Congrats! You’re on your way to boosting your company’s employer brand. After (what I’m sure) was a long roadshow of endless conversations to get buy-in, you finally got the green light and budget to make your first employer branding hire. Before you do that, consider what’s needed to make this role successful. Employer branding isn’t always so black and white.
Throughout my decade-long career in employer branding, I’ve worked both in-house and as a consultant or contractor. Most of the time, I was hired for newly created roles, and the world was my oyster because I could take any direction with the role’s function. I’m fortunate to have worked with some great companies with a clear vision of their goals.
However, I’ve also worked with companies that didn’t have clear objectives (or maybe they thought they did). It’s usually not their fault with those companies because talent acquisition managers had limited exposure to employer branding or none at all.
A disconnect between clear goals and expectations is entirely understandable. I want to help talent acquisition teams that need to hire for an employer brander so they can equip their new hire with the right resources and hit the ground running.
So, here are six things to consider before you post your employer branding job:
Know your goals.
Although the employer brand (EB) role is becoming more common, it’s still an uphill battle to convince the TA leadership team that it provides real value without setting goals. Knowing your key objectives for the EB role will help you narrow down who has the critical skills and establish KPIs and needed resources.
Examples of goals:
- Building more brand awareness
- Improving your brand reputation
- Increasing quality applications
- Decreasing time to fill
- Improving candidate experience
There are many things to consider regarding goals and what to measure. When establishing your goals, determine which are influenced by the employer brand or impacted by the recruitment process.
An employer brander can enhance the candidate experience and reduce the time-to-fill by increasing awareness and conversions. However, the recruitment process itself can also impact these factors, both positively and negatively. If the process is slow or inefficient, or if talent acquisition professionals fail to utilize the content and communications created by the employer brander, it can delay hiring and lead to candidates withdrawing due to a negative experience.
When thinking about your goals and KPIs, clarify what can be measured specifically for this role and how to factor in outside influences.
Determine the right fit.
Once you know what you’re trying to achieve, it will be easier to figure out what type of person you’ll need for the role. Will you need a brander, a marketer, or a mix?
Here are some examples of what these options look like:
- Brander: someone who will shape the brand. They’ll develop the EVP and messaging, invest in channels and tools to promote it and manage the reputation. They’ll likely focus on the overall high-level strategy for how job seekers perceive the company and may work with internal and external partners to activate it.
- Marketer: someone who will activate the brand. They’ll take the strategy and goals and execute a plan to actively engage candidates to take action (e.g., apply, come to an event, sign up for a talent community, etc.). Marketers create content, manage channels, develop CRM marketing, launch campaigns, set up ads, organize events, etc. They’re more in the weeds and focused on hitting a specific goal.
- Generalist: someone who can do both. They’ll build both the strategy and execute it. For many companies making their first hire, having someone as a jack of all trades is common. Of course, that person might be stronger in one area vs. another.
Remember, this person could likely be the only one running the show for a while if getting an additional headcount isn’t approved. Understanding these differences will allow you to focus on the skills most suit your needs.
Identify critical skills.
It’s time to identify which skills are most important. Essentially, this person will act like a whole branding/marketing department, meaning there are many specialties and areas they can lean into. As you consider your needs, goals, and the type of person you’ll want to hire, you can narrow it down better.
For instance, if you’re hiring an employer brander to increase awareness, you might want someone skilled in brand positioning and strategy, communications, and project management. They’ll have the mindset to know how, when, and where to be most competitive with the brand, but they may need to leverage internal agencies, partners, and vendors for the nitty-gritty stuff.
To increase conversions for hard-to-fill roles, you may need a marketer with stronger inbound marketing expertise and the ability to nurture throughout the funnel. Or suppose you’re dealing with high-volume hiring. In that case, you’ll likely want a marketer who understands things like outbound marketing or optimizing their efforts so relevant people will click to apply with the least amount of touches and the lowest cost.
Although these are just a few examples, there are countless skills to consider. Other skills I’ve seen for this role are budgeting, analytics, design, video/photo skills, website management, copywriting, advertising/media buying, and more. An easy way to determine what’s needed is to look at similar corporate/consumer marketing roles and identify skills that can work for employer branding.
You can determine which resources this person will need by narrowing down your skillset. If they’re strong in one area but lighter in another, you may need to invest resources to fill those gaps.
Secure buy-in and resources.
Getting leadership buy-in is often overlooked yet extremely important. Your hire might be able to manage many things, but they’ll still need help to make it all happen.
First, what have you done to set up strong internal partnerships? In addition to the Talent Acquisition team, this person may need to partner with TA, marketing, creative teams, development, etc. If your hire will launch a new career site or provide ongoing design help, establish partnerships and set up expectations with those teams to ensure they can commit bandwidth to these needs.
Second, what budget have you secured for outside help? Depending on your goals, you may hire an agency to develop the EVP or use expert advertising companies to manage your PPC campaigns. Or maybe your person will need occasional copywriting, design, or video freelance help for special projects.
Depending on how much internal help you get, the budget you may need for external support will be determined. If you need to request more budget than initially expected, it’s good to get buy-in and gauge what’s available. It’s also a good practice to engage these internal teams proactively so your employer brander has a seamless way to collaborate right away.
Where should employer branding sit?
I’ve seen this role report to many teams, such as Talent Acquisition, Communications, and Marketing. Each has its pros and cons.
For example, working within the Talent Acquisition team helps one stay updated on shifting priorities, hear about challenges, and learn about interesting employee investments that would make great employer branding content. The downside is that getting committed bandwidth from other internal partners or budgeting for initiatives might be more challenging since these teams are often underresourced.
Working on the Marketing or Internal Communications team will allow this person to have stronger partnerships with specialties like creative, more access to marketing tools and resources, better help with analytics, and a deeper understanding of what’s going on in the overall business that can be relevant for employer branding messaging. The downside is they might not have an immediate pulse on what’s going on with talent acquisition, sometimes making their work more reactive than proactive.
There’s a lot of debate on where this person belongs. I don’t think anyone’s come up with a strict answer yet. Regardless of where you land, the best way to set this person up for success is to build strong relationships with the other teams. Maybe that means establishing a dotted reporting line to someone on the other team to ensure they gain access and insight into relevant things that can help them.
Clarify role scope.
Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for companies to try to cram a bunch of random responsibilities onto this person. Maybe it’s because they couldn’t get a headcount for these other roles or because they don’t fully understand the role enough to realize these duties aren’t within scope.
Some common job duties I’ve seen shoved into an employer branding job description are managing DEI initiatives, handling internal comms, running internal events to improve culture and employee experience, doing random basic duties for corporate marketing, and so on. All of those require different skill sets and strategies. By taking on these duties, you risk burning them out and dividing their time doing too many things, leading them to make little impact in anything.
This is an exciting time for your company! I hope these recommendations will give you hiring confidence and create a solid foundation of support for your new employees so they can thrive.