What Employer Branding Is Not

Employer branding is not about trying to get high visibility by posting your job ads on popular job boards. It’s not the tagline of your company. It’s not sharing Instagram stories about your day-to-day. It’s not about university collaboration. It’s not your career site. It’s also not writing three blog posts. Employer branding is not launching a single employer branding campaign, just because your competitor did it too.

Employer branding is not about individual actions here and there.

Employer branding is…

… continuous and strategic work, where you take actions such as the above, but carefully. Actions that, most importantly, support the business and talent acquisition goals of your organization, and address your target talent audience.

… branding, just like any other. E.g. if a company has a good product and markets it to its target audience, their target audience buys it → if a company is a good employer and markets it to their target audience, their target talent audience applies for the company’s jobs.

… challenging, because it requires a lot of work for both internal and external audiences. It also calls for management, recruitment, HR, and marketing to work together seamlessly. It’s challenging because there aren’t many organizations that work on their employer branding in a strategic, goal-oriented way, meaning there aren’t many organizations to use as a benchmark for best practices.

… working with your existing employer brand; strengthening what you already have, or making a u-turn to fix how people see you → every organization has a brand, so you need to make sure it’s the kind of brand you want it to be.

… so much more than running a visibility campaign. It’s better to have the attention of 100 people in your target talent audience than having the attention of 100,000 people irrelevant to you.

💡 What would you add to this list?

Does your organization need employer branding marketing to attract IT and digital professionals?
If so get in touch: Vivi Brooke, Petra Erkkilä, and the rest of our EB team would love to help!