It's expensive to hire, and even more expensive to hire the wrong people. People who take the company culture in the wrong direction. People who may be brilliant, but who fail to settle in and leave the job at the first crossroads. People who make other employees worse.

Employer branding is not only about attracting great people, but also about retaining and engaging the people you already have. In this article, we'll go through some of the key elements of such a strategy. These include:

Internal culture and brand mapping
How to Benchmark Against Competitors
Employer Value Proposition - How to create a credible and genuine culture
The Role of Management in Employer Branding
Which KPIs You Should Measure

How to Map Your Internal Culture and Brand?

To create a successful employer brand, it's crucial to start with a thorough mapping of your company's current internal culture and brand experience. This is demanding and can be somewhat painful. Especially for managers who don't tolerate honest feedback. We want to hear about everything that's good - and everything that's bad.

This phase consists of:

Surveys and feedback: Feedback from employees through anonymous surveys. This provides honest insight into their experience and expectations and gives you an understanding of what you have to work with.
Analysis of cultural traits: What are the overarching values and principles that guide decisions and behaviours in the business? How do you interact? What actual policies and processes exist? And is there a difference between the formal and informal practices among employees? Identify the cultural markers in your organisation and find out what is unique to your culture.
Internal meetings and discussions: You can't create a brand without including your employees. Organise workshops where they can share their thoughts and perspectives on the company culture. This promotes openness and engagement and helps develop a brand they will actually enjoy and feel passionate about.

Mapping your internal culture and brand gives you a solid foundation for developing a brand strategy that is authentic and resonates with your employees. It also provides a benchmark to assess whether the changes you introduce are having the desired effect.

How to Benchmark Against Competitors

Positioning is just as important in employer branding as in regular brand strategy. What are you doing differently and what can you learn from industry best practice? Benchmarking provides valuable information to identify areas where you can improve and stand out as an attractive employer.

Here are some key points to help you perform this benchmarking:

Who are you competing against? You probably know who you're competing with for customers, but do you know who you're competing with for employees?
Analyse your competitors' employer brand: What are their culture and values. Do you know anything about what it's like to work there? What do the employees say? What do they say in their job advertisements?
Gather insights: Gather insights from current and former employees of your competitors to understand their experiences and perspectives.
Compare benefits and perks: Evaluate your competitors' compensation and benefits packages against your own. This can include salary, bonuses, health insurance, pension plans and other benefits.
Look at recruitment processes: Examine how competitors attract and select their employees. This can include recruitment channels, interview processes and candidate experience.
Identify gaps and opportunities: After comparing these aspects with your own, identify gaps and see where you can do things better or differently than your competitors.

Remember, this benchmarking is not about copying others, but about looking for opportunities to stand out. Create something unique. You may be able to copy some things, but it must always be anchored and adapted internally.

Employer Value Proposition - The Starting Point for a Trustworthy and Genuine Culture

Just as a Value Proposition addresses why a customer should choose your product or service, an Employer Value Proposition (EVP) addresses why employees should choose you. It's at the heart of any successful employer branding strategy and forms the basis for building a trustworthy and genuine culture.

But how do we come up with a simple and good EVP?

Creativity with direction: Simplifying a culture down to a sentence is very, very difficult. The preparatory work that has been done must now be translated into something that is easy to understand and easy to communicate. It requires not only creativity, but creativity with direction. With impact. How can we easily move the business towards what we want to build?
Credibility: Ensure your EVP is authentic and reflects the actual experience of working in the organization. Avoid generic statements and buzz words. People need to recognize the brand.
Think storytelling early on: As you develop the EVP, you need to think about how it will be communicated. How it will be taken out into the organisation. What stories will you tell? At the same time, let's emphasise that creating an EVP and then thinking about how it will be communicated doesn't work.

A well-developed EVP based on the truth about the organisation and appealing to the right people is a critical step in building a credible, engaging work culture. It lays the foundation for attracting and retaining employees who want to contribute.

The Role of Management in Employer Branding

Management is key to creating culture and an employer brand, but let's make a distinction between senior and middle management:

Top Management (and Board)

The commitment and support of senior management is critical to strengthening the organisation's reputation as an employer. They have a strategic obligation to develop and implement a branding strategy that aligns with the organisation's overall vision and goals.

They are the primary spokespersons and ambassadors of the work culture, both internally and externally. It is senior management that embodies the "Employer". They must be credible in their communication of the vision for the company and what kind of workplace it should be.

Senior leaders also have a responsibility to be role models for the organisation's culture and values. They should know how the culture is lived and practiced in all aspects of the organisation and provide measures to encourage brand compliance. They also have a responsibility to evaluate the results of the strategy and be willing to adapt to changes and challenges that arise.

The board also has a responsibility to invest in the implementation of the employer branding strategy. Building and maintaining a positive and strong culture requires both time and resources.

Middle Management

Middle managers are often responsible for implementing the employer branding strategy at an operational level. This includes turning strategic goals and values into concrete actions and everyday life in their departments.

Communication: Middle managers are responsible for communicating values and expectations to their team members. They should clearly communicate the organisation's culture and help employees understand how they can contribute to it.
Develop employees: Empowering people to believe in the future of the business is perhaps the single most important element in creating happy and productive employees. This is super important no matter what kind of brand you're trying to create, and where great middle managers really shine.
Cultural mediators: Middle managers should set an example of how the organisation's values and culture are practiced in everyday life. Many good strategies have been destroyed by "little kings" who would rather do things their own way.
Feedback and improvement: Middle managers are close to employees and should be aware of their responsibility to provide feedback on what it is like to be an employee and how various initiatives affect the culture. This can help the organisation to continuously improve.

Employer branding works from the inside and middle managers act as the bridge between operational level employees and senior management, and they are also often the face of the hiring process. Their role in embodying the branding strategy should not be underestimated.

(Make a plan for how to involve different departments!)

Which KPIs You Should Measure

"What gets measured, gets done!" is a misquote from management guru Peter Drucker. What he actually said was "What gets measured, gets managed!". But the point is more or less the same: If you measure something, it's easier to stay focused on it and take the actions needed to succeed.

You should do the same with employer branding, and we've pulled some KPIs from HR to help you find the numbers you need to keep an eye on. If you have an HR team in your organisation, have a chat with them. They might have some numbers they think can help you manage. But here are our suggestions:

Turnover: How many people leave in a year? Resignations are usually a sign that people don't like working for you.
Sick leave: Disgruntled employees will often take advantage of this, so keeping employees healthy is a good sign for the brand
Time to hire: How long does it take to find new employees?
Cost per hire: Lower costs indicate efficient recruitment processes and that you are a more attractive workplace
Net Promoter Score among employees: How likely are they to recommend others to work for you?
Employee satisfaction: Are people happier than before?

There are many more KPIs, but keep it as simple as possible. Make sure you use KPIs that actually give you something to manage by.

Conclusion:

Employer branding is a process that requires curiosity, insight and creativity combined with a solid dose of communication skills. At Mission, we have extensive experience in this field and we would love to talk about how we can help you.

Call us on 24 10 35 00 or send an email to hello@mission.no