Employer Branding

Employer branding: a definition

Employer branding (العلامة التجارية لصاحب العمل) is the image of an organisation as a place to work in the minds of its employees and of potential candidates, together with what the organisation does deliberately to influence that image.

The definition joins two elements. The first is the image: what the organisation’s employees, and the candidates who might apply to it, think of it as an employer. The second is deliberate action: what the organisation does on purpose in order to influence what they think. In both elements the organisation is considered as a place to work, not as a seller of goods or services.

The image is held by two groups. Current employees hold it from inside the organisation, where they work. Potential candidates hold it from outside, before they have joined. The deliberate action is aimed at the image that both groups hold, whether it concerns the people who already work for the organisation or the people who might come to work for it. In either case, what is being shaped is a view of the organisation as an employer.

Why employer branding is kept separate from the product brand

The audience is different, and so is the question. A product brand answers one question: why should I buy from you? Employer branding answers another: why should I work for you, and why should I stay?

The first question is asked by a customer deciding whether to buy. The second is asked by a candidate deciding whether to join, and its last part, why should I stay, is asked by an employee who has already joined and is deciding whether to remain. Each brand therefore has a different audience.

So an organisation that is well known among its customers may be entirely unknown among candidates. The reverse can also happen: an organisation may be known among candidates while its name means little to customers.

Where employer branding actually takes shape

The image forms from the four sources below, and most of them lie outside the direct control of management. Three of them come from people describing their own dealings with the organisation, as employees, as former employees or as candidates:

• What current employees say to those who ask them. It is the nearest thing to direct testimony about the reality inside the organisation. The people giving it work there now, so whoever asks hears about the workplace from someone inside it.
• What former employees recount. It is the reason the exit interview, and the way the working relationship is brought to an end, are part of the employer brand rather than outside it. A person who has left can still describe the organisation to others, and the way their relationship with it ended is part of what they can describe.
• Candidate experience, including that of candidates who were not accepted. It does not stop at the people who receive an offer. A candidate who was turned down without a reply leaves with an impression and passes it on. The impression covers the whole of the candidate’s dealings with the organisation during hiring, whatever the outcome of the application.
• What the organisation publishes about itself. It is the last of these sources in its effect, not the first. The organisation decides what it publishes, yet what it publishes counts for less than the three sources above it.

Employer branding and the promise that does not match reality

A promise that does not match the internal reality does not build an employer brand. Instead, it can hasten the moment at which the brand is exposed. The organisation says one thing about itself as a workplace, and the people who join it find another. The gap between the two comes to light once people have joined, when they can compare the promise with what they find.

Consider the sequence. A candidate joins on the strength of a particular image and, once inside, finds something different. Such a hire can leave early. The cost of hiring can then rise, because the same position has to be filled again, and the impression the organisation leaves is damaged twice over.

The practical rule follows from that sequence: fix what is said about you by fixing what happens, and then talk about it. The order in the rule is deliberate. Changing what happens inside the organisation comes first, and speaking about the change comes after it, so that what the organisation says describes something a new hire will in fact find on arrival. Speaking first, before anything has changed, reverses that order and recreates the gap between the promise and the reality described above.

How employer branding is measured

Employer branding has no single measure. It is inferred from indirect indicators, and four of them serve that purpose. None of the four measures the image directly:

• The share of hires that come through employee referrals. It is the proportion of the people hired in a period who were recommended by people already working in the organisation. Source of hire is the breakdown of hires by the channel they came through, and employee referral is one of those channels.
• Time to fill. It is the length of time a vacancy stays open until it is filled.
• The offer acceptance rate. It is the share of the job offers made by the organisation that candidates accept. It concerns candidates who have reached the end of the hiring process and received an offer.
• The turnover rate in the first year. It is the share of new hires who leave within their first year of service. It counts early departures among new hires, such as that of the hire described above who joined on the strength of one image and found another.

Each of these indicators is influenced by other factors as well as by the employer brand. A movement in any one of them, taken alone, cannot therefore be attributed to the employer brand. For that reason the four are examined together, and as a trend over time, rather than as a single figure. A trend shows the direction in which each indicator moves from one period to the next, which a single figure taken at one moment cannot show.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.