Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen: How to Unify Your Employment Branding Efforts #SHRM15

By Jessica Miller-Merrell 

These days, employment branding is on the hearts and minds of many talent acquisition leaders. Even though it seems to be everywhere, it is still a relatively new phenomenon and subset of the recruitment industry. The concept is developing rapidly and catching on, but it’s still in its infancy. One of the ways that the concept is growing is through conversations happening all over the place. Employment branding thought leaders are sharing their own best practices and evangelizing in the field through communities like the newly formed Employment Branding Chat on Twitter, or #Ebchat. I love all the conversations, resources and questions shared on these social peer communities. It helps professionals learn from each other and helps in identifying trends as this subset of recruiting and HR continues to develop.

One of the issues that I’ve been able to identify as a problem for many companies and HR or recruiting teams is what to do when you have too much employment branding. This is both a challenge and an exciting problem to have. This means that your people are actively promoting the employment brand and truly get it, though the team’s efforts need to be consolidated and focused.

Consistent, fluid and focused messaging

It’s amazing to have buy in on the idea of employment branding from many team members, but like traditional marketing, it’s important for your message and conversations to be fluid, in line with the current campaign and clear. When you are a large organization it’s hard to get a handle on the massive amount of recruiting and talent acquisition materials and information that recruiters and hiring managers want to be shared, but there absolutely has to a consistent, fluid and focused message, and all your people must embrace it.

In order for this to happen, your organization should exercise employment branding unification, which is essentially the simplification and organization of your employment branding efforts. When you unify, all communications, media pieces and collateral materials are in line with the brand.

With these four steps you can unify your efforts to ensure employment brand success, which means that recruiters have what they need and candidates aren’t overwhelmed:

Conduct an employment branding inventory

Research, absorb and account for all media, materials and branded elements used in the recruiting and hiring process. Talk to your recruiters to ensure that no one has gone rogue and is using materials or messaging they created independently.

Organize and sort your materials

Develop categories so that materials are easier to sort through. You can sort by topic, candidate type, when in the process the material is used or really any other way that makes sense for your team.

Prioritize and purge

Find out what messages resonate with your employees and candidates and hone in on those. Those that don’t should be set aside or recycled for another later campaign. Quality should be the focus, not quantity.

Create employment branding buckets

Authorized materials for different campaigns can be stored in each bucket. Your “bucket” could be as simple as a Google Drive, Dropbox or could be housed within your TalentCircles Talent Network. Give your candidates options of information and resources to absorb and engage with while also providing recruiters and hiring managers with materials and guidelines based on the specific campaign.

TalentCircles is the most comprehensive candidate engagement platform on the market. Take a product tour or request a live demo today. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology anthropologist specializing in HR and recruiting. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs and author of The HR Technology Field Guide. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.

Why Branding is Essential to Your Future Success in Recruiting

By Jessica Miller-Merrell 

We’re in a time when the job-market landscape is a candidate’s dream. The economy is looking up and unemployment is low, which means that candidates have more options than they’ve had in years. And it’s not just that they have options. They have more access and opportunities to connect with employers before they apply for a position. This leaves them in a unique position to get to know whether or not a company is a good fit and has what they’re looking for before ever stepping in the door.

In order for employers to stay competitive and continue to bring in the type of candidates they’re looking for, it’s imperative to go beyond the job posting and start looking at a total solution. What will make the difference is a unified marketing campaign that conveys your employment brand both online and in the real world. We’ve got to start thinking less like traditional HR pros and more like marketers.

Branding and recruiting

You know what branding means to retailers and service companies. You see the same campaign across many channels, all pushing you to make a buying decision in favor of their brand, whether you’re online, flipping through the Sunday paper or visiting a store. Recruitment branding follows the same idea. Essentially, it’s the process of creating a consistent marketing message across all channels. Your brand reinforces and supports your marketing and recruiting efforts with the goal of engaging and building awareness with candidates about career opportunities with your company.

Touch points

Thinking like a marketer means you’re focusing on the end buying decision in all that you do. For candidates, the decision to buy occurs when they apply for a position with your company. The way that marketers achieve this is through repeated touch points. On average, consumer brand recognition doesn’t even occur until there have been seven touch points. If we translate this to recruiting, this sheds some light on exactly how much connecting and engaging we must do to get a candidate to the purchase point where they’re seriously interested in the company. This is why branding is so essential to your recruiting efforts. In recruiting, there are three things touch points must be:

• Consistent - To make the most of your efforts, be consistent with your ads, postings, engagement and outreach. There’s nothing worse than starting over every time you reach out to a candidate because you’ve gone too long between touch points.

• Supporting – You’ll likely have many different touch points, from conversations in your talent network to meeting someone at a career fair. Consider how each touch point is supporting the others. Is the message you use when you meet someone in person consistent with your career site? Where are you guiding them after the initial contact? And is your touch point sequence organized in a way that allows each one to build on the one before?

• Ongoing – Remember the phrase “out of sight, out of mind”? Well it applies in recruiting too. Much of your efforts will be focused on long-term relationship building, so while you shouldn’t bother or overwhelm a potential candidate, your efforts should be ongoing. 

If you can remember that the hiring and recruiting process mirrors the consumer marketplace, your touch points will be moving in the right direction. Candidates, like consumers, want to relate to a company prior to applying. They want to understand company culture, philanthropic interests and leadership style to see your company and theirs can align. Use this desire to your advantage and put those touch points to work.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology anthropologist specializing in HR and recruiting. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs and author of The HR Technology Field Guide. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.

The Secret to Building Your Employment Brand

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

HR professionals, it’s time to start thinking like marketing gurus. No longer can your marketing plan be an afterthought, but instead must be the first thought you have when it comes to the strategic path of your recruiting and hiring. Managing the staffing needs of your company may be your primary responsibility, but marketing your company as an employer is the first step in mastering it. Marketing in HR is nothing new. However, what is new are the tactics being utilized, and even more so the way they’re being used. Effective recruitment marketing includes pieces that are part of a bigger strategic plan or framework. Without that framework, it’s all just a shot in the dark.

When you think of building your employment brand, you likely think of the tactics involved, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, professional organizations and other networking opportunities. These are all proven and effective ways of recruiting, but without seeing how they all fit together, you have a constant handicap. It’s like the difference between using the instructions to assemble a piece of Ikea furniture and just winging it. You might make it through, but there will be that handful of screws left over that leave you wondering whether or not the bed is going to fall apart in the middle of the night.

This is where your talent community comes into play. A framework is created using all of your recruiting and hiring resources. It connects your contacts in professional organizations to your social media, which connects them to online discussions and blogs, which connects them to hiring events...and it goes on and on. Your framework must be built on a strategic plan. How do you want to connect with candidates? What kind of candidates are you seeking? How large of a pipeline of potential candidates do you wish to have? The answers to these questions help to shape your framework.

Your talent community essentially creates a pipeline of potential candidates for your recruiting and hiring efforts. The way it does so is by connecting you with these candidates far before a position ever opens up and keeping the line of communication open through multiple channels. It’s said in marketing that typically an ad must be seen several times in order to be remembered. The same is true of your employment brand. In fact, it helps to think of your employment brand the same way other companies think of their businesses, as having savvy customers who have a choice of where to visit or in your case, apply. Your talent community creates multiple experiences across many channels for your potential candidates.

Those experiences actually create a path for candidates, though it’s not a path you might define or expect to be the same from person to person. One candidate’s path may begin at a career fair, while another’s may start by discovering you on LinkedIn. The actual path taken isn’t as important as the fact that there is a path. The last thing you want is to invest your time and money into connecting with potential candidates for it to lead to a dead end. A talent community creates a constant conversation. This constant conversation puts your employment brand at the forefront of your applicant pool’s minds and makes recruiting and hiring quicker, easier and more successful.

What channels do you use in recruiting and hiring that you could utilize in building a talent community? Let us know in the comments below.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

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