What is employer brand marketing?

Stories help us make sense of a complex world.

Reputations are made of stories — of memories and anecdotes shared and repeated. They can be wrong and they can be exaggerated but they are certainly acted upon. Employer branding — or employer brand marketing or employment branding — is the process of an employer trying to tell that story to attract and retain employees who will best succeed at the organization. Though there is some nuance to the terms, phrases like “recruitment marketing” are also often used, though it can often encapsulate targeted efforts to promote specific openings rather than an organization as a whole.

Understand, this isn’t intended to be a fantasy spun to lure the most applicants. That would ensure a crash of missed expectations and disastrous culture. Just like good content marketing meant to disqualify sales leads that aren’t a good fit, so too employment branding should strive to bring forward those who can thrive.

So employment brand marketing typically starts with definitions — of company mission, vision values; of an organization’s employee value proposition; tracking employee net promoter score and the like — and then it becomes an act of storytelling.

(Read these four tips for telling your company’s story to attract candidates.)

That storytelling takes place internally and externally. It is often done with the company’s own platforms (a company blog, social media channels, etc.) and amplified by third parties, both via earned media and partnership — and yes, we at Technical.ly help brands do just that.

The goal is to attract fans, both existing teammates who believe in the work and those who follow your company and might someday work there. This helps with passive jobseekers who might decide they’d like to work at your company even before they realize they can.

This work is no more necessary than in 2020, when a pandemic, economic shock and focus on racial equity is forcing organizations to show how they treat their employees during the most challenging times.

Employer brand marketing in crisis was discussed at a Technical.ly conference in the spring, and the foundation was worth revisiting so it became the topic of this week’s edition of The TWIJ Show, our weekly interview series on building better workplaces.

To dig into the present and future of employer brand marketing, I turned to two experts: Robin Dagostino, the employer brand lead for software giant SAP, and Matt Gilbert, the chief creative officer for Bayard Advertising, which specializes in recruitment marketing.

You can also listen to the episode here: