In this podcast…
Have you ever gone to your Facebook feed looking to catch up with one or two specific friends but find your feed clogged with photos from your aunt’s recent trip to Phoenix or baby photos from your freshman year roommate? The average Facebook user has 200 friends, and stories from all of those acquaintances can choke out the updates you really want to see from the people you care about. Obviously this is happening with your company’s Facebook page as well. Your carefully crafted employer branding images and copy are fading away into a sea of cat photos. If you have been struggling with this then you are in luck because in our latest Resonate Podcast Jason Seiden of Brand Amper sat down to interview Employer Branding expert Stacy Zapar, CEO of Tenfold, and one of LinkedIn’s most connected members.
Which Way Are Your Chairs Facing?
The difference between an audience and a community is the way the chairs are facing. It’s an important distinction to remember when you start to think about your employer branding. Does the communication consistently move in only one direction or are you creating a forum where both parties get a say? Returning to our Facebook problem, Stacy shares a secret to her success. By creating a closed Facebook group (instead of a Facebook page) you can enable a space for your candidates to connect with recruiters and employees around the company, building relationships, telling your employer brand stories and also helping increase your employee engagement along the way.
Employer branding can be a difficult challenge to tackle because in today’s metric driven world it can be hard to show a clear ROI on your efforts. Stacy quotes Scott Monty “What is the ROI of putting on your pants in the morning?” The specifics of employer branding can get a bit murky. With candidates stalking companies long before they actually put in an application, can we actually nail down the one post or comment or interaction that made a candidate decide to apply on a given day?
I do agree that employer branding and employee engagement often seem to live in a symbiotic relationship; a very chicken or the egg situation. I think the employer branding is all on the attraction side of the table but a lot of the characteristics that attract your best candidates to a company are also the same for the employees who love their job and wouldn’t think about leaving the company. Can you think of a company who does one of these really well while failing at the other?
Who Owns Employer Branding?
The employer branding challenge also suffers from an ownership problem. Who is responsible for employer branding? Is it marketing? The CEO? HR? Recruiting? I would argue, and Stacy and Jason would agree, that recruiting should own it. As recruiters we are the gatekeepers. We are often the first employee a candidate meets. I think a lot of great recruiters out there already do own this; recruiters who think of the consumer brand, the corporate brand, the employer brand, and our own personal brands as well, as we develop and maintain relationships with candidates. Being the first line of a human employer brand gives recruiters a vested interest in making sure it’s authentic but I do acknowledge that as recruiters we are not the only part of this conversation. The consumer brand, the corporate brand, and the employer brand are all converging into multiple sides of the same coin. That is, if we have a 3 sided coin. The C-suite and marketing should be involved and all efforts should be pointing in the same direction.
I really enjoyed one point Jason brings up. At times we can be in such a rush to be different or to be the first, but how much of employer branding is standing out and doing new things versus nailing the fundamentals. I have to say doing new things is great but if you aren’t getting the basics right you might need to slow your roll. And Stacy agrees. All of the new social channels are just paths to get your message out there. At the end of the day content is still the most important thing. If you aren’t engaging and attracting your candidates it doesn’t matter how many channels you push out to. We need more data on our efforts. Ultimately we need to know which content is resonating with our candidates. This isn’t a problem we solve with more applicants; it’s one we solve with better applicants. What spoke to you in this podcast? Leave me a comment below and let me know.
Resources mentioned in this podcast are:
What’s the ROI of putting your pants on in the morning?
Heard in this podcast:
Jason Seiden, CEO & Cofounder, Brand AmperJason’s a storyteller. He launched Brand Amper, a brand management platform for recruiting, based on 20 years experience solving leadership and communications challenges for Fortune 500 executives and their employees.
Twitter: @Seiden
Stacy Zapar, CEO, Tenfold
Stacy Donovan Zapar is a 15-year recruiting veteran for Fortune 500 tech companies and CEO of Tenfold Social Training, a B2B Social Recruiting training company for talent acquisition and staffing teams around the world.
Twitter:@StacyZapar
By Noel Cocca
CEO/Founder RecruitingDaily and avid skier, coach and avid father of two trying to keep up with my altruistic wife. Producing at the sweet spot talent acquisition to create great content for the living breathing human beings in recruiting and hiring. I try to ease the biggest to smallest problems from start-ups to enterprise. Founder of RecruitingDaily and our merry band of rabble-rousers.
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