This Building a Modern Employer Brand podcast episode tackles employer branding for modern leaders head-on.
I’m giving you three strategies to stop you from struggling with finding and keeping the talents you need to meet the expectations set for you as a leader.
Take notes, chat with your HR partner and start tackling the key talent-related struggles you have keeping you up at night worrying about meeting your business goals.
You’re in the right place if you’re a business leader grappling with these issues.
If you are an HR Business Partner for a modern leader losing their sleep over retention and attraction, this is for you as well.
Modern employer branding for modern leaders
We’ll explore the crucial role of investing in and reinforcing strategic employer branding and why it’s essential for leaders to align their business strategy with their HR and employer branding teams.
Plus, we’ll discuss how taking a data-driven approach can not only prove the value of employer branding but also help your company attract and retain top talent.
Stick around, because, by the end of this episode, you’ll have three actionable tips to guide your HR and employer branding teams to secure the necessary resources for employer branding and recruitment marketing.
If you are new to this podcast, my name is Susanna Rantanen. I am a seasoned strategic employer branding expert, executive-level advisor and content & social media marketing coach for professionals struggling with winning and keeping the talents a business needs to succeed.
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Applying talent marketing strategies in a competitive manner
As a modern leader, you must separate employer branding from recruitment campaigns.
Recruitment campaigns are there to help you seal the deal with those available job seekers who match your expectations of success for the open role.
Employer branding aims to grow demand and convert potential employees to your recruitment funnel while raising your employer awareness and building employer brand affinity for the company.
Focusing only on recruitment campaigns is a mistake if you operate in a heavily saturated talent market and struggle with retention and talent acquisition.
Focusing only on recruitment campaigns is a mistake if you operate in a heavily saturated talent market and struggle with retention and talent acquisition.
Susanna Rantanen
This is equivalent to trying to cold call as an unknown business in a market where your competitors are market leaders with strong brands and a very loyal customer base.
You can burn money for your campaigns, as much as you care for. But at the end of the day, your basic career offer is nothing short of a commodity. And you’ll find yourself paying much more for lesser loyalty and commitment.
You can burn money for campaigns as much as you care for. But at the end of the day, your basic career offer is nothing short of a commodity. And you’ll find yourself paying much more for lesser loyalty and commitment.
Susanna Rantanen
Why should you care about employer branding as a modern leader?
You should care deeply because high employment costs with little commitment and loyalty lead to short employment cycles, unhappy customers and little profit.
There are essential talent strategies you, as a modern leader, need to know about and apply to your advantage.
Let’s start with them.
Modern Employer Branding Strategy #1: The Social Recruiting Strategy
The more experienced the talent or, the more competitive the talent market, you are unlikely to win at the last leg of the talent acquisition race unless those available job seekers already know you, trust your leadership capabilities and want you as their leader.
Ask yourself: How well does the external talent market know me? Not the company, but me as a business and people leader? Have I secured my position on the market as the coach every winning player wants to have?
If not, there is a very simple strategy to change this. This is called a social recruiting strategy.
Ask yourself: How well does the external talent market know me? Not the company, but me as a business and people leader? Have I secured my position on the market as the coach every winning player wants to have?
Susanna Rantanen
Your employer branding team is there to help you adopt and adapt to a strategic social recruiting plan that helps you to become known as the boss your target audience truly wants.
This simple strategy is executed with regular (and planned) social media posts from your profile, building trust in your leadership skills and putting transparency into your leadership values.
This is a strategy you don’t have to manage on your own. You will need a plan, maybe some social media marketing training and a guide who coaches you to build the necessary routines for social recruiting.
The benefits of A Social Recruiting Strategy
The benefits of a social recruiting strategy are:
- Growing employer awareness of the company you represent.
- Growing demand for your roles and recruitment needs.
- Building you a professional network of potential future employees and customers.
- Converting your audience into leads, clients and new employees.
Imagine you have a social network of contacts working in your line of business within reach of your social fingers. Allowing you to reach out to professionals matching your hiring criteria and invite them for lunch or a coffee, and talk about their career development plans and your hiring needs.
Imagine this without the need to start that lengthy public recruitment process taking ages. Unless you want to limit your success even more and create tons of bad will resulting in lousy candidate experiences and a bad employer reputation.
Modern Employer Branding Strategy #2: A Data-Driven Recruitment Marketing & Lead Generation Strategy
The data-driven recruitment marketing and recruitment lead generation strategy aligns with the business strategy.
This could be for the entire business, a specific business unit or a division, depending on the company’s size and hiring needs. It benefits especially organisations that do not have resources for employer branding separately but recruit actively.
The data-driven approach ensures the recruitment marketing strategy aligns seamlessly with your broader business goals and tackles those talent acquisition needs and issues the business needs for successful growth.
While the social recruiting strategy is managed and operated by you as the modern leader and supported by marketing & comms, this strategy is driven by talent acquisition and supported by business unit leaders.
Most value will be driven from this strategy when recruitment is seen as a process with each hiring round accelerating the success of the next one instead of separate ad hoc projects.
Our Instant Employer Brand Accelerator™️ program gives your talent acquisition the required systematic approach, templates and coaching to develop this data-driven strategy and process for your organisation. And in just 12 weeks!
I’m happy to talk to you more about this powerful approach to strategic recruitment marketing.
While this is driven by talent acquisition, they need your support and resource allocation to help you successfully hire for your business and team.
Modern Employer Branding Strategy #3: A Data-Driven Employer Branding Strategy
The third strategy for modern leaders is the data-driven employer branding strategy.
What puts this employer branding strategy to the edge of employer branding is the data-driven approach.
When the employer branding strategy is measurable, and the execution is regularly followed up, you can ensure your investment in modern employer branding is looked after, and success is driven month to month.
When the employer branding strategy is measurable, and the execution is regularly followed up, you can ensure your investment in modern employer branding is looked after, and success is driven month to month.
Susanna Rantanen
The difference between the data-driven recruitment marketing strategy and this one is the following:
While the data-driven recruitment marketing strategy aims for a quick turn-around from active job seekers, the data-driven employer branding strategy builds long-term employer brand value and competitive advantage.
With accelerated employer brand value comes the opportunity to differentiate from competitors with a unique point of view and value proposition leading to concrete benefits such as:
- Winning the most talented professionals over the competition.
- Accessing a larger and better-matching talent pool than you will during a recruitment campaign.
- Driving transformation and change internally, resulting in better engagement and commitment and improved retention.
- Building a talent pipeline leads to faster time to hire and decreases direct recruitment costs.
This is how we prefer to work with our clients at Employer Branding Agency Emine, supported by our proprietary Magnetic Employer Branding Method™️.
Which strategy best fits your struggles as a modern business leader?
What modern business leaders should do to empower HR to deliver better ROI from recruitment marketing and employer branding?
As an experienced business consultant, I don’t see enough business leaders empowering their HR to deliver better ROI from recruitment marketing and employer branding.
That’s why I wanted to bring up three key tips modern leaders should provide to their HR and employer branding teams.
Tip 1: Help your HR and talent acquisition recognise and drive the expected ROI from both activities
You may be surprised how rarely HR and talent acquisition measure the impact of their work. The reason is most often that they are not expected nor supported to set up measurable goals. Without measurable goals, you are unable to follow up and drive results.
As a business leader, I assume you are familiar with driving results, so do yourself a favour and help HR align talent acquisition and retention goals with the business strategy.
And don’t leave it at the top HR level but go where it matters the most to you: talent acquisition and employer branding.
Without sufficient retention and attraction, you cannot meet your goals. So, help yourself to succeed by coaching HR and talent acquisition on how to work strategically.
Tip 2: Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration between functions that you need to meet your own business goals
Encourage and invite collaboration between HR, talent acquisition, employer branding and your business division, function or team.
Discover how cross-functional teams can lead to more effective talent strategies. You and your team are their customers. They can help you better meet your goals when they know your business and people well enough.
Guide them to use their knowledge to help you make better decisions instead of gate-keeping you too much.
Call for an advisory role instead of a policy maker’s role.
Check out last week’s episode with CEO and former Wall Street C-level executive Tammy Alvarez. In this episode, she shares her advice from a management perspective on how HR professionals build trust in management.
Tip 3: Allocate Resources Strategically, not randomly
Gain insights from HR and talent acquisition into allocating your talent resources effectively, ensuring your talent planning and development, employer branding and talent acquisition efforts receive the attention and budget they deserve.
What do you think?
Let’s recap.
In this episode, we explored the crucial role of talent marketing and branding in modern businesses, emphasising the need for HR and talent acquisition to invest in this strategic initiative and align it with the overall business strategy. When approached consistently, I gave you three essential talent marketing & branding strategies that deliver great value for your business unit or team.
We’ve also highlighted the power of a data-driven approach to prove the value of your marketing efforts with HR to improve retention and talent acquisition success.
Instead of one-off campaigns, you will get more value back when your talent acquisition is planned strategically, with each round accelerating success in the following. This requires both you and your wallet and your partners in HR and talent acquisition.
By helping your HR and talent acquisition implement the three actionable tips I suggested, you can build trust at the executive level and with whom you report and allocate the right resources to propel your talent success further.
Ok, that’s all for this week, my friends!
Stay tuned for more insightful episodes on mastering the employer branding edge!
If you found this podcast valuable, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your network.
Together, we can help modern leaders transform their organisations through strategic employer branding.
Until next week!
Moi moi!