What if Employer Branding Titles Went Away?
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What if we remove the “employer branding” terminology, think only in terms of content, audience, and channels, and put it all together under one roof with Marketing?
And the collective goal then becomes creating the right things for the right people and putting them in the right places to be consumed.
What would this change?
Here are some ideas:
Marketing to a candidate audience would become valued and therefore given financial + people resources.
Scalable content creation + distribution.
Tactical and measurable execution (quant and qual).
Candidates get more of the information they want at all stages of the buying process.
Alignment on brand messaging.
Joint campaigns that piggyback on each other.
True recruiter enablement: recruiter's jobs simply become easier because of marketing.
Yes, there are a lot of internal considerations to be made here.
And I have no hope of mature companies embracing this idea. It’s too "organizationally challenging". And many already have resources available to them.
But scaling startups that think differently––that believe in coordinated brand efforts, collaborative problem solving, and frankly, in attracting and converting talent the same way they do enterprise customers––are the ones that can design a new way for candidates and companies to meet.
[More context in this video.]
Some final thoughts for the growth-stage startups and SMBs hiring niche talent:
For the record, I’m not saying to kill employer branding or that employer branding doesn’t matter. Quite the opposite. EB is very real and an important component of talent acquisition. And frankly, a key supporter of revenue––especially for B2C brands.
What I’m advocating for is a much-needed change.
This can no longer fall on the lap of a Head of Talent, internal recruiter, or the team-of-one EB leader.
This is less about org structure and more about continually thinking differently about your industry and finding ways for it to just get better.
And it’s about putting under-resourced and undervalued initiatives in the best position to win. That’s the only thing that matters.
Bottom line: put opinions aside and find that place––wherever it is in your org.