In most companies, the employer brand function is generally placed in either the Talent Acquisition/Human resources area or in the Marketing team, suggesting that its only value to the company is the ability to attract more applications.
But what if employer branding is something more than a well-crafted narrative designed to get people to click the “apply” button? What if employer branding is the lever that leadership can use to level up their talent base, become more agile and save money?
In that case, the two people who get the most value from a strong employer brand (and therefore need to actively support it) are the company’s CFO and COO.
In order to make that value clear, we have to start by properly defining employer branding out of its “get more applications” pigeonhole. The value of employer branding isn’t that it generates more broad interest from job seekers, but that, like a consumer or corporate brand, it helps someone who isn’t even looking for a job understand the reasons why they should put your company on their radar.
Obviously, that serves recruiting’s objectives, but there are four key areas in which a strong employer brand not only serves the C-suite, but can provide a strategic advantage as it grows.
Increased quality of talent
Johnny Ive changed the world as the designer of the iPod, iPhone, iMac and many others. He is, without question, the perfect example of game-changing talent that helps Apple become one of the biggest companies in the world.
But did you know it took Apple more than two years to recruit him? Great game-changing talent doesn’t look for a job by hanging out on job boards. These people have nearly unlimited options and need a great deal of information before they can choose their next employer.
What’s complicating here is that great talent is a seed. If you plant it in the right environment, it thrives. Plant it in the wrong soil, give it too much or too little sunlight, and it is doomed. That new hire might be amazing on paper, but they need the right team, the right support, the right manager, the right incentive structure, or they won’t rise to their potential.
At the same time, the amazing talent that doesn’t fit within the existing culture and reward structure becomes a diva, disrupting everyone else and leading to lowered productivity and innovation.
With a strong employer brand, you don’t just attract “great talent,” you explain what working there will be like, what the culture supports, how to interact with others, allowing them to see a more complete picture of how their own motivations and traits will fit or won’t. You’re giving them enough information to allow them to see if they will be a good fit and thrive, or be an unlikely fit and wilt.
There’s a lid for every pot, but because most employer brands are weak or bland, to a lid, all the pots look and sound the same. A strong employer brand makes it clear to game-changing talent, who have the most options when choosing their next employer, why they should join your company.
Without a strong employer brand, game-changing talent will seek other, more clear and better-fitting options.
Increased availability of skills
We live in a world where the rate of change is increasing beyond our immediate frame of reference. That rate of change is stark relative to how slowly most companies interview and hire, putting them in a position of perpetual catch-up. Effectively they are hiring people based on skills that they no longer require.
While much is being made in the talent world about skills-based hiring, those skills still come in the form of a person. You can’t hire sales management skills without it arriving with a social security number and the need for health insurance (assuming a US-centric perspective). You might put some transactional roles in the hands of contract or gig-economy labor, but the future of your company will be driven by people, ones who are fully-invested in your shared success.
But to a company, not all people are equal. Some people show up and do the job as it is described and documented. Others will grow your business because they are perpetually learning, curious about innovations in their and adjacent spaces.
A weak employer brand, dominated by messages of “join us!” and “work here!” attract people who are excited solely that an opening exists. They are looking for any job, not specifically your job. These aren’t the people who obsess over problems, who are listening to industry podcasts or experimenting with interesting ideas on the side.
A strong employer brand attracts people looking for more than a transactional job. It can attract people who are excited to grow a company, build new products, and invent a future together. These are people who are always looking at the horizon for new and better ways to succeed. They innately level up their own skill sets, not because the learning and development team offered a class, but because that’s what gets them excited on a Sunday afternoon. These are the people who ensure that their company is perpetually evolving their available skillsets, often before you realize you need them.
Increased predictability
Your sales team has processes and tools that can predict future sales within a few degrees one way or the other. Compare that to your recruiting team who have no way of knowing if your next critical hire will take five days or five months.
As everything your company does, from sales and support to development and marketing requires someone in a role to complete the task, requires people in role, the inability to fill roles in a predictable manner is incredibly disruptive to the bottom line.
This stems from the fact that the great majority of companies still treat recruiting as “on demand,” meaning no effort goes into attracting appropriate talent for the role until HR has created a requisition (sometimes weeks after the role was needed). This also means that the talent pool is limited primarily to people looking for a job the moment when the requisition opens.
But that isn’t the only way to hire. You can tell your story about your company, about what people can expect when they join, what mission they are dedicated to fulfilling, how people succeed there and what the reward structure is when the goals are reached. That’s not what goes in most job postings, which are geared towards filling the role with someone “good enough” now rather than drawing great talent in to learn more.
Hiring great talent isn’t the same as hiring commoditized talent. Great talent doesn’t troll job boards hoping for something that seems like a match. They have their own list of companies they’d love to talk to, lists developed before they looked for a new role. That means to the people you really want to hire, by the time they are ready to move to a new company, it’s too late to compete for their attention.
In the same way companies build brands to speak to consumers well before they are ready to consider a purchase, building a strong employer brand tells the story of what the talent can expect at the company. It builds future demand to work at that company. And that demand can be tapped as needed to not only lower fill times, but to great a predictable flow of high quality talent that hiring managers can rely on.
Lowered cost
When a company’s in-house recruiting team falls short, they use agencies to fill the gaps. Often the costs of using agencies to hire crucial roles are often masked because they get charged to various individual teams rather than to the talent acquisition function. Consequently, it isn’t always clear how much is being spent to hire quality talent.
A strong employer brand builds a pipeline of quality talent, dramatically lowering annual agency costs and recruitment marketing costs. But that isn’t the only direct savings created through employer branding.
Have you asked your recruiting leader or CHRO what your offer acceptance rate is? It’s not a well-known metric outside of recruiting, but it is one worth knowing.
Think of all the costs that go into bringing a candidate to the offer stage. The money invested in ads, software, content and messaging, the time spent by the recruiter, the hiring manager, and the interview panel. Your offer acceptance rate is how often that process was successful. The inverse is how often everyone had to go back to square one, making the ultimate hire far more expensive than the mean.
You might be surprised to hear that you have an offer acceptance rate as low as 70% or 60%. Meaning that at least one quarter of all hires are twice as expensive. Depending on the size of your company, changing that metric from 60% to 70% could save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost time, effort and budget.
A strong employer brand makes a dramatic impact on your offer acceptance rate because it changes the conversation from “let’s haggle over a number” to “let’s talk about what excited you about joining in the first place.” It creates an emotional connection with the opportunity, and makes a candidate feel more confident accepting it, thus leading to faster and cheaper hires.
Ultimately, the ability to bring on higher quality skills in a cheaper and more predictable fashion gives any company the ability to pivot and evolve much faster, which should be music to a COO’s and CFO’s ears.
So leadership, don’t relegate employer branding to the recruiting or marketing team. Take it seriously, and it will help you grow.
