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Employer branding success depends on coordinated action throughout the organization. An employer brand should work within the broader strategic hierarchy, as shown in Figure 2-1.

© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

FIGURE 2-1: The integrated strategy model.

This illustration of corporate brand and business strategy places employer brand strategy at the intersection between human resources (HR) and talent management and marketing, because employer brand strategy is part of all three:

❯❯ Corporate brand: Your employer brand must reflect the corporate and customer brand promises and ambitions of your company.

❯❯ HR and talent: Your employer brand must support the kind of talent capabilities required for the organization to compete effectively, and it must align with the way HR and talent management operate within the organization.

❯❯ Marketing: Marketing efforts must reinforce the corporate, customer, and employer brand while eliminating any confusion or conflict among the three.

Ideally, line management, HR management, and marketing management are in complete alignment, but organizations operate in an imperfect world. For this reason, employer brand strategy often plays a reconciliatory role between these different stakeholder groups to help maximize the effectiveness and coherence of all three.

In the following sections, we explain how to position employer branding in the organization to optimize success.

Aligning with the corporate brand

The term corporate brand is generally used to describe the overall reputation of the company, as opposed to its more specific reputation as an employer. In addition to finding your fit within the strategic hierarchy, you need to clarify your place within the brand hierarchy, as shown in Figure 2-2.

© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

FIGURE 2-2: The integrated brand model.

From a management perspective, the most discernible manifestation of the corporate brand is its visual identity – the corporate logo, colors, fonts, and design elements used to present a consistent face to the world. (For more about this aspect of corporate branding, see Chapter 5.) Many companies also try to define some of the more intangible components of identity, including the following:

❯❯ Purpose: The organization’s reason for existence beyond making money – what the organization does. Google provides a great example of purpose: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

❯❯ Vision: The organization’s current end goal – what the organization is striving to achieve within a given time frame, “a dream with a deadline.” A powerful historical example of this is Microsoft’s original company vision (when access to computers was still highly limited): “To put a computer on every desk in every home.”

❯❯ Values: The organization’s guiding principles – how the organization does what it does. A few examples from Southwest Airlines are “Work hard,” “Have FUN,” and “Treat others with respect.”

If your organization has a defined purpose, vision, and values, these statements provide an important starting point for defining your employment offer and employer brand strategy, with clear alignment between the company’s core beliefs and the more specific proposition you’re setting out for current and potential employees.

Don’t let the lack of a clear statement of purpose, vision, and values hold up the process of defining and promoting your employer brand. Question the leadership team on the medium- to long-term direction of the company, and their views on the kind of culture they believe the company should promote internally to achieve these longer-term goals.

Start your employer brand development with a clear understanding of the corporate brand and the parameters within which the employer brand needs to function to ensure consistency within the overall brand hierarchy. Your organization’s employer value proposition (EVP) must align with the organization’s core statement of beliefs – its purpose, vision, and values. See Chapter 4 for detailed guidance on how to align these core statements of belief with your EVP.

TAKING AN INSIDE-OUT APPROACH

In Built to Last, James Collins and Jerry Porras shared the results from their study of 18 enduringly successful companies, commonly referred to by other CEOs as “visionary,” including P&G, American Express, Boeing, Walt Disney, and HP. One of the clearest characteristics they found within these companies was a very clear sense of purpose and shared values:

Like the fundamental ideals of a great nation, core ideology in a visionary company is a set of basic precepts that plant a fixed stake in the ground: “This is who we are, this is what we stand for.” Like the guiding principles embodied in the American Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident …”) and echoed 87 years later in the Gettysburg Address (“A nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”).

From a corporate brand perspective, this core ideology can also be described as the organization’s core proposition. This ideally combines the organization’s statement of purpose and its core values, which Collins and Porras define as follows:

Purpose: The organization’s fundamental reasons for existence beyond just making money – a perpetual guiding star on the horizon; not to be confused with specific goals or business strategies.

Core Values: The organization’s essential and enduring tenets – a small set of general guiding principles; not to be compromised for financial gain or short-term expediency.

You can find plenty of other definitions of purpose and value, but from our perspective, these are the clearest and most useful. Employer brand development should always start with a clear understanding of corporate purpose and values, because these core elements of the corporate ethos should be reflected throughout everything the organization says and does.

Aligning with the customer brand

Maintaining consistency with the customer brand depends on how closely the corporate and customer brands are associated:

❯❯ Corporate and customer brands are identical or nearly identical. In many organizations the corporate brand name is carried by the company’s products and services, as is the case with Apple, Shell, Vodafone, and Deloitte.

❯❯ The corporate brand name is carried by a leading product. In some cases, the company name is carried by the leading product or service within a wider product portfolio (for example, L’Oréal, Coca-Cola, and Ferrero).

❯❯ The corporate brand name is loosely, if at all, associated with products. The corporate brand name may not be used directly in naming any of the company’s products or services, as is the case with Unilever and P&G.

After recognizing the relationship between your organization’s corporate and customer brands, you’re ready to start thinking about how closely you want to align your employer brand with the existing brand associations.

Aligning your employer brand with existing brand associations

When corporate and customer brands overlap to some degree, start with an understanding of how the products and services are perceived and the kind of brand associations the customer brand marketing team is trying to promote. Then decide how closely your organization’s employer brand should be associated with its existing corporate and customer brand identities.

To build an employer brand that’s closely associated with your organization’s corporate and customer brand identities, develop a relationship with the customer brand marketing team to agree how you can support each other in building a brand reputation that works for both employees and customers.

Your employer brand reputation inevitably reflects the customer brand. For example, L’Oréal is widely known for its female beauty products, and inevitably its employer brand is generally more attractive to women than to men. Vodafone’s customer brand campaign “Power to You” inevitably shapes expectations of employee empowerment.

Diverging from existing brand associations

If your employees have needs that differ from those of your customers, create an EVP, as explained in Chapter 4. The EVP draws focus to the attributes of your organization that are most relevant to the talent you’re recruiting. Identify which brand attributes the customer and employer brands can and should share. For example, at McDonald’s, certain brand associations are shared between customers and employees, while others are not:

❯❯ Family feel: Shared by customers and employees

❯❯ Low prices: Valued by customers, but likely to discourage candidates

❯❯ Future focused: Valued by employees, but neutral for customers

When envisioning an employer brand, be prepared to break away from an existing brand identity that’s likely to discourage targeted applicants. For example, Citibank’s advertising line “Citi Never Sleeps” was designed to appeal to customers, but it was far less appealing from the perspective of potential candidates.

Choosing to align with a corporate or customer brand

If your organization has a corporate brand along with multiple customer brands, consider the degree to which you want to align your employer brand marketing within specific business units with the overall corporate brand or with the more immediate customer brand that those employees will be working for. For example, would candidates prefer to work for Bentley or Volkswagen (the parent company)? Would they prefer to work for Ben & Jerry’s or Unilever?

Discuss the options with your organization’s senior management team. A strong desire to build the corporate brand may influence you to align your employer brand more closely with the corporate brand. On the other hand, a desire to maintain the distinct character of individual brands within the portfolio (including strong employee identification with the customer brand) may encourage you to create a range of employer brands with the corporate employer brand playing a more supporting role.

If you choose to create a range of employer brands, consider using the corporate brand as the “management brand” for those likely to seek a wider career across the group, with the customer-facing brand playing a more dominant role in attracting and engaging local, frontline employees.

Supporting the business strategy

Business strategy is the plan an organization has in place to achieve its long-term objectives; it defines where and how an organization can best compete in the marketplace. P&G CEO A.G. Lafley suggests the two key business strategy questions are: “Where should we play? And how can we win?”

Business strategy is beyond the scope of this book, but whatever your organization’s strategy is, be very clear about the resources and capabilities the business requires to build and sustain competitive advantage. These resources and capabilities include the kind of talent profile(s) you focus on, the employment benefits you use to attract them, and what you expect from employees in return if they choose to join you.

Getting the right talent onboard

Three goals of every employer branding initiative are to attract, engage, and retain the best talent. To accomplish these goals, you first need to figure out what “best talent” means in the context of your organization. The best talent for your organization isn’t necessarily the brightest, most creative, or most highly skilled candidate. More likely, your ideal candidates possesses a unique blend of knowledge, skills, confidence, drive, imagination, integrity, and a host of other qualities that make them perfectly suited for your organization, its mission, and the positions to be filled. Employees with “the right stuff” enhance your organization’s corporate culture and contribute to its diversity. They make your organization better in all the ways that make it distinctive, and they help to reinforce its competitive advantage.

As Intel once declared, “Our rock stars aren’t like your rock stars.” We can’t provide you with a list of attributes that make the ideal candidate for your organization, but we can provide you with the guidance to conduct such an assessment of your own. In this section, you discover how to define the talent you’re targeting, so you have a clear idea of whether your current employer brand is achieving the desired results and, if it isn’t, what you need to do to make sure it does.

Determining the desired culture fit

Most organizations require a variety of different skills and competencies to meet their resourcing requirements. However, before you start segmenting your workforce into different target talent groups, identify the overall qualities you would like all your employees to share in terms of the desired culture and values. These qualities may already be clearly articulated in a statement of your company’s values. If they’re not, then consult with your leadership team to determine these baseline characteristics. Typically desired qualities fall into the following three categories:

❯❯ Collective purpose: The ability and commitment to work with others to achieve a common goal. This category includes customer focus, teamwork, respect, honesty, integrity, and communication skills.

❯❯ Mental agility: The ability to adjust one’s thinking to best meet the challenges of work. This category covers innovation, imagination, learning ability, resourcefulness, and problem solving.

❯❯ Drive: The dedication to completing a task or achieving a goal. This category includes personal initiative, passion, confidence, decisiveness, performance focus, and persistence.

Although all these qualities are certainly desirable, the important distinction between a generic target profile (good people) and the specific profile targeted by your employer brand (the right people) is differentiation. Among the generally positive qualities, which particular qualities do you emphasize? On which dimensions do you want people to overindex (outperform)? To answer this question effectively you must be clear about the culture your business most needs to achieve its strategic objectives and win in the marketplace. Here are several examples:

❯❯ Google looks for the following qualities in its ideal employee: A desire to use technology to make the world a better place, an entrepreneurial spirit for developing and selling new ideas, and “Googliness” (a mashup of passion and drive that Google describes as hard to define but easy to spot).

❯❯ In addition to the requisite professional and technical knowledge to join the world’s most prestigious consulting firm, McKinsey also looks for the following personal characteristics: an unusual blend of passion, dedication, and energy. It looks for people who are creative and insightful problem solvers, who enjoy working in teams, who have an entrepreneurial spirit, and who are interesting people outside the office.

❯❯ Helmut Schuster, the Executive Vice President of HR at BP, describes the combination of qualities BP looks for in prospective employees as

● Thinking ability, and the right level of experience in its field

● Social competence, emotional intelligence (EQ), and the ability to communicate with other people

● Drive, combined with commitment to the long-term interests of the company

❯❯ A.G. Lafley prioritized innovation as P&G’s primary competitive weapon and engine for growth. According to Lafley, “We had to redefine our social system to get everybody in the innovation game.” Although P&G continued to recruit for values, brains, accomplishment, and leadership, it shifted its determining factors for assessing cultural fit to curiosity and an entrepreneurial spirit.

Don’t assume that your organization’s existing culture is what the leadership team deems necessary to support the organization’s forward-thinking strategies. Consult the leadership team, so you’re clear about its vision and about the culture its members deem most suitable for executing that vision.

CULTURE AT THE LEGO GROUP

Effective leaders typically have a good sense of the organization’s culture. Asking them to describe it in their own words can be a powerful way of clarifying to potential candidates what makes the organization tick. The following example is from the CEO at the LEGO Group:

What a strong culture is about is people know what to do without reading a little book. You have an intuitive sense of how to do things. But that doesn’t mean there is only one solution to the same problem. That would be so untrue of the basic idea of LEGO Organization where we recognize there are many solutions to the same problem and you have to put your imagination and creativity to work to make the best solution.

One day I went off to work and my oldest son said, “Who are you going to spend time with today?” and I said, “I’m going to spend time with Kjeld, who is the owner of the LEGO Group,” and my son’s immediate reaction was, “So what are you going to build?”

The company is still very much about playing and building. We’re constantly reminded of that wonderful quote: “We don’t stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.”

As you work toward developing your EVP, keep track of the employee perspective on what the corporate culture really is. This perception can shed light on changes your organization needs to make to bring the culture more in line with what leadership decides is best for the organization.

Targeting diversity

Culture fit doesn’t imply uniformity. In addition to identifying the qualities you’d like all employees to share, also consider how you can ensure your employees represent a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives. All other qualities being equal, research suggests that a diverse workforce is superior to one lacking in diversity for several reasons: