A baptism in employer brand

Employer brand: Setting yourself apart from your competitors

First thing’s first: What exactly is employer brand? “In a nutshell, it’s our job to create and share the narrative of why HubSpot is a great place to work in a way that’s authentic,” Ashlee explains.

Responsible for “all things talent attraction,” for Hanady, employer brand sits as “a small marketing team under the HR umbrella” which centres on “positioning CDW as an employer of choice and a great place to work.” 

But this definition is far from static. For both Ashlee and Hanady, employer brand has undergone a metamorphosis in the past few years, growing in importance and what it encompasses. 

“With the changing talent market, employer brand isn’t so much of a volume play anymore for a lot of companies,” Ashlee argues. “It’s not so much of a ‘top of the funnel, drive as many applications as you can’ type of thing.” Spilling over into traditional recruitment marketing waters, employer brand has evolved into a targeted approach: “Are you talking to the right people with the right messages that resonate with them on the right channels that they’re active and engaged on?”

And the messages that resonate? “Your brand story, DEI, anything around work/life flexibility, mental health – these are the stories that people are more curious about now than, say, 2019,” Hanady states.

A philosophical shift towards work

Needless to say, the pandemic forced us to look at work through new, wellbeing-centric lenses. “We talk about the Great Resignation or the Great Reshuffle, and sometimes it can be a very surface level conversation – people asking for more money, benefits, etc. But there’s been a philosophical shift in terms of how people think about work,” Hanady states. “It’s a question of am I getting the things that are paramount to me, like how I define work/life balance. If not, I can try and find that somewhere else.”

“It wasn’t just going to a different company and doing the same work. People were drastically shifting the way they looked at and thought about work,” Ashlee continues. The numbers speak for themselves. According to Randstad UK (2021), last year almost one in four UK workers were planning to switch careers – a stark juxtaposition from the 11% Randstad usually sees. This figure is even higher in the US, where almost half of employees are looking for a new job or plan to move soon.

Reshuffling the deck

This shifting attitude towards work and high turnover brings a new meaning to the Great Reshuffle: a redress of the employer/employee hierarchy. “At the start of the pandemic, people were thankful to have a job, stability and wanted to show their worth [as employees]. Employers potentially had more cards at that time,” Hanady states. 

“Then you saw this shift in mentality towards the end of the year, people thinking: I can do anything! I can go anywhere! I don’t know if [employees] are always going to have the cards in their hands, but the landscape has changed and recruiters are getting more ghosted than ever.”

For Ashlee, this power gives employees “motivation and empowers them to explore, request and expect” a better workplace experience. “Candidates don’t have to feel stuck anymore, and the table stakes are different now,” she continues. “They expect a company to provide work/life flexibility. They expect a company to have benefits. They expect a company to provide the things that are important to them.”

And this isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Ashlee predicts a generational shift in what employees care about. Dubbed the ‘generation of sensibility’ in The Power of Gen Z: Trust and the Future Consumer (Edelman, Dec 2021), social and wellbeing sit at the heart of Gen Z’s principles both internally and externally: 

• 78% respondents have carved out more time for self-care and mental health post-pandemic.
• 9 in 10 want the brands they buy from to get involved in causes that better the world (climate change, poverty, gender equality, etc).
• 8 in 10 consider how brands treat employees as critical or important to purchase decision factors.
• 7 in 10 evaluate a brand’s work to support/give to those in need when considering whether to work there.

As the race for talent shows no signs of slowing down, employer brand is set to grow more and more all important for organisations. Those who know how to position themselves will come out on top – and that’s exactly why you need Ignite USA.

Actionable insight you’ll get at Ignite USA

“Anytime I go to a conference I think: Give me one nugget, one actionable item to walk away with and implement,” Hanady states. Hosted by Katie Martell, their session is set to offer an in-depth immersion in employer brand, covering topics such as:

• The evolution of employer brand – what it is, and what it isn’t.
• How to discover your employer brand.
• An immersion in employer brand for those who don’t know what it is – and why you need to start thinking about it.
• Why employer brand connects your entire organisation.
• How you’re ‘doing’ employer brand – even if you don’t know it.
• Why your peers are investing in employer brand at senior level.

“By the very nature of bringing in topics like employer brand, there’s an effort to vary the information that’s shared and look at a wider cross-section of what it means to work in content and brand [at Ignite USA],” Ashlee adds. “Not a lot of conferences do that – they’re overly specific and siloed in their content, and broadening the discussion helps all of us learn more, together.”