Employer Branding (EB)
Discovered by Barrow, S circa 1990 and extracted from the importance of corporate brands
- Atomic number: 731
- Melting point: High
- Density: Hard
- Boiling point: Low
- Ionization Potential: Huge
- Electronegativity: None
Employer Branding is a complex mass of components defined by the Corporate Research Forum (2005) as ‘the combination of factors that differentiate an organisation in its capacity as an employer, and that shape the perceptions of its past, present and future employees’.
So, what does this combination look like? What is your organisation’s Employer Brand? The People in Business organisation founded by Simon Barrow identified 12 key prototype factors of an employer brand:
- Vision & leadership
- Recruitment & induction
- Policies & values
- Development
- Fairness & cooperation
- Performance management
- Corporate personality
- Working environment
- External reputation
- Reward System
- Communication
- Post-employment
Whilst these form the overall structure of the employer brand and further detailed experiments have resulted in a recognised ‘employer brand mix’ (Barrow and Mosley, 2005), the outcome is still complex. Simplifying the process and removing the detail will help position EB as a vital element in the recruitment communications periodic table.
In its simplest form, EB is about corporate reputation. Corporate reputation according to Martin and Hetrick (2006) is about the trust and confidence of stakeholders in an organization to act in their best interests. Davies et al. (2003) identify these stakeholders as follows:
The reputation of the organisation influences, and is influenced by, all stakeholders in different measures dependent on a wide range of variables from size to sector, product to positioning and service to scope. So, if we change the question, ‘What is your Employer Brand?’ to ‘What is your reputation as an employer amongst your stakeholders?’ EB takes on a much simpler form.
The corporate reputation chain below shows how reputation in the form of image and identity affect the commercial effectiveness of the organisation internally and externally, where identity is how the company sees itself (internal); image is how stakeholders see the company external.
The Corporate Reputation Chain adapted from Davies et al. 2003
Putting reputation at the heart of employer branding allows us to answer the critical questions for your organisation of how we measure it, how we manage them, how we communicate it to your stakeholders and how, as recruitment communications experts we develop the chemistry of your Employer Brand?
To find out more...
References
Barrow, S & Mosley, R (2005) The employer brand: bringing the best of brand management to people at work, Wiley & Sons, England.
Corporate Resesrach Forum (2005) Meeting Summary: The employer brand and employee engagement.
Davies, G et al. (2003) Corporate reputation and competitiveness, Routledge: London.
Martin, G. & Hetrick, S. (2006) Corporate reputations, branding and managing people: A strategic approach to HR, Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.