Creating an Employer Branding

Strategy
In this assignment, you will help you to create an employer branding strategy
and the first elements of a tactical plan in five steps. For this assignment, we
assume that your organization doesn’t have a clear employer branding
strategy yet. If you do, go through this assignment and use it to iterate on your
current employer branding strategy the way you learned in the design
thinking course. This may help you evolve your current strategy into
something more on-point or tailored to a specific and crucial candidate group.

Step 1. Define your employer branding goal.

In the first step, you set one or more employer branding goals. These goals
should add value to the business, tangible and measurable, like increasing the
number of candidates on the career website, improving our position as an
attractive employer, or increasing our referral rate.

An approach would be to use a SWOT analysis specifically for recruitment,

like you learned in the first course in this program. A great tactic is to
emphasize your strengths.
Step 2. Define your candidate persona.

In the next step, you define your candidate persona. There are two approaches to doing this. If you work for a smaller organization, you can make a generic
persona that represents someone who will flourish in your organization. If you work for a larger organization, you can make multiple persona’s for different
subsections in your organization. Each subculture requires a slightly different personality – a sales culture may be competitive while your product team may
be more structured and people- and process focused. Incorporate these personality traits so they match the different subcultures in your organization.

Now be careful of making this too generic. The illustration below shows two affluent princes, both male, born in 1948, who grew up in England. One is
Charles, prince of Wales, while the other is Ozzy Osbourne, also known by his nickname prince of darkness. Two very distinct profiles.

Born in 1948

Male

Grew up in England

Married twice

2 children

Wealthy

Invests in real estate

Lives in a castle
Use the candidate persona canvas, shown below, as a template for identifying common characteristics for the people working in your organization. Fill in this canvas for
each of your recruiting personas. In order to get all the information required to accurately do so, conduct interviews with people who fit the candidate persona.

The Candidate Persona Canvas

Bio Goals Job search Personality Motivation

behavior
Who is your candidate persona? What goals is your candidate What character traits does your What motivates them?
trying to achieve? candidate have?
How do they search for a job?
• Age • Reputation
• Position • Career path • DiSC model • Mission & vision
• Active/passive
• Salary • Life goals • Personality test • Norms & values
• Devices
• Location • Culture in the organization
• Time/place
• Education • Remuneration
• Experience • Responsibility
• Social background Frustrations Channels Skills • Work environment
• Work/life balance
What frustrates them? Where do they look for a new job? What are their primary and
• Development & education
secondary skills and
• Colleagues
• Why are they changing jobs? • Social media, job boards, attributes?
• What barriers are there • referrals, career sites,
• to leave the current job? • LinkedIn etc. • Most knowledge
• Experience
• Education

Influencers Content & Resources

Who influence their decisions? What information do they have and whose information do they trust?

• Family & friends • Job advertisement

• Partners • Corporate career sites
• Current work environment • Social media posts and accounts
• Recruiters • Events
• Future employer • Industry leaders & employers
Step 3. Define the employee value proposition for your persona

Prior to this step, you should get familiar with your persona. Interview a number of people that you think really fit this persona well and based on that draft
the employee value proposition for your persona. This includes compensation, benefits, career paths, work environment factors and organizational culture.

The input for the EVP comes from what the persona is looking for and what your organization is most competitive in. A large organization may be able to
offer more compensation, holidays, and a clearer career growth path, while a smaller organization is able to offer a friendlier work environment and highly
inclusive culture. A governmental organization often offers okay compensation, great benefits, and a friendly and easygoing culture in which people are
happy to help each other. This way each (type of) organization has their own unique culture.

Employee Value Proposition (EVP) - WIIFM (What’s in it for me)?

Compensation Benefits Career Work Environment Culture

• Salary satisfaction • Time off • Ability and chance to progress • Recognition • Understanding of firm’s goals
• Compensation system • Holidays • and develop • Autonomy • and plans
• satisfaction • Insurance • Stability • Personal achievements • Colleagues
• Raises and promotions • Satisfaction with the system • Training and education at work • Work- life balance • Leaders and managers
• Timeliness • Retirement • Career development • Challenges • Support
• Fairness • Education • College education • Understanding of one’s role • Collaboration and team spirit
• Evaluation system • Flexibility • Consultation • and responsibility • Social responsibility
• Family • Evaluation and • Trust
• feedback
Step 4. Define the most effective channels to reach your audience

In this step, you take your candidate persona and define the most effective channels to reach them. This may be a social network like LinkedIn, Glassdoor for
US-based companies, university recruiting, the various forms of job advertisement, and so on. This is a step that we recommend you to test extensively by
looking at the number of visitors or impressions and measuring conversions all the way through your recruiting funnel.

The ideal number of channels is hard to determine but the rule is that it is more effective to manage fewer channels well than to have many inactive
channels. If you are just starting with your employer branding, start with three to five channels that are proven and expand from there based on your
capacity.

METHODS AND CHANNELS FOR PROMOTING YOUR EMPLOYER BRAND

Social networks Career site Current employees

Lectures and workshops Inbound recruiting Job advertisement

Candidate relationship
management Application process Internal job board
Step 5. Bringing it together

At this point you have defined your target audience(s), identified what drives them, what they find attractive in an employer, and how you can reach them
most effectively. Now you can bring this together into a tactical plan in which you define how you will use the different channels, what content you will want
to post and when, and who will take care of this.

This structure is helpful as it will force you to think about the time investment required to manage a channel well as well as its return. We put the Twitter
example in the template – Twitter may be a necessity for multinational B2C organizations with high name recognition but for most organizations Twitter will
take a lot of time (i.e., money) but has a relatively lower return when it comes to employer branding. Low maintenance channels like LinkedIn advertisement
may work better – but this channel will work better if your brand posts often and has a larger number of followers, which is required for social proof.

Fill in the last worksheet.

 The Candidate Persona Canvas

Bio Goals Job search Personality Motivation

behavior
Who is your candidate persona? What goals is your candidate What character traits does your What motivates them?
trying to achieve? candidate have?
How do they search for a job?
• •
• • •
• •
• • •
• •
• • •
• •

• •
Frustrations Channels Skills
• •
What frustrates them? Where do they look for a new job? What are their primary and
• •
secondary skills and
• attributes? •
• •
• •
• •
•
• •
• •
•
•

Influencers Content & Resources

Who influence their decisions? What information do they have and whose information do they trust?

• •
• •
• •
• •
 EMPLOYEE VALUE PROPOSITION (EVP)

Compensation Benefits Career Work Environment Culture

• • • • •
• • • • •
• • • • •
• • • • •
• • • • •
• • • • •
• • • • •
 Channel Example
Channel name Twitter
Goal in the recruiting cycle Branding / name recognition
Posting frequency 8 times a day
Channel owner Veronika Jones, social media manager
Time & budget investment 3 hours a day (shared with marketing)
Success measure Number of followers Score 8,825 Target 9,200 by Q4
Success measure 2 Tweet engagement Score 1.6% Target 1.65% by Q4
Channel 1
Channel name
Goal in the recruiting cycle
Posting frequency
Channel owner
Time & budget investment
Success measure Score Target
Success measure 2 Score Target
Channel 2
Channel name
Goal in the recruiting cycle
Posting frequency
Channel owner
Time & budget investment
Success measure Score Target
Success measure Score Target
Channel 3
Channel name
Goal in the recruiting cycle
Posting frequency
Channel owner
Time & budget investment
Success measure Score Target
Success measure Score Target