Employer branding A no-nonsense approach - CIPD

For example, you will still need to recruit, and therefore
to attract, applicants through one form of employment
marketing communications or another. Your newly
developed employer brand will obviously have a big and
immediate impact on this. It’s not just a question of
new messages, a new look and feel. The brand will
probably change the whole relationship between the
offline and online elements of your employment
marketing. The other thing it will do – should do, must
do – is to reduce your costs by reducing your
dependence on traditional, reactive, ‘distress purchase’
recruitment advertising.
The new brand will have to be applied to a broad range
of other employment marketing or internal
communications initiatives and materials – applicant
information literature, campus marketing programmes,
induction materials and programmes, the organisation’s
intranet or staff magazine, and so on. It may be that
your initial research, particularly a communications
audit, reveals that there are glaring gaps in your
communications armoury, or that the messaging and
tone of certain items is in conflict with the new brand.
If that’s the case, action needs to be taken, and the
funding needs to be found to fix an urgent problem.
But otherwise, you don’t need to scrap and replace
You need enough to enable you to compare
how your organisation is perceived as an
employer externally, and internally. That’s the
bottom line.
your existing materials – just wait until Stationery tells
you that existing stocks are running low.
All this may still leave you wondering, ‘Yes, but how
much money will I actually have to find? What’s the
minimum I can get away with?’ Only you can
determine the budget you need to set for the exact
circumstances of your own organisation. But there’s a
simple answer, a pretty accurate rule of thumb –
enough to enable you to compare how your
organisation is perceived as an employer externally,
and internally. That’s the bottom line.
Only you can decide how much money you’ll need, and
where it will come from. In essence, developing an
employer brand is a business investment like any other,
and as such will show a return on the original sum
invested. But that still leaves the question of who will
stump up the initial cash to pay for the research. Maybe
you have adequate funding and sufficient budgetary
control to allow you to do this unaided. It’s more likely
that, like most of your colleagues in any business
function, you’ll need to make a robust business case if
the cash is to be forthcoming. In many organisations,
likely sources of supplementary funding can include
marketing, PR or internal communications.
But irrespective of financial considerations, it’s essential
to forge alliances with these and other business
functions if your project is to succeed. It’s not a
question of going to them cap in hand; money aside,
you can do as much for them and help them meet their
business goals as they can for you, and you need to
make them understand that. Here are some of the
arguments you could use:
To corporate finance
‘I can save you serious money on recruitment,
reduce the hidden but considerable costs of
premature departures and demonstrate an
attractive and measurable ROI.’
Of course, if you make that kind of claim, you’d better
make sure that ROI really is measurable in ways that
would impress the most sceptical accountant. Any
promised improvement begs the question,
‘improvement against what?’ – which is why the
baseline metrics of your current performance in
recruitment and retention is so important. We cover this
issue later in this guide.
Employer branding