Employer branding to attract and retain talent

What is an employer brand?

When we talk about branding, we often think of it from a purely commercial perspective. How does a brand stand out to its customers or consumers? What is its awareness, reputation and esteem? In essence, brands are used to make choices.

Employer branding helps talent choose you as a company to work for.
It's all about showcasing what makes you unique and desirable as an employer to retain your best resources and attract new ones.

Employer branding is a set of elements that define your company as an employer in the most authentic way possible. These elements include

• Its raison d'être (mission and vision)
• Its intrinsic values
• Its culture (its history, rituals, ways of doing and behaving, employee experience)
• Its tangible value proposition
• Its way of communicating

In addition, the employer brand is involved at all stages of your employees' career cycle: recruitment, on-boarding, development, evaluation, etc.

It is part of the company's project. Some aspects are tangible, such as salaries and benefits, while others are intangible, such as the work climate and culture.

Why develop it?

Your employer brand allows you to promote your company, whatever your sector of activity, even if it is not flamboyant at first glance. The purpose of developing your employer brand is to clarify the value that the company uniquely brings or wants to bring to its current and future talent.

It's mentioned in the introduction to this article: the stated goal is to attract and retain talent, and both components are equally important:

It's important to attract the right talent, those who have the right skills of course, but also (especially) those who fit your company (its mission, its values) and who will find their place there permanently. The goal is to reduce turnover and increase the pride of your teams, because the cost of replacing your best talent is prohibitive. If this is the case, developing your candidate pool (also known as sourcing) to offset a hemorrhage of personnel is not the right approach. Rather, the primary question to ask is why are my people leaving? What is the problem?

It is clear that often, employer branding is considered to solve an internal issue. Conversely, it is rare that a company in which everything is going well asks itself questions about its employer brand.

The desire to develop an employer brand can also be particularly relevant following significant changes within your company: accelerated growth with massive recruitment, a merger of companies with different cultures, etc. These are moments when the deepest values of your company are being challenged. These are times when the company's core values can be blurred and it is necessary to reaffirm or redefine them in order to maintain buy-in and cohesion. It is then essential to put in place the right practices to regain control of your employer brand and ensure that it still corresponds to your reality.

As you can see, authenticity is the key word behind the employer brand.

How to develop it?

Some large companies have several departments involved depending on the employee's contact points, but for SMEs the situation is different. They will sometimes call on specialized external firms, and sometimes seek to develop the necessary skills so that the teams in place (often multidisciplinary) can initiate the process.

First of all, it is essential for an SME to clearly define itself in order to develop its employer brand. Since it allows the company's foundations to be promoted, it is essential that there be coherence between the stated values and the reality of the workplace. Especially since today there are resources available to employees (Glassdoor, to name but one) that allow anyone to validate the promises made.

To get off to a good start, planning certain steps will contribute to the overall alignment of intentions, actions and communications:

Take an honest stocktaking, which considers the gap between management's declarative, employees' lived experience, and the perception of potential talent externally.
Validate its positioning to ensure that it contributes to the company's differentiation and value proposition.
Deliver communications that reflect these points and reinforce the consistency of the overall message.
Then implement and monitor the programs.
There are tools available that are designed to break down the entire employee experience from A to Z. It's up to the company (and its VP) to see how to use the findings to take the company further. Make no mistake: developing your employer brand is not a matter of a few days or a few weeks. It's an ongoing process that unfolds over time... Any methodology, even the best, must be integrated into the culture of the company that uses it, to support its Momentum.

Who develops it?

Management buy-in is necessary: 70% of companies that have successfully developed their employer brand also managed to involve the senior manager. However, it is mostly human resources and marketing that are at the helm. They are the ones who want to inject new momentum and are looking to promote the approach to management.

The first step allows them to draw up a report, from which they can detail their needs, the scope of the project, the necessary resources and, finally, the associated budget. The involvement of these departments is quite logical, as they are more operational, and they are usually the first to work on the company's mission, vision, culture and communications. And it's precisely this approach that makes employer branding a systemic one, as part of the company's project.

And Sourcing?

We could say that the two go hand in hand. In short, sourcing brings together a set of techniques for conducting effective searches for candidates in the context of recruitment. In particular, by finding "passive" candidates, who are not looking for a job, but whose profile would be a good match with the company's current needs. In this context, employer branding takes on its full meaning, since its role is precisely to put forward its difference/promise in a way that is clear and inciting enough for a person in the position to be ready to take the plunge.

To learn more about sourcing, we recommend reading Sandrine Théard's article "Le sourcing pour anticiper les postes vacants".

In conclusion
Attracting and retaining talent is a key issue for all companies. Tools and methods exist to help them perform well, in particular the development of the employer brand, which includes the definition of its raison d'être, its values, its culture and its communications. Developing it well requires four essential ingredients: method, insight, authenticity, tenacity.

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