Every business has a brand. A look, a tone, a consistent message that makes your business identifiable in a sea of competitors. Anyone who’s ever worked in public relations or marketing knows to achieve a cohesive brand, there are rules and guidelines to follow — a reference manual to define your visual identity, tone of voice, key messages, etc. But how many businesses have an employment brand?
An employment brand is similar in purpose to an organization’s overall brand. Both exist to set the organization apart from competitors. The employment brand focuses on how the organization stands out in relation to recruiting, hiring, and retaining employees.
How do you develop an employment brand?
The first step in developing an employment brand is for the organization, particularly the HR team, to reflect on new hires and long-tenured employees who have successfully integrated into the organization and represent it well. What makes your organization a place they enjoy working for? What keeps them working there?
That’s where Blue Wagon started recently with one of its health care clients. We looked at employees through the lens of their job function: trained clinical staff, entry-level front-line staff, and support staff. What is meaningful to one of these groups is not necessarily meaningful to employees in other roles. For this particular client, clinicians valued how the client handled billable hours, while entry level new hires valued consistent but flexible schedules. Further and still differently, support staff valued emphasis on career growth paths. Where values overlap across job functions is where we find the organization’s employment brand attributes.
Why create an employment brand?
First, it’s a great tool for recruiters to identify candidates who will be successful in your organization and be a good “fit.” Defining a unique employment brand can help recruiters and hiring managers focus on candidates who can fill vacancies for the long term and who will become positive internal brand advocates, especially in environments where there is high turnover or churn.
Secondly, an employment brand can help all parties involved in recruiting and hiring align in how they present the organization. At the end of the day, just like a brand unifies an organization in the public space, an employment brand does so in the hiring space.
Last but certainly not least, your employment brand is a great way to demonstrate the importance of consistent communication within an organization and to set the expectation of unified priorities.
For Blue Wagon’s client, churn is an issue across the industry and something our client wanted to reduce. By helping the organization define its employment brand, we helped our client, a multi-site health care provider with a lot of remote support staff, bring continuity to recruiting to echo the consistency it strives for in its treatment centers.
Does your organization have an employment brand? If Blue Wagon Group can help you reflect on your recruiting challenges, we’d love to speak with you.