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Get leadership on board with employer branding

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Here’s how to communicate the impact of talent branding problems, get leadership on board with employer branding, and achieve buy-in for your projects. 

Your leadership needs to understand how your work in employer branding and recruitment marketing impacts the profitability and productivity of your entire organization. When leadership connects the value of your work to organizational performance, you can get stakeholder time and attention, and increased resources to do your job to the best of your ability. 

And, sometimes you need money for outside expertise, special projects, tools, to build your team, and more. 

Hey, we’re all about being scrappy and doing the best you can with what you have. But if you are undertaking an employer branding problem like lack of recognition, correcting candidate perception, or building pipelines of talent essential to your company’s growth and survival, you need to be realistic about just how much you can really do on a limited budget and with a small team. 

Advocate for your function 

Traditional and consumer marketers require healthy budgets to do their jobs well. In fact, it’s standard that marketers have a budget equal to their salary to spend on marketing programs and initiatives. They can’t do their jobs without it and that’s recognized universally.

So why does recruitment marketing and employer branding, wedged between the marketing and talent acquisition worlds, feel the need to squeak by on hard work and smarts alone? 

Your organization will eventually learn what it needs to develop a strong employer branding and recruitment marketing function. You control how soon this happens by how well you influence and advocate for your work. 

What does your problem cost?

Sure, leadership needs to relate to you and the work you’re doing. They need to understand the obstacles you’re trying to overcome. 

But more than that, they need to see and feel your problems as their problems. They need to realize ineffective or nonexistent employer branding and recruitment marketing efforts impact their bottom line, their ability to get work done, and even their reputation among buying and current customers. It damages the whole company.

Here are a few employer branding and recruitment marketing problems you may be having: 

Brand Awareness

We have a great culture … but no one knows about it. All of our talent efforts are outbound. Top talent would come to us if we had better brand recognition and recruitment marketing programs in place. 

Employee Experience and Employer Brand Misalignment / Retention

We’re not doing a good job setting expectations of what it’s really like to work here. The reality of our employee experience doesn’t match the message. Our turnover is fast and high as a result.

Employee Advocacy & Storytelling

We have a highly engaged workforce, but we aren’t leveraging employee experiences to attract others like them. Even though they are willing and enthusiastic, we aren’t asking them to tap into their networks. 

Scaling the Story

Our recruiters are fantastic storytellers, but can only sell our culture on a one-to-one basis when we get someone on the phone. We need to scale our storytelling to reach and influence the right candidates faster. 

Diversity, Inclusion & Equity

We can’t advance our diversity and inclusion goals, because we have a terrible reputation among those that would be diverse to our company or our teams. We are doing the internal work, and have made progress. We need to share our progress and plans in a compelling way. We need to share the stories of how we support our employees so candidates can see all the work we’ve done to fix culture. 

Talent Engagement 

We have a talent community that only hears from us once a year. As a result, we have an unengaged database and a lot of wasted opportunity. 

So, why should your leadership care? 

Ultimately all these things are tied to the ability to attract the right talent, hire them quickly and/or retain them for the medium and long term. 

Get started & get leadership on board with employer branding

Our ebook shows you how to communicate the ROI of the employee story projects that are essential to your success. Plus, inside you’ll find special resources for communicating your needs and making a case for your project, like a custom ROI calculator and presentation deck template for presenting to leadership. 

Download the ebook