Employer Branding and Management

Last reviewed: February 2017

Abstract

Employer branding and management refers to the strategies by which a company creates its public image as a desirable place to work. The goal is to recruit top talent and in turn to retain the best employees already hired. However, employer branding is far more than a simple human resources tool to make a company a presence in an increasingly competitive job market. Rather, employer branding and management, when executed correctly, becomes a significant tool for a company to understand its own operations and its own employees thus making for a more engaged and productive workplace.

Overview

Traditional Hiring. Before the need for highly specialized talent in fields as diverse as medicine and software development, environmental engineering, and accounting began to far exceed the number of qualified applicants, securing a job was largely the responsibility of the applicant. Applicants had to sell themselves as a good hire. Because internal information was comparatively limited, the applicant might know very little about the company they were applying to or the working conditions to which they would be subject, if hired.

The applicant was at a distinct disadvantage as the company was largely in control of the information provided to make employment there seem attractive. Even if a job interview involved a tour of the facilities and actually meeting employees, the entire interview process could be manipulated to make the best impression. Promises concerning responsibilities and/or company growth potential could be made that really had little foundation.

Indeed, companies largely relied on offering a competitive salary and benefit package as the best—really, only—way to seal the deal. Companies sometimes relied on so-called head-hunters—that is, talent acquisition representatives—yet the search still largely on a needful applicant field and its own carefully crafted and polished public image to secure needed talent.

The intention was as simple as it was misguided: to hire the best candidate rather than the right candidate. Companies simply filled positions rather than hiring promising workers. The results of the applicant-centered process were predictably uneven. New hires might find that the reality of the selected workplace differed significantly from the impression given at the interview. Talented employees who experienced frustration or were otherwise disappointed in the company or their place in it were motivated to move on, leaving the original company facing the applicant process again.

Attracting Talent. With the advent of the digital era, communication chatter outside a company vastly increased. Through the agencies of mass communication platform outlets, including Facebook and LinkedIn, personal blogs, and review sites that offered individuals the ability to evaluate companies’ products, practices, and employment conditions without fear of repercussions, the workforce itself suddenly emerged as a powerful tool for creating the perception of a company. Senior management and human resources departments realized they were no longer in control of the information circulating about their company. They could no longer offer candidates false promises; they could no longer easily create an image of the workplace that did not match the reality; their employees (and their ex-employees) had found a powerful voice to register what conditions were like and what sort of workplace culture defined the company. Was the company a fun place to work? Relaxed and informal? Was it rigid and hierarchical? Did it encourage talent? Did it promote fairly? Were supervisors responsive to employee feedback? Was the technology current? Was there a clear chain of command? Did the company treat its employees with respect? Were there genuine opportunities to engage creatively the work of the company? Were there legitimate avenues for promotion and significant protocols for job security?

Within a single decade the pool of qualified applicants fell far below the numbers of openings even as the ability of applicants to choose which employers were the most desirable and best fit for themselves became more refined. Companies realized they needed to engage their own branding—that is, create buzz for their own workplace as a means of attracting the best new talent and retaining their own top management, supervisors, and workers. According to Robertson & Khatibi (2013) 40 percent of applicants considered employee treatment the most important criterion in choosing a place to work, whereas only 29 percent ranked quality of products or services as most important.

Insights such as these significantly impacted the hiring process. Because companies within a field all pitch comparable salary ranges and benefit packages—the tipping point for applicants would have to come from the employer brand. To use the jargon of the fast-emerging field of employer branding, a company might be a talent “magnet” or a talent “repellant.”

The emerging theoretical model suggested that in matters of hiring and retaining genuine talent, the best, or most qualified, candidate was not necessarily the right candidate. A promising applicant or a recent hire can in fact discover that the workplace environment is simply incompatible with their talents, their skill set, their expertise, their ambitions, or their personality. By managing their employer brand, companies can improve the odds of hiring talent that best fits the company itself, making for a happier, more productive, and more stable workforce and a less stressful workplace. Further, employer branding is not merely about hiring. By defining itself through internal feedback from its employees, companies can retain promising talent (Biswas & Suar, 2016).

The challenge for employers is to discover how a company becomes an employer of choice. Employer branding depends for its success on how well a company can project itself as a vibrant work community in which a person can thrive. The strategy must be able to market a positive, clearly defined, and uncontestable image to the widest possible pool of qualified applicants. Companies can no longer dangle top salaries and wide-ranging benefit packages and expect these to be enough to tap what is termed “top talent”— that is, the most highly qualified and highly desirable applicants.

Conversely, every employee becomes part of the branding process. Virtually any size company from local grocery stores to multinational corporations study their market image as a way to attract the best talent. Employer branding and management is a strategy used by local, state, and federal governments, which employ hundreds of thousands of workers; research facilities; universities; hospitals; financial institutions; law enforcement agencies; and law firms.

Applications

The application of employee branding begins with a remarkably simple observation: A company is a community. In addition to the product and/or service it provides to the consumer public, it sustains what is called a workplace culture—that is, maintains a particular signature environment for its employees, a workplace atmosphere created by the interplay between and among its employees and the management team (Verma & Ahmad, 2016). That interplay in turn defines the workplace in which employees, day in and day out, perform their assigned responsibilities. Businesses engaged in identical businesses are not identical.

It is difficult to generalize on exactly how a company can brand itself as an attractive place to work. Ghadeer (2016) terms it a “magic spell that allows organizations to differentiate themselves from others in the market place.” Companies routinely identified as those with a high-profile and very successful brand marketing strategy. Growth companies such as tech communications conglomerates such as Apple, Google, ESPN, Netflix, and Facebook; business corporations such as Pepsi, Coca Cola, Nike, IBM, and 3M; online retail giants such as Amazon; and transportation services such as Southwest Airlines and Amtrak each follow a brand marketing management strategy that keys to its own identity and its wider business network of competitors.

However, for a company to begin to build its brand as part of a long-term commitment to its employees and more specifically to be competitive for attracting the best and the brightest, branding analysts suggest commitment to a four-stage process. The process is circular—that is, it is never entirely completed but rather once the process has run its course the company returns to the initial stage as a way to keep the process of branding itself open, flexible, and living.

First, a company must understand its current conditions. This involves not only securing reliable data from its current employees and but also gathering data through exit interviews with department employees. Data collectors also monitor social media sites and investigate conditions at other similar companies, and management looks critically at the company’s own operations. With all this information, a company profiles its strengths and weaknesses and reviews its operations and workplace culture from the viewpoint of an applicant. The goal is to discover what might attract a new hire and what might drive that potential hire elsewhere.

Second, research leads to shaping a specific plan, developing a market-based company profile that can be posted online, for example, as an element of a job posting, or as part of a pitch given in an interview. This plan also covers ways of courting current employees who might be thinking of going to a new employer. Hire and retain—those are the prime directives of employer branding and management.

The third stage is critical: the actual execution—that is, the presentation of the brand—live in job interviews, whether in person or through video conferencing. The human resources representative and/or management team responsible for hiring rehearses the critical elements of the company’s workplace advantages, hitting critical bullet points, stressing the talking points from the company’s developed plan. In addition, the company secures website space to promote its brand marketing, sets up sites on social media platforms—gets the word out. Promotion and communication of a company’s brand must be constant (Wilska, 2014).

The fourth stage represents the company’s commitment to the ongoing process of managing its brand. Reflection—that is, measuring how successful the current efforts are—is the final process before returning to stage one and beginning again. Constant evaluation is key to success. Companies must discover whether they have shaped a brand image that is both relevant to the contemporary job market and distinctive from the other business entities in the field. At this point, employer branding becomes more than a strategy for hiring better employees; it becomes an essential and ongoing element of a company’s sense of its own identity. By creating a forum in which employees and supervisors, junior and senior executives all are respected equally and each help shape a response, brand marketing creates a corporate community, company operations become transparent and the subject of a robust and vibrant critique, the status quo becomes itself a problem, a starting place from which the most promising companies move forward.

Viewpoints

Human resources directors, who are responsible for managing recruitment and retention, view the emerging interest in employer branding as a significant shift in the recruitment paradigm. By using the data generated by its own employees and ex-employees, a company can demonstrate its agility, its ability, indeed its vested interest in listening to problems in operations or personnel, and in changing policies in response to this input. Brand management is useful not merely as a tool for hiring but also as an effective way to ensure a growing company’s own corporate integrity, long-term viability, and continuing relevance in its field.

The Internet and social media provide a glut of information, much of it anonymous and unfocused, which can become a distraction, providing unhelpful and conflicting perspectives. Critics doubt that a company managing its own image, deliberately contriving to make its image ”sexy,” can produce honest self-evaluation. Rather, employee branding and management represents a potentially dangerous sort of propaganda, with a company gathering, censoring, shaping, polishing, and even generating the raw data on the Internet to try to control the conversation about their own reputation.

Workplace psychologists and human resource counselors, however, see a company concerning itself with its own culture as representing a major revision in business management and how it conducts and presents itself to the public in the era of digital communications. By providing a serious evaluation of why a person should want to work there, a business can search not for a good hire but rather for a good fit, taking into consideration how that potential hire, whatever the qualifications and expertise they might bring, will ultimately fit into the workplace culture and in turn how the network will nurture that creativity as a way to secure that person’s long-term loyalty. It does no good, after all, to hire a qualified candidate who will not fit into the established workplace culture and will be soon gone or, even worse, unhappy and unproductive. A happy and engaged workforce, conversely, networked through social media, becomes the business’s best promoters.

Finally, brand marketing and management allows a company the chance to look into the mirror, to define and focus on legitimate and real-time reasons why their company is a challenging and rewarding environment that should attract and keep the best possible talent. Corporations work better when they listen to their employees (Vatsa, 2016). The brand becomes the company’s most valuable recruitment tool as well as its identity, its encompassing mission, its pledge to its employees and management teams, and as such represents the ever-evolving, cooperative, and robust nature of its workplace.

Terms & Concepts

Brand: In human resources, the process of creating a signature positive reputation for a company within its field.

Head-Hunters: In human resources, a company representative hired to vet job applicants and scout the field and competitors for promising talent to recruit.

Platform: A linked complex of related information databases.

Resume: An organized presentation of a job applicant’s relevant work experience and education.

Sexy: In marketing, a term meaning to make something or some product or service appealing and hip.

Tipping Point: In decision-making, the factor and/or impact event credited with determining the eventual decision.

Top Talent: A term applied to the most promising applicants in a field, most often defined by education, expertise, and/or experience.

Workplace Culture: The overall impression and/or defining characteristics of a specific work environment, an entire business ,or a department or division within that business.

Bibliography

Biswas, M., & Suar, D. (2016). Antecedents and consequences of employer branding. Journal of Business Ethics, 136(1), 57–72. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=116146299&site=ehost-live

Ghadeer, M. (2016). Employer branding: What constitutes “an employer of choice?” Journal of Business & Retail Management Research, 11(1), 154–166. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=119494341&site=ehost-live

Reis, G. G., & Braga, B. M. (2016). Employer attractiveness from a generational perspective: Implications for employer branding. Revista De Administração, 51(1), 103–116. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=119836858&site=ehost-live

Robertson, A., & Khatibi, A. (2013). The influence of employer branding on productivity-related outcomes of an organization. IUP Journal of Brand Management, 10(3), 17–32. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=91675188&site=ehost-live

Sengupta, A., Bamel, U., & Singh, P. (2015). Value proposition framework: Implications for employer branding. Decision, 42(3), 307–323. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=109091781&site=ehost-live

Vatsa, M. (2016). Leveraging employer branding for organizational success. Review of Management 6, (1/2), 9–13. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=116834394&site=ehost-live

Verma, D., & Ahmad, A. (2016). Employer branding: The Solution to create a talented workforce. IUP Journal of Business Management, 13(1), 42–56. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=114187526&site=ehost-live

Wilska, E. (2014). Employer branding as an effective tool in acquiring talent. Journal of Positive Management, 5(3), 46–54. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=100713372&site=ehost-live

Suggested Reading

Blasco- López, M. F., Rodríguez-Tarodo, A., & Fernández-Lores, S. (2014). Employer branding: Estudio multinacional sobre la construcción de la marca del empleador. Universia Business Review, (44), 34–53. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=100197992&site=ehost-live

Kaur, P., Sharma, S., Kaur, J., & Sharma, S. K. (2015). Using social media for employer branding and talent management: An experiential study. IUP Journal of Brand Management, 12(2), 7–20. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=108447382&site=ehost-live

Kucherov, D., & Zamulin, A. (2016). Employer branding practices for young talents in IT companies (Russian experience). Human Resource Development International, 19(2), 178–188. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=113744308&site=ehost-live

Moseley, R. (2014). Employer Branding Management: Practical Lessons from the world’s leading employers. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Ting, C. (2011). Employer branding and employee-life-cycle: How to become an attractive employer. Saarbrucken, Germany: AV Akademikerverlag.