Traditionally, brand strategies are shaped by the customer experience of the company’s products and services. However, truly successful brands always deliver the same positive experience – if not better – to their employees. Therefore, it is a mistake to focus only on your customer journeys. Your employees’ experiences when working for you are just as meaningful.  Happy employees grow advocacy not only for your consumer brand but for your employer brand too. After all, a high-performing company is dependent on high-performing employees. In addition, you will only attract (and retain) qual ..read more

The upheaval brought about by the pandemic has forced many of us to reevaluate what’s essential. Data shows that record numbers of people around the globe are voluntarily quitting their jobs to focus on new opportunities that better align with their values and goals. I am one of those people. For me, the Great Resignation has been an opportunity to step back and rethink the personal objectives in my life. I realized there was a lot of work that didn’t stop or slow down, but I didn’t feel challenged intellectually. On top of that, I was only getting insight into the complexities of a single ind ..read more

Whether you’re selling goods, services, technology, or an employee value proposition, there should always be the same first step. It’s critical to identify your message and what makes your story compelling or ‘pop’, before determining the format or channel for communicating to your audience. On paper it seems simple, but marketers are often dazzled by the prospect of a shiny webinar, blog, or video, and jump to the output channel before they’ve nailed down what they really want to say.   The same rules apply in the world of employer branding. In fact, when what you’re trying to sell ..read more

Put yourself in a candidate’s shoes for a moment. You are browsing a company’s careers site, reading their reviews on Glassdoor, stalking their social media channels. Yet when you start talking with a recruiter during the interview process, what you’re hearing is misaligned to what you’ve read online. Frustrating, right? This might immediately create a negative perception of the company for you. This is the heart of employer branding. What it’s like to work at a company, why people choose to apply and stay, what they read online. It’s the feeling and perception both candidates and employees ha ..read more

MVPs: we highlight them on a football field, but in employer branding – the team sport of the corporate field – those standout performers are a thing, too.  We’ve previously shared why employer branding is a team sport and delved into the collective effort that a good employer brand relies on. But how do you pinpoint the most valuable players in your employer branding game, and why are they so key to the attraction and retention of great talent? Six of our employer branding leaders discussed their views on this as we listened in – read their thoughts below. Who’s the MVP of your EB team r ..read more

Your EVP is quite a different beast to your product and service branding. Your EVP has to deliver on a subject with much higher stakes – the ‘self’ – in a society that reinforces that much of our identity and wellbeing is connected to the value we produce. Thus, a job with your company needs to present itself as an opportunity for a candidate to become what they want to be, or reinforce who they already are. Your EVP touches upon self-realisation and people’s deeper needs (i.e. providing for their lifestyle, family and future, wanting to be seen as a high value individual) so it follows that y ..read more

The employer brand space has transformed a lot over the years. I think it’s really important to understand that company purpose and company culture are not one and the same, but rather elements that should work together to create the employee experience. You need to make sure your purpose feeds into your culture because no matter what your purpose is, if it doesn’t feed into a culture that fosters belonging and people first, it’s just not going to fly in the 2020s. Above all, candidates are looking for a culture they can belong to. I look after the Employer Brand team at Commonwealth Bank, one ..read more

Before joining Grace Blue last year, I spent more than a decade leading global employer brand for a large professional services organization. It’s a brand practice that in many ways is still quite nascent, though there are dedicated practitioners doing inspiring work around the world and the market for employer brand roles is happily exploding. I’m not surprised. In my role at Grace Blue, I’ve gained a more fully formed picture of how CHROs and CMOs are thinking, their priorities, and what they are responsible for from a metric standpoint, and from everything I’m seeing, employer brand is righ ..read more

We all know automation technologies, AI, machine learning and data aggregation have changed the way businesses operate and how they recruit talent. We’ve also seen a shift over the last decade or so, from employer-centric recruitment to candidate-centric recruitment and now relationship-centric recruitment, with a real focus on bringing meaning to your employment. What I’ve realised is that all the companies I’ve seen using tech and data to disrupt have identified the importance of the human element in everything they do. They’re leveraging the magic of technology to successfully transform the ..read more

When it comes to building out an authentic employer brand, trust is everything. But if you try to hoodwink your audience in building that trust, you can break your brand in an instant.  This is where employee advocacy is so important.  Between social proof (Glassdoor, LinkedIn, etc.), anecdotal evidence and value affiliation, you need your people to tell their version of your story and organically build trust in your employer brand. Employee advocacy can improve marketing efficiencies right across both talent and consumer lifecycles. Think of it in terms of the saying ‘a smile is con ..read more