its most simple, you should be attempting to understand what your own employees think and also have a good understanding of what people who do not work for your business think of you as an employer.

But, simply knowing that your employees, on average, rate their fulfillment at work as five out of ten does not allow you to understand the difference between the sales force, who rate their fulfillment as 10/10, and the engineering team, who (hypothetically) average 1/10 on fulfillment.

Segmenting the audiences – internally and externally – is key to producing insight that you can act on.

How to Segment an Audience for Employer Branding Research

Within the organization, there are typically a number of audience groups that can be viewed as distinct and important – but remembering that this is not an exercise in trying to determine who the most important group within the organization is; some may be more critical than others at any given time.

Whereas in consumer marketing audience groups may be segmented based on spending habits, the distinctions here are based on what each group is likely to need from the organization at this stage in their career, what their roles/functions are, and what the market context is like. Each of these shapes their opinion of the organization.

Typical employee audience segments will include:

  • Senior leaders

    Those at the top of the business join companies and stay at them for very different reasons to those at earlier stages in the careers. To generalize, they will be more concerned with company performance and strategy, the size of their role and influence, and the impact they may be able to make. What they think of an organization may be colored by what they read in the financial reports and less by what the culture of the organization is like.

  • New joiners

    Those that have recently joined a business (depending on the organization/industry, this could be determined as anything from a matter of weeks up to about 2 years) will not only have a view on the business that should be reasonably positive, but they will also have a view that takes into consideration the comparative strength of an organization’s brand. This is because they will typically have seen what else is available from other, similar employers; heard how other organizations are marketing themselves; and will, often, have direct, recent experience at a competitor to draw on – and by competitor, in the sense of “competitors for talent,” as opposed to competitor in a traditional business sense.

  • Long-serving staff

    In direct contrast to those new to a business, those that have been there a long time are able to give valuable insight into how the business, and the brand, has changed over time. For organizations that have a distinct culture and for those going through substantial change, such as a merger, understanding what they could potentially be losing through any changes is important in order to be able to weigh it against any perceived benefits.

  • High performers, high potentials, future leaders

    Many organizations have an identified talent stream. This may be the graduate or MBA intake, or it may be less formal. Whichever option your organization has adopted, however, it is likely that there will be more investment in and notice taken of the (relatively) small cohort that has been earmarked as the future leaders of the business. This is often the group that is seen as most difficult to retain and satisfy – the front line of the “war for talent.” Ensuring a full understanding of their opinion is often crucial.

  • Volume hires

    While high potentials can make up a small group of those that might make a disproportionately large impact on the business in the future, many businesses have a particular job role that accounts for a large volume of staff. From frontline retail staff, to factory workers to contact center employees, these may not be the most difficult staff to find and employ, but they constitute a disproportionately high percentage of staff and, through their friends and families, can reach an extremely wide network of people with their opinions. What they think of you as an employer matters.

  • Functional or Critical Workforce Groups

    Finally, within every organization, there are some groups that will be deemed to be different or critical. This varies depending on the business but, when segmenting the audience for research and insight, the three questions that need to be asked are:

    • What are the functional areas that we should survey?

    • Are there any groups of people that are harder to attract or retain than others?

    • Do people in different locations think different things?

Functions will be specific to the business but companies will often be able to review opinion as relatively homogenous by function, collecting together the thoughts of just a sample of engineers, or those in the finance team, or sales and marketing , or of customer service agents and treating them as a representative view of the function without having to speak to every single employee.

In the same way, understanding whether there are groups of hard to find people, such as software engineers or big data analysts, is a first step to segmenting your internal audience so as to be able to gather opinion from those that do already work in such critical workforce groups and allow you to get a clearer understanding of your brand for that audience segment. In some instances, the sample could be convened based on age, gender, or disability – helping an organization to better understand the reality of their offer for a specific audience group such as women with children.

The third question is one that will come up time and again for organizations that work across multiple locations. It may be that you have lots of consultants working for the business who, in theory, are relatively homogenous. But, the reality may be that consultants in Singapore have vastly different expectations or experiences to those in Mumbai or Melbourne. This could be down to the local management, different external competition, or a different business structure and operating conditions.

Understanding how things like location, function, and stage people are at in their careers impact on employee experience is all key to being able to build up a good, overall picture of how you are viewed as an employer by those that already work for you.

Tools for Understanding Your Internal Audiences

Having segmented the audiences, how should you gather insight and opinion? As with the audiences, so the methods vary.

The basic options include surveys, focus groups, and interviews as primary sources – but there are a number of secondary sources that can also provide interesting data and are discussed later.

Surveys: Standard or Bespoke?

Standard staff surveying is something that many companies do regularly, either as employee opinion surveys or as engagement surveys to understand how engaged staff are at work.

These types of survey have real benefit in allowing you to understand not only how any given audience group thinks about a certain topic (e.g., management communication) but also whether those thoughts are improving or getting worse year on year.

In addition, standardized surveys provide a means to compare your own results to those within the rest of the industry. This is critical. Knowing that 47 % of your own staff thinks that the leadership team is excellent means something quite different if you also know that the average in your industry is 17 %. But, if the average is actually 97 %, very different action will be needed.

However, such surveys do not allow you to probe into the reasons behind the results as well as other, qualitative methods do, and the ideal scenario is one in which you are able to use both quantitative survey methods together with interviews and focus groups to understand both the sentiment and the reasons behind it.

Moreover, although standard questions give a comparison group, they may not be tailored particularly well to some internal audience groups or your type of business. In this case, a bespoke solution is better. This can give you year-on-year data, explore topics that are specific to your business (such as your values or selling points), and allow you to gather information from across all locations and functions quickly and simply.

Of course, given the bespoke nature of such work, no normative data would be available with which to compare yourself to the industry as a whole. For that, external surveying would be necessary – see below.

Focus Groups and Workshops

Another standard tool for exploring employee opinion is to run structured focus groups or workshop sessions with staff drawn from the appropriate audience segments.

In an ideal world, such sessions would cover all of the critical workforce groups, segments, and other permutations previously outlined. In practice, employer brand projects typically have to compromise due to budgetary and timescale pressures, creating a research plan that covers as many audiences as possible in a way that is simple and useful to report on, while keeping to the given budget and time frame.

For example, rather than hold separate groups of engineers, new joiners, and longer-serving staff, it could be better to run sessions that include a number of newly joined and longer-serving engineers in the same group and actively explore the different perspectives in the same discussion.

This is often a practical solution to reviewing opinion across organizations that can be varied and diverse, especially when the workforce is split across different sites and countries.

In practice, focus groups and workshops are great tools for exploring opinion with many types of employee but are less often used for senior managers who want to give more of an opinion than they would be able to within a group. They allow for group discussion of ideas and provide real insight into the positive and negative aspects of working for a company.

Variations include mini groups – if a typical focus group contains eight to ten participants, a mini group could include two to four people. Mini groups bridge the space between full focus groups and interviews – they are often held for team leaders or managers whose thoughts should be captured but who could not be included in the focus groups due to the fact that staff will usually not participate fully if a manager is present.

Online focus groups are becoming more commonplace. Typically, these are less desirable than face-to-face groups since they lose the element of interaction and eye contact that comes from having participants in the same room. They are, however, a practical solution for some businesses and projects and can be successful in producing additional insight.

Interviews

Face-to-face, telephone, or even online interviews (or depths) are a way of getting rich insight from audience members who have a lot to give. Often senior managers are interviewed rather than invited to take part in focus groups or surveys. This is because they usually have a strong and well-thought-through opinion not only on what the organization is like as an employer but on what it could and should be like. This is relevant to the employer value proposition as discussed later on in this chapter.

External Audience Segmentation

Understanding what your own employees think about you as an employer is critical – but it is not the complete picture.

To understand your employer brand, you not only have to know why people join and stay, but why people do not or would not want to work for you. That means surveying the external population.

There are a number of ways of doing this and a number of groups whose opinion matters.

Potential Employees

The most obvious group of people whose opinions of you matter are those people that could work for, especially those who you struggle to attract.

But potential employees, just like employees, fall into a number of categories that should mirror those of your internal workforce. They should also mirror your HR and recruitment strategy.

For example, although you may recruit on university campuses, if you offer internships to students at the start of their university careers and full-time positions for those who are graduating, you will need to know what different year groups think about you as a potential employer of interns and as a potential employer of graduates, respectively. It will not be enough to know what “those at university in general” think.

Some of this insight can be gained from people who have already joined you in these roles – as discussed above – but what this would fail to show is what the reasons are for candidates who could work for you choosing not to do so, either because they are unaware of the available roles, or because they have actively chosen not to for some other reason.

Aside from students, it is important to understand the opinion of people with experience in your direct competitors for talent and across a range of roles and functions into which you hire.

It can be useful to know the overall opinion of industry groups and rankings, but it is most important to understand the opinion of people who are good enough to join you. These audiences will give you the insight into why people do not join your organization – which is just as valuable as understanding why those that do do.

Typically, there are two reasons people (who you would want to hire) do not join a company:

  1. 1.

    The first is because they were not aware of it or the availability of jobs there.

  2. 2.

    The second is because they have chosen not to.

The first of these, a lack of awareness among a target audience group can be addressed relatively easily through employer branding campaigns – but only if you know that this lack of awareness exists. This is actually very common when businesses expand overseas. Often, because the company is well known in the home market (where head office is based), they assume that people will know who they are in the local market too. For major US brands entering China, or vice versa, that is often not the case at all. Even if you know that people have heard of the brand, because you have sales outlets there, that is not the same as them being aware of you as an employer. This is something you need to know. In brand terms, this is people not talking about you when you are not in the room.

The second reason is the one to address through active employer brand management.

It could be that people do not join you because they believe that you do not hire people like them. This is often true for diversity recruitment, so the messages in your employer brand campaigns would need to change to be inclusive, if that is the case.

Perhaps more often, people cannot “see” their role within that business. For example, although it is obvious that bankers work at Deutsche Bank and IT people work at Microsoft, it is less obvious that Microsoft needs finance people and Deutsche Bank has lots of jobs in technology. Understanding if people are ruling themselves out for these reasons is the starting point for you to be able to change those perceptions.

However, being unaware of the appropriateness of the roles is just one side of it. There are also groups of potential employees who choose to work for a competitor even though they have considered your opportunities. Again, we can break these into two categories:

  1. 1.

    Those that know something about your business, that is not true, that they do not like

  2. 2.

    Those that know something about your business, that is true, that they do not like

Again, tackling each in turn.

If people have a perception that is not true – such as that local talents cannot progress in a business that has lots of expats in management jobs – then that perception needs to be changed. Employer branding is the way to change that – research is the way to find out that that perception exists in the first place and needs changing.

If people have a perception that is true, and that is putting them off, congratulations – your employer brand is well understood in the way that you need it to be.

It may seem counterintuitive to suggest that putting people off is a good thing, but it is. For example, accountancy firms need people who are good with numbers. If an external audience knows that PwC needs numerate people and either does not consider themselves good with numbers or does not want a job that deals with numbers, then they will not apply – which saves time and money for the firm.

Often, the goal of employer branding is not something as simple to differentiate as “being numerate” – after all, the recruitment process can filter applicants who are not. Instead, employer branding tries to help candidates understand what kind of culture an organization has and allows them to self-select or deselect accordingly.

Again, an example may be instructive.

Consider two aeronautical engineering firms, company A and company B, both of whom make airplanes. Both make very high-quality products that sell well, have cutting-edge technology, and are safe and well loved by customers. But how each approaches their business is different.

Company A works within well-understood frameworks and processes. It feels like a company where project management is the most important skill and where everything from design to sales is about following a shared method.

Company B works completely differently. Although they still need to follow processes in many areas of the business, when it comes to design and innovation, they like to be completely creative. They accept that lots of crazy ideas will fail, and they allow for that in their business plan, management style, and performance reviews.

As an aeronautical engineer, you have a choice based on what you would prefer. In one company, you are likely to thrive; in the other, you would not be capable of producing your best. But what would be true for you would be the opposite of what would be true for someone else.

Because of this, if you are company A and your external research among engineers shows that people think you are process heavy and focus on project management and this puts them off, you should not change anything. This shows that the perception people have of you in the external market is accurate. This is what you want.

If, as discussed above, the perception is not accurate, change it through employer branding, but be wary of trying to change your communications to please what an external audience thinks they want – especially when that comes from a large-scale survey of “unqualified” voices. For example, this typically happens when companies listen to findings from surveys of those still at university which may report that the average student wants a company to focus more on CSR activities. There are lots of dangers here:

  1. 1.

    Firstly, this is an average result, not one focused on your critical audience.

  2. 2.

    Secondly, in this instance, it comes from an audience who has no experience to draw on – they are guessing about the employment experience.

  3. 3.

    Finally, if all firms listen and act accordingly, there will be no differentiation – nobody will seem more attractive, yet all will have spent money – this is value destruction.

Instead, make sure your offer is in line with business objectives and tailored to the right audiences, not the popular vote.

Social Media Listening

Another option that is available for understanding employer reputation is social media listening . While all of the options above require actively putting questions to a group of people (a group who you will have to identify and persuade to take part) and noting what they say in response, social media listening involves finding the conversations online that people are already having about your brand.

There are some challenges, of course – including the fact that people often use social media to complain more than they use it to praise a company, but as a comparative measure, understanding how much people talk about you, what they say, whether it tends to be positive or negative, and whether it is true or misguided allows you to understand the scale of the challenge ahead of you, especially if you compare the level of activity, both positive and negative, to some key competitors.

Social media listening is your way of knowing what people are saying about you when you are not in the chat room.

Economic Perspective

Employer Brand Statistics: Claims, Evidence, and Sources

An important part of managing the employer brand is understanding the impact. This is also fundamental in gaining senior buy-in for a project in the first place. Although EB management is an ongoing task, not a project, it is often initiated as a project and, as such, needs supporting metrics to achieve budget sign-off.

Some of the most widely cited benefits, together with some company-specific examples, that are helpful and provide evidence of these benefits are as follows:

  • Twenty percent increase in the pool of potential employees

  • Fourfold increase in commitment among those joining

  • Ten percent decrease in payroll costs

    These three claims come from an article in The Economist, published in 2006. In this article, a study from the Corporate Executive Board is quoted as follows:

    On the basis of a detailed study of about 90 companies, the Corporate Executive Board argues that the rewards for managing an EVP effectively are huge, increasing a company’s pool of potential workers by 20 % and the commitment of its employees fourfold. It can even reduce the payroll: companies with well-managed EVPs get away with paying 10 % less than those with badly managed EVPs.

  • Highly engaged employees – up to 20 % more productive

Productivity of engaged employees can be found in a number of places. Hewitt have reported in their annual best employers report of Fortune 500 companies that 79 % of employees at best employers say they are inspired to do their best work every day versus 55 % of employees at other companies.

Hewitt Associates. Human Capital Foresight Research. Fortune 500 company benchmark.

Other findings from Hewitt include:

  1. 1.

    A 10 % increase in attracting and retaining pivotal employees adds approximately $70–$160 million to a company’s bottom line.

  2. 2.

    Average annual sales growth is nearly 40 % higher for best employers versus other companies.

  3. 3.

    Best employers enjoy nearly half the turnover and double the applications per opening versus other companies

In addition, the CIPD guide to employer branding, released in 2007, reported data from Sears in the USA, who, in 1992, proved – to its own satisfaction – that employee engagement was the principal factor behind turning a $3 billion deficit in one of their key divisions into a healthy $752 million income.

More recently, Towers Perrin (now Towers Watson) have claimed that, for every 1 % improvement in engagement, a 0.1 % improvement in sales growth will surely follow. It is a neat, memorable formula.

Can an Employer Brand Be Bad As Well As Good?

Because employer branding is often regarded simply as marketing, it is reasonably common for organizations to forget that their employer brand itself is not only made up of all of the positive elements that they offer as an employer, but also all of the negatives connotations.

In this day and age, where social media and word of mouth can create reputational crises at great speed, it is important to remember that anything an organization does that is negative, or seen to be negative, will impact on their reputation – on how people view them as an employer.

This is not just about media and marketing , however. Policies and behaviors play a large part in influencing thinking.

If an organization pays worse than its competitors, for example, it will get a reputation for being a lower payer. If it treats staff worse, that too will come to form part of its employer brand. In such a case, simply changing the way you talk about yourself as an employer will not change perception – certainly not among those staffs that already work for you or those with whom they regularly talk about work.

In this instance, as in all instances, the brand reflects the reality of the reward policy and management behaviors. Reputation is based on reality.

Of course, it does not follow that all organizations that act in the way described above will have a poor reputation.

For some, such as charities, low pay is an understood trade-off for the emotional buy-in to the organization’s purpose. For others (traditionally banking firms), treating people badly can be seen as a rite of passage and foster loyalty. It can be seen as a badge of honor and enhance what potential employees think.

However, these counterintuitive examples simply serve to show that there are many factors at play in determining whether your employer brand is positive or negative – and part of the role of the HR or employer brand team is to understand, rather than guess, what people do think so as to be able to make decisions about how to act to reinforce or change perceptions, as appropriate.

It is worth noting that negative perceptions can seldom be changed through marketing alone, unless it is a misunderstanding. In most cases, it is only by addressing any issue head on that reputation can be changed. For example, a reputation for long hours can only be mitigated by changing the hours people work – and, even then, it may take time for people to realize that that change has occurred.

For many businesses, agreeing what you want to be seen as is an important step. In order to make the business model work, it may be that some “negative” elements are also necessary and that there needs to be an acceptance of that internally and externally in order for the right talent to thrive. Brands need to have a balance and be appropriate – a strong employer brand will put off more people than it attracts by the very nature of the fact that most people in the world could not work for you. Trying to appeal to people who you neither need nor want is a recipe for disaster.

The Economic Downside of Not Managing Your Employer Brand Effectively

An employer brand produces a range of returns for an organization, but it mitigates against others, including:

  • Ten to twenty percent higher compensation premiums for companies with poor EVPs

    In a piece of 2006 research, the Corporate Leadership Council measured the impact of an attractive employer proposition on demanded remuneration when changing roles.

    They found that when candidates view an organization’s EVP as attractive, they demand less of a remuneration premium when deciding to join the company. And, specifically that:

    1. i.

      An EVP viewed as unattractive requires a 21 % premium to attract candidates.

    2. ii.

      An EVP viewed as attractive requires only an 11 % premium.

  • Reduction in replacement costs (150 % or more of salary)

    The numbers for replacement of staff obviously vary by role, company, and marketplace, but the 150 % figure is quoted in several places, including the same CIPD guide to employer branding and the 2002 Strategic HR Management/EMA Staffing Metrics Study.

    SHRM data shows that the cost to hire for an employee group in the $40–60,000 salary range (with an efficient staffing operation) might be in the range of 20–25 % of the salary.

    But, the cost to replace is much higher, about 150 % of the salary in that salary range. This is based on the Bliss-Gately tool.

    The above statistics show that the benefits of employer brand manager can be expressed in terms of either the positives they bring or the negatives they reduce.

Risk Perspective

In addition to the economic risk of not managing your brand, there are other risks to be aware of as follows.

Employer Brand Influencers

Having a clear understanding of what people who could work for you think is important as it is these people who you will need to persuade to join you.

However, for many types of people, what they believe is influenced to a larger or lesser degree by a whole host of other influencer groups. Often, if you need to change the awareness or understanding of a target group, you also need to change the awareness or understanding of those people who influence them – and that means knowing who they are and what they currently think and including them in any perception research.

These groups include, but are not limited to:

  • Parents – for entry-level and graduate roles in many countries; parents play a large part in helping their sons and daughters make career decisions. In emerging markets such as China, there are strong cultural and economic reasons for this, but even in Western markets such as the USA and UK, the increased cost of higher education has seen parents take a much more active role in helping their children make decisions.

  • Teachers and lecturers – just as parents exert undue influence, so too do teachers and university lecturers. It may not be that these individuals know any more than their students about your organization, but they may well be a source of misinformation. Understanding what they think is the first step to making sure it is accurate.

  • Journalists and (micro) bloggers – depending on the company and your corporate brand, what is written about you in the media forms a large part of what people think about you as a company and as an employer. Whether you operate in a market with a traditional press or one where social media and microblogging is more common, if news stories are inaccurate or misaligned to your employer branding, they will continue to influence perception in a way that is counter to your efforts.

  • Peers and friends – whether friends at school or contacts on professional social networking sites; what people’s circle of friends and peers say about you is important in coloring their opinion. This is the room in which the discussion of your reputation is happening.

  • Your own employees and alumni – it is increasingly easy for potential employees to find someone who works for you or used to work for you. What they say about the opportunities and culture will be taken seriously. So, if there are a number of disgruntled employees on social media bad-mouthing the business, again, you need to be aware so you can take the appropriate action.

  • Professional bodies and associations – a great source of information for candidates; it can be the case that poorly funded professional associations can be behind in their information and yet exert lots of influence on potential employees.

  • Recruitment consultants – finally (for now), those who are paid as headhunters, executive recruiters, or recruitment consultants are speaking to candidates all of the time. It is their job to influence them and to persuade them to join you. But do they have an accurate understanding of what it is like to work for your business? Or is it outdated?

All of these audiences, and more, potentially know something about you as an employer or think they do. Some will be more influential than others, but you have to be mindful that all of these opinions exist.

So, how do you do that?

Researching External Audiences

The tools and techniques discussed above for internal audience research form the basis for external research too. Focus groups, surveys, and interviews all have their place. But there are some considerations that need to be borne in mind when surveying opinion among external audiences.

Surveys and Rankings

As with internal work, surveys can reach a large number of people and gather excellent data, when used well. Standard surveys are widely used in some countries and with some audience groups, especially among students.

These are great for rankings – which can give you an understanding of how attractive your brand is relative to other employers. However, the headline findings which are often cited in the press/online are not necessarily the most important points to focus on.

When using standard surveys, it is important to understand whether they include the audiences and influencers whose opinion you care about, whether you can review the findings so as to be able to differentiate audience groups as defined above, and whether the ranking itself is helpful.

To expand on that final point, rankings not only favor better-known brands (in some instances, they can be little more than a measure of the target audience’s awareness – which is still helpful when taken as that measure alone), but they can also seemingly give undue weight to brands that are (a) not very distinctive or (b) those that appeal to the most commonly found audience type.

As an example of the latter, if 75 % of a survey sample wants to work for a government employer, a private sector organization will never feature highly in that ranking, nor should it. Instead, as an employer brand manager at a private business, you should be interrogating the data to see how many people did state a preference for working for a private business and then look at how you fared among that group only, relative to your competitors.

Why surveys can favor less distinctive brands is a direct correlation to the idea above that you want to put off the wrong people as much as you want to attract the right ones.

So, using the example of aeronautical companies again, company A and company B, if company B has done a good job of demonstrating that it wants creative engineers, but company A has not really made it clear whether it wants creative thinkers or people who follow process, in a survey lots of people who are not creative will rule out working for company B. So, let us say 50 % of aeronautical engineers say they would like to work there.

But, nobody really knows what kind of people thrive at company A. All they know is that it is a successful company – so 100 % of aeronautical engineers tick the box that they would like to work at company A.

In this scenario, twice as many people have ticked company A as ticked company B. They will rank far higher and it looks like they are doing better among their key audience.

However, that is opposite to the true situation. The reality is that 100 % of the people who said they would like to work for company B match what company B is looking for – both aeronautical skills and attitude. In contrast, just 50 % of those that choose company A are appropriate.

If everyone goes on to apply, company A will have to spend twice the money, time, and effort, sorting out the wrong candidates and may well end up hiring some that leave quickly because they joined the wrong company. All of this is expensive and costly.

For these reasons, rankings, while extremely useful when analyzed properly, nonetheless need to be treated with care.

A final note on standard external surveys is that they have to ask about a wide range of companies, not just yours. This has two implications:

  1. 1.

    Firstly, the amount of data you can get on your business is limited. When surveys are reporting on hundreds of employers, they cannot go into any depth of why people think what they do or give much insight as to how to fix it.

  2. 2.

    Secondly, some standard questionnaires use a list of employers when asking for brand opinion – which means that users could be reviewing you because they saw you in a list. That is not a true measure of awareness and can lead to survey respondents commenting on you despite having no real opinion whatsoever.

Bespoke Surveys

Using bespoke surveys to understand audience opinion gives you more control over the content and audience groups but has the downside of being more expensive to activate than the standardized surveys. This is because the planning, design, and data collection costs are not spread among a number of companies.

Included in this, and in much external audience work, is a cost for incentivizing participants to take part. While internal audiences will take part in surveys, focus groups, and interviews willingly, external respondents typically receive an incentive to take part. As with consumer research, incentives vary greatly depending on local laws, customs, and expectations of the target group in question.

In addition, external response rates can be low. Frustratingly, the more difficult an audience is to recruit, the more difficult it also tends to be to survey as both involve targeting niche audiences and getting them to engage.

Because surveys require reasonably large numbers of participants in order to be viable, it is always worth finding out the feasibility of a good response before going ahead with bespoke surveys.

Focus Groups and Interviews

As before, focus groups and interviews are also useful ways to supplement external surveys and are often a good way of exploring initial opinion gathered from the surveys in the first instance.

Using a combination is also a good way to make sure that no element of the research work is wasted.

For example, company C is a large pharmaceutical business that is well known in Germany but needs to understand why it is not seen as so attractive in Brazil among experienced scientists, so it commissions research.

It is considered that, due to sample size, they would not be able to get enough senior scientists to respond to make a survey worthwhile so run a focus group instead to find out why people do not think they are attractive.

They recruit the session “blind” (see below), and in the first few minutes of the group, it becomes clear that nobody in Brazil has heard of them. There is no perception problem – it is wholly to do with awareness. While this is a useful finding, the company can now launch an employer branding campaign to promote its job opportunities, and the focus group cannot now go on to comment on why the business is not attractive or shed any light on what they think about the culture, management, or approach to innovation. They have not heard of the business, so whatever they say would be guess work.

This is not a total disaster since a skillful moderator will now use the time allocated to discuss the general market, who the competitors are that they do find attractive, and why. But this does highlight one key challenge in conducting external perception research in a market – there may be no perception of your brand at all.

Researching Blind

In the previous example, we discussed a focus group being recruited “blind.” What that means is that the participants do not know before the group starts on whose behalf the research is being run.

This can be important (especially in some cultures and markets) so that participants do not do research before the group. You are trying to understand what people like this think about you, not what people like this who have had time and a reason to browse the corporate and career websites directly before the session.

Blind research clearly cannot be done with an internal audience, but it can be very useful when done externally. A typical technique here would be to run part of the research session before revealing who the company is, allowing for unbiased response about a range of companies before focusing specifically on your brand in the second half. This gives rich, comparative data.

Influencer Interviews

For potential candidates, as with internal audiences, the more you think someone will give a well-considered view, the fewer people you tend to need in the room. School-age respondents tend to be better in groups; senior managers tend to research better in one-to-one meetings. This is especially true in external research. Consider, for example, a research program for a major law firm in Sydney that includes interviewing a few associates at rival firms. This could be done in one group (with a decent incentive), but there is a strong chance that associates from rival firms will know each other either from university or through working on opposite sides of client deals and transactions. To bring them together into one room runs the risk of compromising their anonymity – which research participants need if you are to get honest responses from them. The most likely method in this instance would be telephone interviews.

Some of the influencer groups identified above, such as parents and teachers, can be researched in groups – sometimes even in the same group as each other – but many will be better on their own.

One group of influencers for whom this is the case is recruitment consultants. These are a very good group of influencers to speak to because they will have the crucial insight into why good candidates turn down the opportunity to interview with your company.

If the maxim is true that what can be measured can be managed, these interviews can plug a serious hole in your perception data by providing information from candidates who would otherwise not even be known to you.

Operational Perspective

Taking Active Steps to Manage Your Employer Brand

Understanding your current brand perception can seem daunting when covering as many audiences and as many tools and techniques as outlined above, but all major employer brand projects have to start with a comprehensive understanding of:

  • Who your target audiences are

  • What they currently think

  • How you can change/reinforce that perception

And that is what this next section focuses on – how to communicate your employer brand in a way that helps people understand what it is like to work for you. In essence, this is what people mean when they talk about doing employer branding.

And it all begins with the employer value proposition – or EVP for short.

Your Employer Value Proposition

If your employer brand is made up of what everyone thinks about you, good and bad, as an employer, your employer value proposition (EVP) is what allows you to begin to focus on the positive aspects of your employment offer.

Companies that do employer branding really well tend to do three things:

  1. 1.

    They understand what audiences think about them.

  2. 2.

    They define and articulate a compelling and credible EVP.

  3. 3.

    They communicate that EVP clearly, consistently, and coherently.

These three typically constitute the three steps in an employer brand project. The first we have already covered in some depth – researching and understanding your audiences.

The second is defining and articulating your EVP. This is a key output of any research program – ensuring that you have a collective understanding internally of what it is that you would like to and can credibly offer for employees and prospective employees.

Put most simply, your EVP is what your company looks like on a really good day.

Defining and Articulating Your EVP

Research programs give you insight, but defining an EVP that can be used practically also requires an element of judgment and vision.

As a professional brand consultant, the first question to put to an organization that is trying to define their EVP is not what is it like to work here, but what you would ideally like it to be.

All employer branding activity should align to the business goals, and so this starting point is really about getting to grips with what the company is trying to achieve – how it wants to go about that and what kind of people it is going to need to be successful.

This constitutes the employer vision, the first step in building an EVP model, and an EVP. And it should come from the very top of the business.

In effect, this sets the objectives for everything that is to come.

Employer visions should include:

  • What the company does/is.

  • What it wants to be known for (as an employer).

  • What kind of people are needed for this to happen.

  • What kind of environment they will create.

So, an example for a big data company in China might read:

At XXXX, we want to be the employer of choice for data scientists and software engineers who want a fast-paced and dynamic career that shapes the future of online media analytics globally.

Within a simple paragraph, this captures the kind of work being done and the environment they want to create and appeals to a type of data scientist – one who wants to influence and influence on a global scale.

Each of these serves to differentiate the business, but it also ensures a focal point for the EVP. If that is what the leaders want to be seen as, what does the business need to be able to offer to back that up?

You Should Have an EVP Model, Pillars, and Toolkits in Place

In order to ensure a consistent understanding and application of the EVP, most companies develop a model of some kind. These are variously known as EVP model, employer brand model (though that is something of a misnomer, since a brand model should technically include the negative connotations, not just the positive messages), or message house.

Looking at Fig. 1, content varies by company, but a model can contain:

Fig. 1
figure 1

Example of an EVP model

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  • EB (employer branding) vision – what the organization would like to be known for as an employer

  • EVP statement – a short statement that articulates the positive aspects of the employment experience with that organization

  • Extended EVP statement – a longer version of the above that encapsulates more aspects and detail

  • Values – company values

  • EVP pillars or attributes – the core selling points that underpin the overall EVP

With an established vision for what kind of employer the organization would like to be, the research program as outlined in detail above should be focused on establishing what the organization is like to work for (internal view) and what the perception of it is (external view.)

Employer brand management is all about understanding the gaps and, where necessary, closing them.

If there is a gap between the internal and external perceptions, for example, then it is likely that well-developed communications will be able to close that over time. The EVP model becomes the platform for that communication in order to ensure consistency of message.

If there is an identified gap between the vision and the reality (internal view) – then this shows that what the employees and management think is not in alignment. This would then require an assessment of the issue at hand. Is the problem one of communication, or is there a structural or policy issue to address?

EVP Statements and Pillars

The research program will inevitably throw up non-comms challenges, especially the internal research, and here it is important to revisit what you can get from these internal and external research elements.

The external research, though more challenging to administer in practice, is simpler in its content and aims. Its purpose is purely to understand levels of awareness and understanding and to allow you to see if that understanding is in line with what you would like it to be.

The internal work is easier to run, but much more difficult to analyze because it is dealing with multiple audiences and multiple experiences, of the same workplace. Employees will interpret things differently depending on their level, age, experience, and a range of other factors.

When analyzing the internal research, the goal is to define some clear EVP pillars or attributes. These are the positive and distinctive elements of the employment experience within that organization which are compelling to current and potential employees.

There is no set number of such pillars – though many organizations work somewhere between three and seven.

These pillars should be focused, so fewer than three and each pillar becomes a fuzzy compilation of ideas – and should really be split into its constituent parts.

With the pillars in place, along with the EB vision, the closing step in finalizing the EVP model is to write the EVP statement – a statement which will articulate the positive aspects of the pillars and give a great sense of who you are as a business. Here is an example, for a global chemical firm:

Example EVP Statement

As a leader in the global pharmaceutical and chemical sectors, we develop and sell high-quality specialty products, applying our unique skills and clever science to global challenges.

We believe that success on the international stage can only be achieved through global standards and local insight.

In nearly 350 years, we have never shied away from the complicated tasks or settled for the easier options.

We recognize performance, reward achievements, and foster potential.

Our worldwide network of opportunities enhances professional development and personal growth. We are passionate about what we do and take pride in the achievements we share.

Through our inventiveness and creativity, by hiring the best brains and creating stimulating environments, we enable our employees everywhere to meet specific customer needs and improve people’s lives.

Creative Development and an EVP Toolkit

With a fully developed brand model, it is time to go into creative development, to design and create a visual platform that brings your EVP to life.

The EB vision, statement, and pillars should now be backed up with proof points and evidence from the research and written up as a creative brief for a specialist employer branding agency to turn into compelling creative work that can be applied across everything from social media and websites, to campus campaigns and internal launches.

With creative developed, many companies feel the need to create an EVP toolkit – a simple tool that will allow all those responsible for using the EVP, from line managers and internal recruiters, to recruitment consultants and careers services – to have one reference guide which ensures consistency of messages.

Expect to engage a specialist agency to complete both of these elements. From scratch, this should be achievable within 4–6 weeks giving you visual materials as well as the EVP model which now act as a platform for using the EVP in the field!

Using Your EVP: Communication and Integration

Defining and articulating your EVP is a vital stage in employer brand management – but, in some ways, this is where the real work begins, the work of using the EVP clearly, consistently, and coherently.

Here, the work splits into two parts: communication and integration.

Communication of the EVP will address a number of challenges identified in your external research. Most of all, internally, it creates pride and engagement among your employees. Done well, the clarity and consistency of the communication will remove confusion and create greater levels of affinity and productivity – leading to a more successful business.

Externally, a consistent, well-defined message makes it easier for people to make decisions – for the right candidates to opt in and for the wrong ones to opt out. This saves you money and allows you to compete better, gaining more than your fair share of the best candidates.

However, there is also an internal integration element that goes beyond communication and needs to be addressed here.

EVP Touchpoints

Figure 2 below shows what are often called EVP touchpoints. These are all of the elements that carry some influence in communicating the EVP.

Fig. 2
figure 2

EVP touchpoints

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It is important to note that few organizations will have completely aligned all elements of their EVP consistently well. For many, this is an evolving process and, as their business changes to changing market conditions, so too does their EVP evolve – that is one reason that EVP projects are initiated/revisited every few years and why brand management is an ongoing task.

Upon completion of an EVP project, organizations should always prioritize which of the touchpoints they want to tackle first.

There is no one answer here since an organization that redefines its EVP in order to tackle high levels of attrition has different objectives to one that is facing a recruitment shortfall.

What is common, however, is that no organization should try to tackle everything at once. Instead, it is far more common to review each type of communication in light of the newly articulated EVP and start applying it on a needs must basis.

Of course, there is an interconnectedness to the touchpoints. Many companies want to use their new EVP in external recruitment communications as a first expression of the EVP, but this is likely to fail if the recruitment process and career website have not also been updated.

For those organizations that want to start communicating internally first, adapting internal communications and the induction/onboarding materials must go hand in hand with education for the recruiters and line managers, otherwise there will be a disconnect.

It is certainly worth asking the questions:

  • Is the EVP to be applied more urgently to external or internal communications?

  • What elements of communications should be tackled first? And what is next?

  • What is more pressing: communication or internal integration?

Internal Integration

In some ways, the communication of the EVP, once defined, is the easy part.

However, communication that is not reinforced through consistent behaviors, actions, and policies can do more harm than good by creating or reinforcing dissonance, especially with the internal audience, and it is vital that an HR or EB manager understands where the gaps are internally and commits to closing them properly.

For example, let us return to the internal research findings for a moment.

Earlier on, when talking about EVP as a platform for communication, we concentrated on the positive aspects since we were thinking of this as a means of promoting the selling points.

That is the right way to consider this. But, that does not mean that any negative themes highlighted in your internal research should be ignored. Integration is a second set of activities that should focus specifically on closing those gaps identified as existing between the employer brand vision and the current reality.

Again, it is possible to use the chart above both as a tool for aligning communication and also as a tool for implementing internal changes that will make the business stronger. This is also in line with the earlier discussion as to whether the EVP pillars should be aspirational or descriptive only.

Let us take “training and development” as an example and again use one of our aeronautical companies who want to promote “unlimited career possibilities” as one of their main pillars.

In this instance, they have recognized that they need to offer this to attract the top talent globally, but they also know that they only really offer this to a few people who come in at MBA level in the USA.

It will be very difficult to communicate this pillar without any proof – unless there is commitment to show instead. So, the best course of action is to convene a set of stakeholders to develop programs that will make this pillar true in time (3–5 years at the most if this is to be credible).

The internal research will show that the current situation is piecemeal, but will also have a lot of insight from current staff and line managers, ideas as to what might be done, and a view of the competition – what are they saying about career development and what are they doing?

With stakeholders in place and objectives set, it is possible to review the current offer, identify the size of the gaps, and start to plan improvements.

In this instance, the solution could be to create global rotations for high performers and continuous development in technical and managerial streams for all staffs that are good enough and show the desire to improve. They could implement global internships, graduate schemes or placements, a buddy network, and work alongside universities.

By using the tool above, an organization is able to review its current practices and policies against the EVP. By implementing changes over time, it is able to ensure that high-flying employees who join expecting “unlimited career possibilities” will indeed find that to be true and will stay and thrive within the organization.

So, the EVP becomes a tool that not only allows consistent communication, it allows for consistent business improvement because it is all tied into the original EB vision.

If an EVP program is developed without senior buy-in, then there is a real risk that the evidence to support the pillars will not be available or that the business itself will not have the appetite to grow and change in a way that continues to make it attractive to top talent – without whom, it will not be able to compete.

Global Differences

Employer branding was initially a reaction to the fact that employees were no longer satisfied with organizations simply paying more money. As McKinsey identified, the top talent – those with a choice of who to work for – exercises that choice by considering a raft of other factors, from business vision, purpose, and strategy, to culture and management style. This is, however, only significant in markets displaying two characteristics: a restricted supply of talent and choice of opportunity for that talent.

In reality, economies enter these conditions only as they move along the continuum from developing to developed. At the less-developed end, not only are most workers interchangeable – and, therefore, fail to create the first characteristic, that of talent scarcity – opportunities are largely undifferentiated. In such a market, people change jobs for functional reasons (such as a few extra dollars) or not at all since all options are similar.

In a developed market, although there are still large numbers of lower-level jobs, the difficult to find roles are taken by talent who, by and large, can choose to ignore functional issues such as salary (on the basis that they will be able to demand a high remuneration package at any of a number of employers) and, instead, choose employers based purely on the emotional factors that matter to them.

For these reasons, EVP work is most common and most necessary in markets as they become developed because this is where competition changes to one of function to one of emotional differences.

Richard Clark, formerly of Barkers, once noted that “a company that wants more than its fair share of the top talent can rely on one of three things. Paying more. Luck. Or marketing.”

Whereas luck and paying extra will work in emerging/manufacturing-based economies, as markets develop into service and knowledge economies, employer branding is the marketing needed to secure the best talent.

EVP Statements and Pillars

Having beyond seven pillars within your EVP runs the risk of simply being a list of selling points, not the core selling points. It is important to resist lengthening the list of pillars which will often happen when key stakeholders ask to include a number of elements that, while important to the business, are not key selling points in themselves.

A good example of this would be “safety” in engineering firms.

Safety is of utmost importance to those businesses and is rightly listed among the values in many of them, but it is unlikely to be one of the core reasons for a skilled engineer joining that business nor is it likely to be a key differentiator among competitor firms. If it is neither of those, then it is hard to make a case for it being an EVP. Along with salary and CSR, safety is more likely to be important if done badly. It is expected as part of everyone’s offer and, as such, would be far more likely to be seen as a hygiene factor, not a core pillar. Where this is not the case could be for an MNC operating in a market of local firms in a region such as Brazil and an industry such as construction. In such an instance, it could be that MNCs can differentiate from local firms based purely on their safety record, and so it does become a core part of the message.

A helpful step in analyzing the research outputs is to start by looking for common themes in the work. You may identify specific topics to investigate up front – safety might be one of those, as might innovation, high-performance culture, development, and progression. By discussing these, themes will emerge from the conversations and will be positive as well as negative.

For example, a theme could be that many employees feel that innovation conflicts with high performance or that development does not have to be tied to upward progression but is just as satisfying when considered as sideways movement and continuous learning.

Returning to the example of safety, how your company addresses safety may well be a theme and could eventually become a pillar. If, for example, discussions around safety highlight that this is indicative of how your company puts people first, adheres to processes, or is particularly diligent, then one of those starts to become a differentiating idea, not just a hygiene factor.

In other words, themes will emerge as an organization’s approach to something that matters.

There are always going to be common areas that are important to most employees, but how you tackle such an area will be a little different, and the areas that you excel in will be noticeable through the research. These positive themes are the starting point for developing your EVP pillars, but your pillars should combine in such a way that they are unique to you as a business.

In fact, there are three tests that should be applied and are very useful in defining the EVP pillars.

For each pillar, you should be asking:

  1. 1.

    Is this compelling to our specific, identified audience?

    Is it a core selling point that both attracts and engages the kind of people we really need and want? Again, think back to the core sells, not just anything and everything that forms part of the sell, such as salary or CSR activities.

  2. 2.

    Is it differentiating from our competitors? No single pillar will differentiate you all by itself; if it could, you would only need one. It is, in fact, more than likely that you will share one or more pillars with your competitors but that you will also have a point of difference somewhere that really matters.

    Returning once more to our aeronautical businesses, let us assume that they each have four pillars:

    The first three are shared, not with all other aeronautical business, but with each other. The choice for candidates, if they understand the difference, is that one offers “freedom to innovate,” the other access to “world-class processes.” There is only one real point of difference, but it will make all the difference in the world to engineers who, otherwise, would not know which business they are better suited to.

    Of course, there may be other companies in their industry who offer freedom to innovate, but external research should have shown that those businesses would not therefore be offering the others too.

    Finally, it is actually possible that all of your pillars are similar in some way to another business that is not in your industry. Consider those pillars again (using freedom to innovate) and apply them to two separate companies: Google and Airbus.

    They could work for both (potentially) but the nature of the industry would be what sets them apart. And this is equally important – because as well as articulating the pillars, when it comes to communicating an EVP, you will need to show evidence to support those pillars. In the case above, Google and Airbus would both demonstrate cutting-edge technology in very different ways.

  3. 3.

    Is it credible?

    Finally, for any pillar chosen, it is important to assess the credibility. In fact, it could be argued that the whole method of EVP research is geared up for this purpose. Establish what senior leaders would like to say, and then see how credible it is by talking to the staff.

    Again, however, there is a judgment call to be made. When used as a marketing platform, EVPs are designed to be aspirational, not merely descriptive. Going back to point 1 above, they must be compelling and engaging and that means that there may well be an element that cannot necessarily be supported with evidence yet, but that can be supported by commitment to that point.

    When determining the final set of pillars, then, we have to be mindful not only of the current situation but of the desire, commitment, and plan for the business itself to change – to make the EB vision a reality.

    Perhaps, in the above example, you have evidence for three of the pillars but cannot yet offer “unlimited career possibilities” – the question to ask then is whether you want to say it simply because you know it will appeal to the market or whether this is a realistic ambition for the business with both senior-level support and a plan to make it happen.

    If it is the former, then this should not be part of the EVP; it is not credible. If the latter is true, then to include one aspirational pillar out of four is more than acceptable.

Company A

Company B

At the cutting edge of technology

At the cutting edge of technology

Unlimited career possibilities

Unlimited career possibilities

Global success

Global success

World-class processes

Freedom to innovate

Getting the balance right is challenging with so many people to please.

The ultimate set of pillars that is right for a business will satisfy all parties, senior leaders, current employees, and potential employees, creating a unique and compelling position that distinguishes that business in the market, making employees proud and making potential employees aspire to work there.

Do’s

  • Take active steps to manage your employer brand, considering:

    • Who is your target audience?

    • What are they currently thinking?

    • How can you change/reinforce that perception?

  • Define and articulate your EVP. Think about:

    • What does the organization do?

    • What does the organization want to be known for?

    • What kind of people are needed for this to happen?

    • What kind of environment do you want to create?

  • Have an EVP model, statement, pillars, and toolkit.

  • Bring the EVP to life through creative development.

  • Communicate and integrate your EVP using your EVP touchpoints.

  • Keep in mind global differences.

  • Measure the impacts at every stage.

Don’ts

  • Have too many pillars within your EVP – it is what you want to be known for, not everything that you do.

  • Have pillars that are not key selling points in themselves such as values, salary, or CSR activities.

    • These may be part of your culture but are seldom the reason people choose you.

  • Use pillars that are not well defined.

  • Make promises that the business is unable to keep.

  • View employer branding as a project; it is a continual process.

Final Comments

This chapter has outlined, addressed, and evaluated the theory and practice of employer branding and how this is communicated internally and externally through the employer value proposition. A narrative is given in who you should listen to, who your influencers are, what research methods to use to gauge your internal and external audience, how to develop your EVP statements and pillars, and how the EVP is developed creatively.

As a closing statement, it must be reiterated that the danger in employer branding is that it is often seen and initiated as a project. Employer branding is a continual process and this needs to be kept in mind when thinking of future budget allocations.