I used to be an Employer Brand enthusiast

The idea

When I first heard the term ‘Employer Branding’ back in 2003, I was hooked by the name alone.

I started learning as much as I could about it, because as newly created job disciplines go, this one made sense.

It made sense (to me at least) because it merged the two main areas of my professional life; recruitment and advertising. The idea of making the marriage of recruitment and marketing official, seemed like a good idea, if only for selfish reasons.

I was an advocate. I still am, just not as much. I still like the idea though.

The execution

The reason why I’m not that into employer branding anymore is down to execution.

The career pages, the social media feeds, the job posts, the pictures of pretty people enjoying their work. All the blandness.

And all of it coming from companies rich enough to spend tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of pounds/dollars building something that’s going to speak to their future employees. And if they can afford that kind of money, they’re probably quite big and employ a lot of people.

The bad news

If they employ a lot of people, they don’t have one homogeneous work culture.

Instead they have lots of different sub work cultures. But none of their employer branding says anything interesting to all those different types of people doing different jobs.

So all that “values” stuff companies love to spread, has to speak to so many different types of people that it ends up getting distilled down to anodyne junk like “we’re honest” and “we’re collaborative” so those values can broadly apply to everyone.

If you have to sell honesty, you have nothing. Seriously.

And if collaboration really is a key factor to working for you, at least say it in an interesting way. In a way that will get noticed. But being able to do that means doing the research, because the research is where the ideas come from. Then it’s about the execution of those ideas.

But they don’t stand out, or get noticed. They all sound the same. As do their job posts (or job descriptions if you still think they’re the same thing).

The race to the creative bottom

The company is big, they’re successful and they probably don’t want to risk rocking any boats. I get it. They’re playing in defence mode, which is why there are so many barriers to navigate when it comes to getting any external marketing signed-off.

So they try and look and sound like everyone else by creating collateral that looks as pretty as everyone else’s and is formulaic enough to not offend risk-averse senior managers. They probably expect (or hope) that their consumer brand will do all of the selling when it comes to hiring.

And if that’s true, it gives some credence to the industry joke that employer branding is just the main board giving HR colouring crayons to play with.

For me, large companies have dragged the concept of employer branding down to their level.

Boring, safe, bland and ironically, sometimes not true. That’s not a criticism by the way, because I understand their thinking, despite not agreeing with it. Which brings me to my final point.

The smaller the better

Employer Branding, when executed with real creativity, is far more applicable to smaller companies.

Especially smaller companies that want to become bigger companies.

Because they’re more likely to want to rock the boat and to stand out. They’re in attack mode. They’re “underdogs” as this ad agency calls them. But there’s probably a price barrier, which means it’s only being done at a micro level, like this example beautifully illustrates.

If anyone knows of any smaller/growing companies that do employer branding well, I’d love to hear about them.

And now, this…