What Is Your Employer Brand Strategy?
No fluff. No BS. And speak the language that gets the respect of marketing and revenue-focused leaders.
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If asked the question, “What is your employer brand strategy?”, I’d expect your answer to be something along these lines:
First, you’re able to clearly articulate the desired outcome.
This needs to be clear, measurable, and tied to something that influences core business objectives. Aka, shit that people outside of your bubble actually care about.
For small companies, this might be one overarching initiative. For large companies, this might be a series of initiatives.
Either way, an initiative should be accountable to the following:
1. A tactical plan to achieve the desired outcome.
Content.
How you will create the content.
Needs from internal stakeholders.
Resources: internal or external (freelance/agency support).
Distribution.
Budget.
2. Est. timeline to achieve the desired outcome.
This manages expectations. (FYI, it’s much longer than you think. Overestimate.)
3. How you will know if you’re succeeding.
Metrics: Qual and quant.
Your core metric.
Breadcrumb metrics: indicators that things are working.
***How will you measure qualitative data? (IMO this is the most important data. If someone doesn’t know to measure this, they’re going to struggle with EB.)
4. How you will know if you’ve succeeded.
This is all that actually matters.
Some will call me out, saying this is recruitment marketing.
My response to them is, no, this is employer branding the way that I see it:
No fluff. No BS. And it speaks the language that gets the respect of marketing and revenue-focused leaders.
Context: A friend, who’s an in-house talent brand leader, reached out to me wondering how I would expect the question “What is your employer branding strategy?” to be answered.
This was my reply. It was stream of consciousness and therefore likely missing some steps. See this as a framework. You’re smart. You can fill in the gaps.
Here’s an example of a clearly articulated outcome:
We want to be known as the company where junior developers come to level up their careers through our internal mentorship program led by senior developers.
We will measure this through a combination of qual and quant data: referrals, retention, quality of inbound leads, inbound sourced leads via our dev team, response rates to passive candidates, time to hire, and overall recruiter efficiency and happiness.
*I kinda stole this from a CTO I know. But it’s good, so…