Employer Branding, it’s a been a topic we’ve mentioned in passing a lot on the show this year, but unusually we haven’t done a deep dive into it for a quite a while. So what are the current trends in employer branding, how are the events of this dystopian year shaping what employers are doing and what should employer brand strategies for the future look like?
My guest this week is the perfect person to answer all of these questions. David Thompson is a highly experienced employer brand consultant and the founder of Employer Branding Made Easy. Keep listening to hear his thoughts on the present state and future direction of employer branding.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ Employer brand trends that are being accelerated by the pandemic
▪ Three key areas where employer brand is now having an impact
▪ The importance of great stories and how to tell them
▪ Keeping employees engaged by strengthening emotional ties
▪ Managing reputation
▪ Where should employer brand sit within organisations?
▪ Do we overcomplicate employer brand?
▪ How should employers be shaping their employer brand strategies for the future?
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast is provided by Cornerstone on Demand. Cornerstone is the world’s leading talent technology specialist, helping organizations drive people’s success in uncertain times. Their enterprise class talent acquisition platform, TalentLink supports recruiting teams with the challenges of today, helping clients to deliver digital first hiring experiences while guiding them in the shift to skills based hiring and their missions to build more diverse workforces globally. If engaging hiring and onboarding the very best people in today’s environment is important to you, visit www.corstoneondemand.co.uk and get in touch to find out why. TalentLink is the platform built for the smarter recruiter.
Matt Alder [00:01:07]:
The ages of history. Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 315 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Employer Branding. It’s been a topic we’ve mentioned in passing a lot on the show this year, but unusually we haven’t done a deep dive into it for quite a while. So what are the current trends in employer branding? How are the events of this dystopian year shaping what employers are doing? And what should employer brand strategies for the future look like? My guest this week is the perfect person to answer all of these questions. David Thompson is a highly experienced employer brand consultant and the founder of Employer Brand Made Easy. Keep listening to hear his thoughts on the present state and the future direction of employer branding. Hi David, and welcome back to the podcast.
David Thompson [00:02:10]:
Hey Matt, how are you doing? Lovely to be back. Great to speak to you again.
Matt Alder [00:02:13]:
I’m doing pretty well and it’s an absolute pleasure to have you back on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
David Thompson [00:02:21]:
Of course. Thanks Matt. So my name’s David Thompson. I’m an employer brand consultant. I’ve been in and around employer branding agencies for about 20, 25 years and recently co founded a business called Employer Branding Made Easy. We offer online courses and consultancy so companies competing for talents can more effectively get out there with their messages, whether they’re a household name or not. So online courses and consultancy is what we’re doing now.
Matt Alder [00:02:50]:
You mentioned you’ve been in and around employer branding for 20 years. I’ve known you for quite a quite a large chunk of that and you’re always doing great employer brand work and have some great insights around employer branding. So that makes you the perfect person to ask this question too, which is what’s going on in 2020? Because there’s, there’s lots of discussion about the impact of 2020 on employer branding. But, but what’s actually happening at the coalface? What are, what are people doing? What are, what are people thinking?
David Thompson [00:03:18]:
Yeah, well, as, as with everybody else, it’s been a mad old year and I think a lot of what’s happening now we were seeing starting to happen kind of pre Covid, but like in so many different areas and different situations, this whole kind of situation, we found ourselves in accelerated things. It’s just poured gasoline on it and really, really accelerated things that were already starting to happen. So we saw in the early days of the COVID crisis, everyone went very quiet, rather as you’d expect, and that was mainly because organizations were just trying to get their houses in order, get everybody set up to work from home. So the landscape was very quiet. But what we’ve seen is a kind of return. And you know, I was looking at some statistics yesterday from the Recruitment Employment Confederation saying the number of jobs posted overall is now back to pre March levels. So we’re starting to see a ramp up of the number of jobs being advertised and accordingly, the amount of employer branding content out there. We saw some organizations still kept their activation up. Companies like Next Rolls Royce did a great job through getting out there and telling stories, mainly on social media, about how they were supporting their employees and how they were making it safe for them. So some of the more enlightened organizations kind of kept talking, kept telling those stories, but a lot of people kind of went very quiet. But it’s coming back up now. It’s coming back to a position of activity. But what we’re definitely seeing is an evolution, I think, of employer branding away from just being about recruitment. It’s really gaining traction in a number of other areas as well, which is making it into something a bit bigger and more holistic. And I think going forward it’s going to take on quite a different and significant role. That’s, that’s really going to change it and make it much bigger than just a kind of recruitment tool.
Matt Alder [00:05:27]:
Talk us through that a bit more. I presume that you’re sort of talking about reputation of organizations. What do you mean there?
David Thompson [00:05:35]:
Yeah, so I think there is three areas where, you know, employer branding is in the future going to really have a significant impact. The first one we already know, which is recruitment as it’s always been. I think we’ve always looked at employer branding as a recruitment aid and then given a kind of nod towards employee engagement as well. So it’s still going to place a growing importance in recruitment. You Know, as AI takes over more of the recruitment process, what AI can’t do is tell great stories. And we all love a story. You know, we all love to hear stories about employers because it activates a different part of our brain to normal facts, basically. So we tend to remember employer stories more strongly. So I think we’re going to see employer branding in recruitment taking on more of a storytelling role to help employers to kind of really stand out and differentiate. So, number one, recruitment, it’s going to grow in importance, but it’s going to be more around storytelling. But I think where there’s a really significant shift, and we’ve seen this very much happening in Covid, is the effect it has on employee engagement and retention. Now, if you kind of take the situation we’re in now where we’re all working behind laptops in our kitchens and in our bedrooms, and we know that this is probably going to perpetuate. Now, the Institute of Directors survey recently showed that three in four firms plan to increase homeworking over the next few years. So we’re sat behind our laptops. But what does that do to our engagement and the way we feel about working for our employers? Well, my thinking is, you know, does absence make the heart grow stronger? I don’t think it does. I think it makes it weaker. You know, if you think about your best employment experiences that you’ve had, most of mine were based around working in offices with people like you, Matt. Working with people I liked, I had of relationships with living and working in a physical environment together. There was a physicality that kind of kept people connected and created an emotional attachment to their employer. Now, I don’t think you can recreate that on Zoom. You know, if we’re spending more and more time at our home, in our homes, does this start to dilute the emotional kind of bond that we have with our employers? And then on top of that, okay, so, you know, we might not feel as strongly towards our employers as we did before. Equally, we can now work for anyone, anywhere. You know, we used to be quite limited by the physical geography of where we worked. You know, we worked somewhere we could commute to. But now, in theory, we can work for companies anywhere. So in theory, there’s going to be more choice, more employers to work for. So, again, does that start to catch my eye? Do I get distracted? And is this again, diluting this bond I have to my employer? So if these bonds are weakening, how do we make sure these bonds strengthen? And how do we keep people engaged? Well, again, it’s Great employer storytelling. It’s reminding people of what the organization does, what its purpose is, the amazing people that come together and the way that we work to make it happen. You know, what we stand for. And this is what’s at the heart of employer branding. So I think, I think in terms of employer engagement, there are only so many town halls and so many manager briefings and check ins you can do. I think what we’ll see going forward is to create and retain that emotional engagement with employees. We’re going to need to see a lot more employer branding activity, a lot more storytelling, authentically done from people who work within the business, telling the stories of why it’s a great place to be. So that’s your second audience, if you like. So, growing importance in recruitment and growing importance in employee engagement and retention. But we’ve also seen a third emergence I think through Covid, which is going to stay with us as well. And that’s the impact that employer reputation is having on customers and stakeholders and shareholders. You know, we’ve seen a whole raft. Pre Covid, we were starting to see an increasing number of stories around employee practices. You know, I’m in the UK and if you take company like Boohoo, the fashion company, you know, their share price really slumped when there was a bad story came out about some of their employment practices. And equally, as we went through Covid, we saw front page news every day around employer stories. You know, the likes of Sports Direct or JD Weatherspoon didn’t come out great and we saw immediate kind of dips in their share prices. Whereas other employers like Timpsons or BET365, you know, their stock rose because they seem to be treating their employers well. So I think we’re becoming increasingly sensitive to employer storytelling and employer reputation. And that’s not just employees and potential employees, that’s customers and stakeholders. You know, it’s becoming more and more important to customers to see the organizations that they’re buying from have a strong reputation. Piece of research I was just reading recently from career ARC said 64% of consumers have stopped purchasing a brand after hearing news of that company’s poor employment treatment. So this is more and more going into the realms of affecting a company’s stock and its sales and its feasibility. Basically. I think it was interesting during COVID that we saw a number of big organizations in the uk, Tesco, Co Op, Asda, all leading their marketing campaigns, not with information about products, but with information, but with little stories about their employees. And pre Covid, Amazon were doing Quite a lot of television advertising based around their employer brand, their employer brand films talking about how they treat their employees. Now, this advertising wasn’t aimed to recruit more people. It was aimed at customers, and it was aimed at stakeholders to make them feel confident about the organization that they’re buying from. So I think this is a really interesting step. Employer reputation is becoming far more important. And how do we create and amplify that employer reputation? Again, it’s through great employer branding. It’s having a strong employer value proposition and great storytelling and employer advocacy. Getting your own employees sharing that information and just creating that strong narrative and that strong reputation that supports the business, as we said, not just as a recruiter, but with sales and customers as well. So, as I said, Covid’s really accelerated this and brought this to the fore. And I think these are now trends that are going to stay with us as we come out of COVID next year and business returns to normal. So employee branding is. Yeah, it’s just increasing into something really much more holistic than just a recruitment tool with a little bit of a nod to engagement. I mean, the importance is going to continue to grow.
Matt Alder [00:13:04]:
I couldn’t agree with you more. And I think the reputation thing is really interesting because you mentioned Timson’s as an example there. And the really interesting thing about Timson’s and what they do and how they talk about their values and what they’re like as the place to work is that their CEO is absolutely front and center in that communication. So it’s him talking directly on Twitter about what he values and the type of business that they are. And it’s. It’s actually very, very powerful. And I suppose that leads on to my next question, that if employer branding is. Is changing and becoming even more important than it already was, where does it sit in the organization? I think it’s something that all organizations sort of debate, and I’ve seen it sort of reporting into different. Different places. Where do you think it should sit in an organization?
David Thompson [00:13:55]:
It’s a really good question, Matt, and I’m not sure I have the definitive answer because there’s this. You know, I’m not. I’m not sure the answer has been created yet. You know, it’s. It’s increasing at the moment. It sits in talent acquisition generally, as we said, because it’s mainly being viewed as something to aid and assist recruitment. But what we’re finding is that within the talent acquisition teams, there aren’t necessarily the people with the marketing skills that are required to make the Best of employer branding. So you kind of go, well, is it best suited to talent acquisition? Then as we evolve and we’re talking more about corporate reputation, then you kind of think well, should it then sit in our marketing and public relations team? But then the people in those teams don’t necessarily have the understanding of talent acquisition and talent management. I think, well, I’m not sure it sits correctly there. And then there’s the, there’s the employee engagement that sits in the middle. You know, is it part of employee engagement? Should it sit in hr? So there’s a number of different places it can sit and I don’t think we’ve actually figured out exactly what the answer is. I think my view is you need. There’s a combination of skills in there. Certainly if it’s going to sit anywhere near, you know, in talent acquisition. Talent acquisition needs to be more adept at marketing, there’s no doubt about that. But you know, if it’s going to sit, yeah, absolutely. You know, if it’s going to sit there that we need to be better at marketing. But I’m not sure it is the right place for it to sit. I think what we’ll see is a coming together of a number of different bodies from different parts of the organization. As you say, from employee engagement, from recruitment and resourcing, from talent management, from marketing, from pr, almost forming a unique little stakeholder group that will report into all of these different areas. So yeah, remains to be seen I think is the answer to that one. Matt.
Matt Alder [00:15:50]:
It’s a debate that’s going to run and run but I think every organization needs to find what, what’s going to work best for them. I suppose, I suppose my next question is do we over complicate employer branding? Employer brand tends to love jargon and ways of talking and can seem off putting or put up barriers for organizations to, to kind of get get involved in it. What’s, what’s your view of that?
David Thompson [00:16:15]:
I called my business and our business Employer Branding Made Easy just because I feel exactly that. I think it has been over complicated, made into a little bit of a dark art which I think is something. It’s overcomplicated sometimes. That’s not to say it’s a doddle and anybody can do it. There are many parts of it, creative development, media management, research, EVP development that do require some SK and knowledge but they’re not beyond the acquisition and abilities of people who are already working in talent acquisition. They just need upskilling basically. So I think it has been over complicated in many areas, and some simplification would be helpful. And I think making the skills more widely available would be really, really helpful too.
Matt Alder [00:17:13]:
You’ve talked a lot about storytelling effectively, employees telling their stories. Can you talk about that a little bit more? Who does that well and what are the key elements of being successful here?
David Thompson [00:17:27]:
So I think to tell great stories, the first thing you need to do is understand what you’re trying to say, what your target audience wants to hear, and make sure that you have a really solid EVP employer value proposition framework that’s well researched. So you can say, hey, look, there are, you know, five, six, seven things that we know are universal truths in this organization. We’ve researched them, we’ve road tested them with our people. We’re confident that we can tell the stories that back these up. And we’ve spoken to our external audiences that are interested and we know that they want to hear these things. So having a really solid, you know, base to tell your stories from is really important. Then I think you want to tell your stories authentically. You know, we want to hear from employees, the voices of the people. So, you know, there is research out there that says, you know, people trust the voice of an employee three times as much as they trust the voice of the CEO. So authentic storytelling coming from people who work within the business, telling people of their journey is like any story that we ever tell that we read always has an arc. It has a story arc. So people start from a position, then have to come up against a challenge and overcome a challenge to reach their goal. So use storytelling to tell a story arc. Use it to bring your EVP pillars to life. Use authenticity. Use real people to tell those stories. Basically, I think that’s the key to good storytelling. I think the main mistake I see made by organizations is a willingness to tell stories, but they don’t really know what they want to tell the story about. So they’ll go out to the business and go, can you just say some nice things about the business? What you end up with is quite a fragmented kind of volume of stories and people can’t quite grasp, okay, what’s the one thing you want me to remember? What’s the one story or the two stories that are really going to stick and resonate with me? So by being focused, by having your EVP pillars and telling stories around them, and then by repetition, by telling them over and over and over again in different and interesting creative ways, you can really start to build an understanding in people’s heads of what makes you a Unique employer and why they should join and thrive with you.
Matt Alder [00:20:04]:
So we’re recording this in mid November and it very much seems like there’s some light at the end of the tunnel in terms of this crisis abating and us being able to sort of move, move, move forward and get back to something resembling normal life at some point next year. What should companies be doing now when it comes to employer brand? How, how should they be planning for 2021 and 2022?
David Thompson [00:20:32]:
It can be tough at the moment when we’re going through periods where, you know, recruiting budgets are maybe being cut, project budgets have maybe been cut to kind of think, okay, I need to be planning to develop my employer brand next year to make sure we are future fit and ready for the years that are coming. But that’s exactly what you need to be doing. You know, I think organizations, you know, as we come out the other side, even though we’ve got this strange kind of disequilibrium, we’ve got rising unemployment in some areas, but at the same time we’ve got the rising number of available jobs, you know, what we’re seeing in some sectors, in particular fintech, technology, anything technology related, financial services, many professional services is a real growth in demand. And if you want to get ahead of the competition, you really need to be planning your employer brand activity for next year and that with both existing employees and potential hires in mind. So, you know, you really need to be planning. What’s our story going to be? Have we got a firm EVP framework in place? Do we understand what our audiences want? Are we able to start telling these stories? Do we have the kind of assets and architecture in place to tell these stories? Have we set up our social media channels? Have we got internal advocacy? Are our people wanting to share those stories and take them, you know, share them, them with their networks, all of these things? You know, it’s a perfect time if recruitment activity is a bit quieter, a perfect time to start doing this planning for next year. Because I think if you wait until next year to do this, you know, we’re going to be back into full on activity mode again and you might well find yourself behind the curve and struggling to keep up and struggling to find those great candidates. Also struggling to keep your own employees as their heads get turned by those who’ve done the job a little bit better.
Matt Alder [00:22:38]:
So final question. Where can people find you and where can they find out more about the courses?
David Thompson [00:22:44]:
Yes, thanks, Matt. Yes, the courses are available at www.employerbrandingmadeeasy.com Nice and simple. There you’ll find all the information about the courses and the consultancy support that we can offer as well. We’ve also created just for you listeners to Recruiting Future, a discount code. So if you were wanting to purchase, just use the code recruiting future15 at the store and you’ll get a 15% discount on the courses. So hopefully that’s, that’s of interest.
Matt Alder [00:23:16]:
Fantastic stuff, David. Thank you very much for talking to me.
David Thompson [00:23:19]:
It’s been a pleasure, Matt. Thank you as ever for having me on.
Matt Alder [00:23:23]:
My thanks to David Thompson. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search through all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
