What if you were awarded as the Employer Branding Professional of the Year? Wouldn’t that be pretty amazing for you, your career and life, too?
Today, I’m going to introduce you to our own star, Nora Nykänen, who works with me and my husband here at Employer Branding Agency Emine in Helsinki, Finland.
Nora was recently given this outstanding award at the Magnet Awards Finland as a testament to her career and professional growth in employer branding.
As her employer and colleague, I could not be more proud! I wanted you to meet her, too!
In this week’s and next week’s episodes of the Building a Modern Employer Branding podcast, Nora and I will discuss her career and growth as an employer branding professional of the year.
We’ll discuss how working with the Magnetic Employer Branding Method™️ has not only helped many of our customers take employer branding to new heights but has also provided Nora and our other employees in the past with a systematic structure for developing and growing as a top-notch employer branding professional.
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Who is Nora Nykänen, The Employer Branding Professional of the Year 2024?
In the first segment, Nora shares who she is and her backstory to employer branding career.
What is specific about Nora’s career journey to becoming an awarded employer branding professional of the year is how it epitomises us at Emine building our modern employer brand and The Candidate Journey of the Information Era™️ between us here at Employer Branding Agency Emine and Nora.
Everything started several years—five to be exact—before she joined our team. Nora explains how her candidate journey with us started with me winning her sustainable attention in 2017, when she was working in a well-known Finnish consumer brand company.
She attended a training on recruitment marketing and employer branding on social media I gave this company and tells us how she was immediately inspired and excited about my new employer branding concept and method (Magnetic Employer Branding Method™️ / Vaikuttava TyönantajabrändiⓇ).
Nora tells how she then started to listen to my podcast as her weekly routine and platform for educating herself as an aspiring employer branding professional. This phase grew and strengthened her awareness of Susanna as a leading employer branding expert and of Emine as a potential place to work in the future.
Employer Brand Dating us Before Joining Emine
At Employer Branding Agency Emine, we have a unique talent acquisition style.
Because we want to remain a boutique agency, we don’t hire very often, but we welcome interested talent prospects to connect with us—our tribe—so that we can start EB-dating.
We literally date our prospects, first casually, then more seriously, until both parties feel it’s time to call it official.
Nora explains in this episode how and for how long, too, we dated her before making it official.
The dating part is how we move our relevant candidate prospects forward on their Candidate Journeys with us. Those with whom, we become more exclusive, enter the employer brand affinity phase that eventually leads to value-conversion of an employment without recruitment campaign costs involved.
This specific way for us also strengthens the bond between us and our future employees, grows their awareness of our business, culture and ways of work and decreases the chances of expensive and sad hiring mistakes.
In this segment, Nora explains the value she received when we dated, which made sense for her to stay engaged with us. This is one concrete example of leveraging the Magnetic Employer Branding Method™️ to keep your target audience members engaged and motivated to pursue the Candidate Journey with your organisation until both parties are ready to talk careers.
The Most Beneficial Aspects of Our Method to Nora During Growing into an Employer Branding Professional of the Year
In this segment, Nora and I discuss the impact our game-changing method has had on her and her career in employer branding.
She notes how the most significant thing for her has been the unique lesson she learned early on about the significance of role reversal. With this, Nora refers to the ‘Talent is the Hero’ and ‘Employer positions as their trusted adviser and guide to a better life.’
In our experience, the concept of ‘It’s not about you; it’s about them’ is key to successful employer branding. No one can be bothered to listen to someone talking endlessly about themselves. And, with employer branding being such a long game, you simply must adopt this role reversal to sustain that vital attention required to engage passive job seekers with your organisation until they are ready to consider new career opportunities.
When you succeed in this, you have a competitive edge over your competition for the same talent.
Nora continues to explain, how the next biggest learnings she’s had as she has grown into the employer branding professional of the year under the influence of the Magnetic Employer Branding Method™️ are her learnings on business storytelling, the content creation process but also recognising and measuring employer branding value.
She also mentioned how my particular leadership style of mentoring has helped her to grow her confidence as an employer branding professional and emphasise the importance of staying curious to constant learning and educating.
How Structure and Process-Thinking Support Growth and Success
In this segment, we discuss the value of working in such a structured manner our modern employer branding method provides us with.
Both Nora and I agree how it makes content and social media marketing so much easier and more efficient and makes it easy to recognise areas or tasks we don’t need to or should not spend time and other resources on.
Nora shares a little insight about one of our clients who have been exceptionally committed into the structured manner and that has already returned many value for this organisation.
Nora’s Advice to You Considering or Already Building a Successful Career in Employer Branding
In the final segment of this two-part-episode, Nora shares three tips based on her own experiences as someone who has built a successful career in employer branding and received that bonus: The award for the Employer Branding Professional of the Year.
These three tips are:
#1 Role in recruiting makes a really sound base for a career in employer branding
- You get the important outside-in perspective vital in successful employer branding.
- The insight you learn – want it or not – about the key challenges and strengths of the organisation as an employer is one of the best advantages you can carry to employer branding.
- However, employer branding is not for all recruiters. If you love the short game, the fast results, and the spring of recruiting keeps you going, the long employer branding game will likely not keep you motivated.
#2 Staying curious and adopting a lifelong learning mindset and way of work
- Multiple elements in employer branding require keeping your professional skills updated. Primarily these have to do with marketing and especially social media marketing and your specific talent market insight.
- Another area is sharpening consistently your skills in becoming a great communicator.
- A third vital area is staying updated on business needs and strategic emphasis that changes year by year so that what you do in employer branding delivers value to the business.
- “Success doesn’t happen overnight”, says Nora and means not in employer branding and not as an employer branding professional.
#3 Make it and keep it fun
- Nora and I have learned how important it is to make the routines of systematic employer branding feel fun.
- Grinding in employer branding with passion can become tedious and stressful or fun. Which one do you prefer?
Thanks for joining us on Nora’s amazing journey of becoming the Employer Branding Professional of the Year!
We have a couple more episodes in the pipeline for you before this podcast goes on a little hiatus while I finish writing my book on the Magnetic Employer Branding Method™️.
How to connect with Nora on social media?
Nora and I behind Emine’s Instagram and LinkedIn >
If you want to work with us as a client, contact us here >
If you want to start EB-dating us, you can connect with us either on LinkedIn, Instagram, or both, and when you are ready to let us know, please send us a direct message. Don’t keep your infatuation a secret from us. 💓
P.S Come back next week for part 2 on this episode!