50 shades of beige. Employer Branding needs to get creative, here’s how.
What’s the best employer brand campaign or content you have ever seen? I was considering this question when I was invited to run a workshop on ‘Creating Content to Build Brand Love’ at the Talent Brand Summit in London a few weeks ago.
Honestly, I was scratching my head. After a career working in consumer marketing for some of the world’s biggest global brands, I moved into employer branding because I believed in the huge potential of marketing a culture over a commodity. The opportunity for creative storytelling should be wide open with the freedom of that theoretical brief.
In reality the creative silence has been deafening.
Various compilation lists like to reference Heineken’s Go Places but this was a couple of years ago and while charming, it’s not exactly Employer Branding’s ‘Whopper Sacrifice’ or #LikeAGirl. We seem to be mistaking decent production values and media spend for exceptional creative ideas.
How do I define an exceptional creative idea? One that disrupts your scrolling, is part of the cultural zeitgeist, that captures a mood or a moment, that gets people talking about your brand. It’s easier said than done but I keep hearing that Employer Brand has been around for 20 years so really we should have had a decent crack at it by now. We are in danger of sinking into talking-heads, box-ticking, everything-to-everyone mediocrity.
Remove the logos from EB content and you probably couldn’t tell the difference between the companies. And don’t get me started on employee-generated content without a creative idea (see my last article on LinkedIn.)
So, introspection time, what’s going wrong and how can we aim higher?
Let’s start with the recurrent excuses of having limited budget/resources and working into risk-averse managers who don’t get what we do. Yes, these are of course limiting factors but these are obstacles that the creative industry has faced before: procurement is all over production budgets, creativity is almost always under-resourced and many CMOs are hugely risk-averse.
Working in the creative industry, it is our job to leverage the power of great ideas to get the production budget or the sign-off needed to make it a reality. I can’t count the number of times a client magically found more money for an idea they were truly excited about. Equally if a team really believe in a great idea, they will pitch it in again and again and find the influencers or decision-makers to make it happen.
These limiting factors cannot therefore be the only reason we aren’t getting to great creative work in EB. So what else could be causing the drought?
Having the right creative talent is a factor for sure. Reading EB job descriptions, the skillset matches those for digital marketing experts but the scope is often ridiculous - 5 roles rolled into 1 instead of clear specialisms like Creative, Digital Strategy, Media Planning and Production. Couple this with a lower pay-grade than consumer marketing roles and we can see the potential issue in attracting and empowering the right talent to be effective.
That’s even before you try to figure out a career path for them once you hire them. While I am a believer in the maxim that anyone can be creative and that great ideas can come from anywhere, I also think there needs to be a healthy dose of realism.
“You are much more likely to yield industry-shaking creative ideas from trained creative thinkers who are given the focus and the bandwidth to ideate. ”
So how do we attract and retain these creative thinkers? Why not start by leveraging the advantages we have on the employer brand side instead of acting like the poor relation to consumer branding? We have all the cards if we choose to play them. We don’t have a hard tangible product with multiple features we need to push - we’re doing something much bigger. We are shaping a culture. This is a chance to transform how a brand behaves from the inside-out not just affect its marketing. Given proper creative freedom, a talented thinker could create exceptional ideas from that springboard.
If we were smart about it, we have the opportunity to cherry-pick the best talent from the consumer brand side, where creatives are desperate to make a real impact and are disillusioned with selling commodities.
If only we could show that great creative ideas are possible in this area, we’d have creative talent lining up. We would actually have to pay them their worth though. Remember, EB are responsible for attracting the people who make a business run so in actuality are a key driver of profit margin. Companies need to start paying this talent accordingly and remember a robot can’t do what they do, neither can a tool.
The other route to great creative ideas is a decent brief. When I worked in consumer marketing we would always write a tight creative brief or the creatives would pretty much throw it back in our faces. A good brief would contain a compelling insight about the target audience - something about their buying habits, sure, but also rooted deeply in the context of culture and demographics.
“To get them to buy we needed to understand their biggest barriers and drivers. We needed to know them better than they knew themselves. And that was just to get them to buy a pair of shoes. ”
Simon Barrow puts the case eloquently, ‘brand is about lifestyle, employer brand is about life itself.’ Too far you think? Consider the impact taking the wrong or right job has on all aspects of your existence...
In EB we keep talking about our audience as ‘candidates’ or ‘future candidates’, but the reality is, if we are going to the effort of fighting for budgets to create content then we have to know our audience infinitely better than that or we might as well not bother.
A potential candidate could be anyone or their mother and you can be sure as hell it’s not how your audience defines themselves.
In using this generic terminology we are basically saying, ‘we are talking to people with the skillsets we want or might possibly want in the future’, without considering that those same people are hugely complex individuals with hopes, dreams, fears and desires that have nothing to do with the professional skills they are endorsed for on LinkedIn.
To imagine otherwise is hopelessly naive or willfully ignorant. Talent is not homogenous, our approach cannot be either.
So we need better insights and better briefs. We also need to let go of the notion that deciding to join a company is only a rational decision.
The content we are producing currently is a hard-sell and it shows. The reasons you want to work for a company are emotional not rational at the employer-brand level, they only become rational further down the funnel when you start thinking about practicalities like salary and benefits.
That is recruitment marketing not employer branding by the way (yes they are related but different, just like brand building vs conversion campaigns.) The reality is that many people develop an unconscious attachment to a company they might want to work for at the brand level, this might take months or years to become actual consideration or convert to a hire.
The other hard truth is that some of the greatest Employer Brand campaigns are not obviously EB campaigns at all.
In perhaps the greatest Employer Branding success of all time, the film Top Gun increased recruitment for the US Navy by 500%. Are you seeing that kind of ROI on your EB campaigns? Didn’t think so. The feeling that the film evoked captured the imagination without sugar coating anything. This is a job you can die doing and they didn’t hide from that but people still rushed to sign up with the recruiters waiting in the cinema foyers.
To take another example, how much did Patagonia’s ‘The President Stole Your Land’ legal action against Trump make you want to work for them? Personally, I was browsing that career site before I turned the page on their full page ad declaring their actions. It wasn’t an EB campaign of course, but with an insightful brief and a brave EB team willing to take their ideas directly to the board it easily could have been.
The brief? We need a maverick idea to attract exceptional talent that value the outdoors above all else (Patgonia’s target talent) while building consumer brand value and doing good in the world at the same time.
Actions will always speak louder than words when showcasing who you are as a company and of course corporate brand and EB are inextricably linked, just as a good consumer experience of your brand will shape desire to work for you. My point is that consumer/corporate brand don’t always have to lead. It’s time for EB to drive the conversation, just as talent drives your business, and for the other areas of the brand to feel the halo effect. Why not?
The stakes of getting this right are high because creativity is the way EB will rise and professionalise. We need to pitch bigger, braver ideas, not hygiene-factor content. We need ideas that scare us and progressive companies to buy them. We need CEOs to be able to point to game-changing ideas and say, ‘we want some of that magic here!’
Stand-out creativity is the only way EB will hit the mainstream. It’s the only way you won’t have to explain to your mum for the rest of your life what exactly it is that you do.
So who’s game?
About our TBA Member: Emily Firth is an independent Talent Brand Consultant based in Amsterdam and the former Global Head of Employer Branding at Booking.com. Prior to that she spent over a decade in advertising as a strategic Business Director helping to transform top global brands like Dove and Absolut vodka. Emily is a proud working mother and a vocal advocate for equality and inclusion - in the world as well as the workplace. She enjoys speaking and writing on topics she feels passionate about in the areas of employer branding, D,I&B and employment culture.
