What if you are unemployer branding and you don’t even realize?
What does unemployer branding look like and why does it hurt your employer branding career and the company who you are supposed to be employer branding?
In this episode of the Building a Modern Employer Brand -podcast, we address the monster in the room: unemployer branding your place to work when you were meant to be employer branding.
The 3 tell-tell signs of unemployer branding
#1 You see it as a campaign or a project when it should be an on-going delivery of a promised brand experience
If you thought employer branding is a campaign or a project you could not be more wrong.
Unfortunately, that’s what it looks like in most organizations.
If you take an internal orientation, it usually looks like an EVP project.
If the outlook is external, it looks like marketing collateral created for a recruitment campaign.
Employer Branding is neither.
It starts with consistently clarifying your employer image in the eyes of your target audience, continues with an on-going delivery of a distinct employer brand experience and leads into returning intended employer brand value to the business.
What you probably don’t yet know about employer branding?
Transitioning your mind from recruiting to employer branding
#2 All the effort is put into crafting an EVP
While the Employee Value Proposition for sure can add value in employer branding it isn’t the most important element in your employer brand strategy.
In fact, your employer branding can be a huge success without an EVP.
EVP is nothing more than a summarized promise of the value what becoming employed by this company generates an individual. It equals a claim a marketing department writes down on a package of a facial cream.
Your EVP is nothing but a claim until you prove it to be true. That part keeps missing from the typical employer branding.
#3 You and your competitors share the same EVP and key words
If the other facial creams allege the same promise, it makes all of these creams commodities with plenty of substitutes. Pick anyone and you are promised to get the same benefit.
I bet, you can almost pick any EVP on your market and compare it with the next one. Regardless of how it’s being paraphrased, the promise sounds the same.
The key words used commonly in most EVP’s and in the generated marketing messages and collateral are:
- growth opportunities
- passion
- team-work
- making a difference
- innovative
- curious
- excellence
- sustainability
- equal opportunities
- diversity
- inclusiveness
Am I wrong?
Successful employer branding begins with differentiating your offer from the substitute offers.
Even if you truly were all of these and 9/10 of your staff would agree, you fail in employer branding if you choose the same words and benefits in your employer branding. Because real employer branding makes you look and sound different from other options.
Furthermore, achieving an employer brand doesn’t take place in a tagline. An employer brand is a distinctive experience I know I am likely to get each time I come to contact with your company.
What makes it an employer brand is that the other options I compare to you are not making me feel the same. I only get that unique experience with your company.
Unless your employer branding:
- makes your audience understand what sets you apart from the other options,
- that specific difference adds value to the audience then and there and
- creates an experience that will be repeated 9/10 times the person comes to contact with your company,
you are not employer branding. You are unemployer branding.
Listen to episode 98 in the Building a Modern Employer Brand podcast with Susanna Rantanen
In this episode:
- What does unemployer branding look like?
- Why is it such a huge problem?
- How to stop unemployer branding?
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