Over the past year, employer branding has gained traction across most organizations. According to recent studies, only 56% of businesses now have an employer branding plan. Employer branding has become more significant as businesses try to attract and hold onto talent in the shifting labor market. What significance does marketing then have in improving workplace branding? And what ideal procedures may they adopt? But, Is Employer Branding a Marketing or HR Function? In this blog, learn if Employer Branding is a Marketing or HR Function.
Isn’t Employer Branding an HR Responsibility?
Absolutely! Here, the HR department and the hiring team should assume the initiative. They are the most knowledgeable about the organization’s overarching hiring objectives. Additionally, HR is ideally placed to explain to prospective employees the value of the business in terms of company culture, work environment, salary, and possibilities.
None of this, however, suggests that they need to be the only group working on these projects. Marketing has a crucial function to play, without a doubt. They offer contributions to the conversation that HR just cannot.
HR Meets Marketing
While many employer branding-related initiatives are not new, allocating employees and resources to this endeavor is comparatively recent. Marketing and HR are working together more on employer branding. People who work in this newly emerging function frequently have marketing and employer branding backgrounds. Marketers are increasingly driving the efforts. Marketers respond to needs as they become aware of them.
For workplace branding to be effective, HR and marketing must work closely together. Although they may have a lot to offer, marketers might not be aware of the subtleties of a daily engagement or the motivations of employees and candidates. While HR is mindful of this, they might not have the necessary tools or resources to support a campaign.
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Values Added to Employer Branding Through Marketing
A firm’s marketing division is responsible for consistently communicating a company’s brand to all external stakeholders. A company’s brand should be thoroughly understood through marketing, along with what it stands for and how it should be expressed. Because a brand must be built from the inside out, many marketers think that the employee brand should fall under the purview of marketing.
1. Visual Design
Your employer brand depends on people remembering you and your company. If potential customers don’t remember or identify your brand, all of your efforts will be for nothing. Your marketing department can offer assistance.
They can access visual resources, including typefaces, color schemes, and logos. They may have also developed guidelines and best practices for using images to guarantee consistency and create the visual aspect of your branding activities.
2. Employee Journey Mapping
Consider each possible point of interaction a job seeker might have with your brand. Each presents a chance to dazzle by offering a top-notch hiring experience (or not). The employee journey is comparable to the customer journey, which incorporates all customer interactions with a brand.
Marketers know how crucial it is to exploit these touchpoints to produce wonderful client experiences. They may also assist you in identifying critical recruitment touchpoints and developing strategies to improve the recruiting process.
3. Construct candidate personas
Knowing who you aim to reach with your branding plan will help you accomplish more. You can develop candidate personas with the marketing department’s expertise in creating customer personas.
4. Develop Content
Content is one of your most effective tools for recruiting new employees, promoting your corporate culture, or emphasizing the advantages of working for you. But for that content to be effective, it must be well-written, pertinent, simple to read, and SEO-friendly. Marketing may require specific assistance, but they already possess the abilities necessary to produce exciting content.
5. Analyze the competition
Are potential employees leaving your company for other employers? What are they doing that you aren’t to recruit talent? How are employees’ employer brands perceived? Your marketing team is in the ideal position to evaluate the competition, just like market research.
6. Communicate
Consumer marketing is about producing and disseminating the appropriate materials to the right audiences. Those are messages. Marketers are skilled at explaining to potential clients the benefits of their company’s goods and services. You can apply those skills to telling potential employees how great an employer your company is.
7. Market research
You already have one, even if you haven’t done anything to impact or create your employer brand. That brand will always remain as long as people have formed ideas about you as an employer. To develop a branding plan, you must first be aware of your current position.
To do that, you must conduct market research to get the information you require about your standing among your staff members, prior interviewees, and others. The best candidates to carry out this research will be members of your marketing staff.
Non-Technical Value addition by Marketers to Employer Branding
Employer branding is a type of HR marketing that aims to sell a favorable perception of the business and its brand. It addresses both internal and external audiences, aiding in the enticement and recruitment of potential employees and maintaining current workers’ loyalty and well-being. Focusing on the people at the center of your operations is a constant in employer branding, regardless of the goal.
1. Perspective
Customers are the focus of Marketing, and their insight is priceless. Marketers own the overall brand story and experience. Additionally, they are ideally situated to ensure that the “inside” and “outside” of the brand are in perfect harmony because any discrepancy between these two causes unsuccessful branding.
2. Skillset
Although they are done for a different audience, most everyday tasks associated with effective employer branding are similar to those of marketers. As a result, marketers can contribute their expertise to employer branding to raise the level of effort.
3. Resources
A few study participants stated that HR has a tight budget. Additionally, marketing can provide financial resources, communication know-how, and other priceless resources.
4. Mentality
A savvy marketer engages with their audience by adopting a complete lifecycle mindset. A typical brand strategy can be changed into an employer branding plan by simply swapping out a prospect for a candidate and a customer for an employee. The fundamentals attract, converting, developing connections, and encouraging advocacy are essentially the same.
Related blog: How Can Employer Branding Grow Your Business?
Conclusion
Marketers have a distinct viewpoint developed via their interactions with clients and prospects. Employee involvement in marketing is nothing new. However, to make a significant shift, they need to give priority to three critical areas when they consider becoming more involved in employer branding. Building an employer brand takes time and effort, which is not a simple task. Organizations may create a strong employer brand that draws candidates, keeps employees, and cultivates brand evangelists by adhering to the best practices outlined above.
FAQs
1. What is the idea of employer branding?
A time-tested idea, employer branding has gained popularity in our networked society. It involves presenting a business or organization to a targeted audience as the employer of choice. One that a business needs and wants to draw in, hire, and keep.
2. What can HR do to promote the employer brand?
HR can educate staff members about brand messages and support their positive interaction with the business. This will consequently improve the company’s reputation. The staff members are enthusiastic about the brand since they know the company’s mission.
3. Why is it crucial for HR to promote and establish brands?
Employee engagement will increase if your brand and culture are strong. Your team must be engaged because that will increase the likelihood of telling others how much they enjoy working for your business. People tend to trust employees more than they do the CEO of a company, after all.
