Employment Brand Integration

Employment Brand Integration
Leveraging your brand for maximum impact

Branding your organization as “a great place to work” has become mandatory for any strategic staffing organization.  Identifying employment brand attributes, brand opportunities, brand barriers and the unique employment value proposition typically requires time, resources and investment. Employment brands are also a highly visible initiative, often drawing feedback and attention from executives and the C-suite. Once you have gone through the research, strategy meetings, brand development and approval process, you may be left wondering, “Now what?”

The next step is to extend and integrate your employment brand message strategically and holistically. Whether you are working with internal resources or your employment branding agency partner, the following brand integration strategies will help you achieve a positive outcome:

1. Employment Brand Ambassador Training
When you launch a new employment brand, it’s essential to train and communicate with key stakeholders on your new messaging. Unless you work at a very small company, you’ll find it nearly impossible to train all employees. But if you identify specific employment brand ambassadors across the organization, you can build a “train the trainer” type of program. Typical employment brand ambassadors include recruiters and recruiting leaders, key executives, key hiring managers and representatives from your internal communications/marketing department.

During the employment brand ambassador training, you will want to convey the definition of an employment brand, the reasons why branding for employment is important, and the process you followed for creating your organization’s employment brand so that all participants have a 360-degree understanding of the strategy. You’ll have the opportunity to unveil your new employment brand and establish the role each participant plays in carrying out the brand. You’ll also be able to share the brand themes, positioning statement, attributes and the visual concept that will represent your employment brand.

2. Employment Brand Guidelines
Creating an employment brand usage guide—and reviewing it with your brand ambassadors—is crucial to ensuring that everyone markets your employment brand as intended. Usage guides include approved color palates, fonts, photos, images, etc. If your recruiting team is decentralized and sources through media independently, you’ll also need to include guidelines for print and online media.

3. Recruiter’s Tool Kit
The recruiter’s tool kit encompasses all of the tools your recruiting team will need to engage candidates. This may include display exhibits, e-communication, direct mail, brochures and collateral, video, giveaways and flyers.  By conducting a recruiter’s roundtable and identifying a priority list, you can review your current materials and determine which are most used/useful. Begin by updating the most critical pieces, and then create a phased in project plan. As you continue to build out your tool kit, be sure to consider target audience, shelf life and potential impact. If your budget is tight, it’s best to focus on interactive and Web-based tools that can be inexpensively altered and do not require printing expenses.

4. Corporate Career Site
The corporate career site is, arguably, the most important tool for employment brand integration. A successful career site weaves together the employment brand messaging, imagery, tone and positioning as early as possible in the brand integration process. Sites such as JohnDeere.jobs and SUPERVALU.jobs are great examples of how the employment brand messaging fuels the overall career site. Key considerations for brand integration on the career site include target audience (campus vs. mid-career), job family branding, employee testimonials and the overall candidate experience.

5. Onboarding
Successful onboarding communication for new hires reinforces the recruitment message and employment brand they received as candidates and during the hiring process. You’ll be able to integrate your employment brand messaging through various touch points for new hires, including the welcome website, offer packet, new hire collateral, new hire presentations/orientation and recruiter emails.

6. Employee Communication
Another effective way of reinforcing the recruitment message is to integrate the employment brand throughout the employee’s entire talent lifecycle. While the messaging may evolve slightly, depending on the communication, the employment brand itself will remain the same. By effectively communicating your employment brand to your employees, you’ll positively impact retention, engagement, employee referrals and overall brand acceptance. Ideally, your employees will fully accept your brand and be extensions of the brand itself, living your message every day.  Other useful venues for integrating the employment brand themes and building awareness and pride include internal message campaigns, the intranet and employee newsletters.

7. Media
Today’s world of media fragmentation is a challenge for brand marketers. Candidates and consumers come into contact with messages through multiple media sources every day. Maintaining brand integrity despite media fragmentation and the transparency it creates is challenging, but it can be done. By providing recruiters and media partners with approved media branding for specific executions—online job templates, text-only postings, banners and rich media, print media, video and podcasts, text messages, email templates, search and social media promotions, etc.—you’ll be able to evolve the brand to fit any target audience.

With the help of this brand integration plan, you’ll get off to a great start marketing your employment brand message. The most important rule to remember is this: your brand is only as strong as your marketing strategy. Take every opportunity to reinforce your brand message with your potential candidates.