What is traditional employer branding? It is an extension to recruitment marketing with an attempt to amplify the message to get more applications and better applicants to current and very near future openings.
In this episode of the Building a Modern Employer Brand -podcast, I’ll pinpoint six typical characteristics of traditional employer branding that seem to repeat themselves.
Traditional employer branding can be limiting in the (digital) information era
Back in the days, when I first started in HR and HR marketing, these six characteristics were pretty much the only options how to go about. Much has changed since we entered the digital information era. And as a result, in my opinion, continuing to “employer brand” in these old ways is no longer as effective as it could be.
The birth of social media, digital marketing, the speed of digitalization and the ability to search, browse, get answers and buy online, when convenient to you has become the new normal. As consumers we expect so much more, faster and at our convenience.
Talents are consumers too. These mega trends in the consumer behavior impact talent behavior the same.
- Job marketing is mostly advertising, and advertising is considered mostly spamming today.
- Nobody likes to be spammed.
- Everyone loves to be educated, inspired and entertained by content relevant to their interests and of immediate value to them.
- The growing information noise online makes it more and more difficult to get people’s attention. Like GaryVee says: “Attention is currency”.
- Talents are not exactly googling about your needs. But they are surely googling for their needs.
To summarize: It is no longer about you or me, it’s about them. If you want to win in the war for talent, that is.
Podcast episode content & links
This podcast episode answers to the questions:
- What is traditional employer branding
- Why the traditional means are no longer that effective
- The most typical 6 characteristics of traditional employer branding
- A quick peak into the three types of HR marketing and how they are different
Length of this episode: 21:30 min
There is more to employer branding today
There is also more to “employer branding” today – thanks to digital marketing and social media. Back in the former days our options we pretty limited to the odd print adverts, career fairs and a career site that had a fancy people banner and a list of job posts.
Today, we are able to separate recruitment marketing, the development of employer image and the actual act of employer branding into three different types of HR marketing separated by:
- key characteristics of the target audience
- goals and impact
- the duration to efficiency of the activities
Why all ambitious growth companies should consider transitioning into modern employer branding
The modern employer branding method is not meant for or even ideal to all businesses. But it will add noticeable benefits and value to ambitious growth companies who hire a lot and regularly talent equipped with the latest skills and competencies, able to self-motivate and self-manage their work, and in general, bloom in the times of change.
- These “digital age” or digital talents network online and tend to transition to new jobs quite easily through their networks. They don’t need to read job posts or go to job boards.
- Many digital talents are also in such demand, they are head hunted to their next jobs. Again, no need to click open job posts.
- They follow and connect with other digital talents, and get to know their workplaces and companies through people and employee experiences. If they dig it, they start to follow these companies and immerse themselves in their content, messages, stories and knowledge.
- They change jobs when they are ready to, not when we need to hire, and tend to follow the tracks to people and places they already know and like.
> (opens in a new tab)”>Learn about the Strategically Ideal Talent >>
Traditional employer branding assumes talents are already fond of you
Hands up, if you are automatically interested, eager and inspired to consume corporate talk about a random company, their needs, their expectations and their greatness?
While there are companies in the world so legendary, so inspiring and so influential that they have gained their own talent fan clubs, could you say the same about your business today?
In my opinion, traditional employer branding assumes talents are already fond of your business. Majority of employers are not that lucky.
But they could be.
This is especially important for businesses who are expected to grow and scale fast. These types of businesses are unlikely to afford the shortage of the digital talent to slow down or stop their growth goals.
And for those companies, I developed the modern employer branding method.
> (opens in a new tab)”>Find the Employer Branding -book mentioned in this episode >>
About Building a Modern Employer Brand -podcast
Building a Modern Employer Brand-podcast is a weekly podcast bringing you a modern breath of air into HR marketing and employer branding.
This podcast is dedicated to all modern growth companies and modern employer branding practitioners who want to really influence their talent audiences and add measurable value to growing and scaling modern businesses with HR marketing and employer branding.
This podcast is sponsored Employee Experience Agency Emine and hosted by Susanna Rantanen.