Erin Lanciani, Chief People & Experience Officer, Sage Therapeutics.
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High growth, scaling nationally and the launch of a first product is an exhilarating and challenging time for all companies. Building your company as a great place to work in your local market is one thing, but now the challenge becomes, how do you attract talent nationally? Will people be excited by your mission; will they know who you are? One answer is clear: You need a talent brand, an employee value proposition or a people brand.
Living your company values is important, and as you scale, you want to be able to succinctly articulate why a candidate should want to join your workplace. Your culture is your secret sauce, the DNA of the company. But when you’re building a commercial organization perhaps with just one or a couple of people in each state, you must think about the best way to convince each candidate that your company is right for them. The message should be packaged in a way that both tells the story (in the voice of your existing team members) and makes it compelling to the right potential hires.
A talent brand can do just that for you. I will share the talent brand we developed at Sage in 2018: Enjoy the journey. It’s made up of three pillars: fulfillment of purposeful work, continually rise to the occasion and commitment to well-being. Each of those pillars shares the “give and get” of life at Sage — what we expect from our people and what our people can expect from us.
Creating our talent brand took time as we wanted to reflect the voices of our existing team. Months of research, reviews and feedback went into this process. But we came out with a talent brand that we loved and that seemed to resonate.
Call On The Experts
Finding the right external partners to supplement and enhance internal expertise is important. You know your culture well, but fresh eyes to bring it together is critical.
We began with a team of experts at creating innovative messaging and telling stories across digital platforms, compelling the right candidates to apply for advertised roles. Our partner helped us conduct research to figure out what made up our secret sauce. We asked our people two general questions:
• What brought you here?
• What makes you stay?
Next, we considered social media campaigns but found ourselves with many separate (and great!) ideas with no theme to connect them. At that point, we sought the help of a talent brand specialist creative agency to help ensure everything hung together under a strategy that stood the test of time. That meant honestly sharing the parts people may find tough, as well as celebrating the parts they may love. This approach creates a filter, letting only the most well-suited candidates into the recruitment funnel, strengthening internal teams through hires that are a good cultural match.
Our agency partner distilled the research we’d undertaken and used it to construct the strategic pillars that support the talent brand statement itself. This meant everything within our talent brand came from our very own team members and felt like our company.
With the right partners, you can create a complete talent brand strategy tool kit, a culture deck with your own distinct visual and written identity, photography and video to bring the talent brand to life, a social media tool kit with ready-made assets and copy, and a new careers site.
More Than Just A Talent Brand
Your talent brand is important in both attracting the candidates you need to the company and championing your culture internally. But we found it reached even further than these areas, in sometimes quite profound ways.
• Supporting the corporate brand: First, it should support your existing brand or the build of your corporate brand. Work together with your communications team to create a brand that brings your product and who you are together. It’s like different faces of the same coin.
• Real results: Take your talent brand into your recruitment build. Step up your inbound efforts as you lean on traditional recruitment marketing, particularly ramping up your social media campaigns. And if part of your strategy is hiring events around the country, as was the case for us, make sure to be as thoughtful as you can, weaving the talent brand into everything (the advertisements, the interview questions and experience, the onboarding process, etc.).
If you get it right, your new hires will play back your talent brand without really knowing what it is. They will mention your social presence and that they loved the culture that was evident throughout your hiring events. This will tell you if your talent brand and the culture it represents resonate with people.
• Rollout or not?: I believe that “rolling out” your talent brand is the wrong way to go. You do not need an official launch, rollout or communication. In documentation, don’t title it your “talent brand” — just refer to it in language everybody can understand, like “What makes us special?”
Just socialize it. Make it part of the way you speak. Use the process of creating the talent brand to get folks across the company familiar with it, present them with drafts, ask for feedback, get their input. By the time it “goes live,” it can already be an active, celebrated part of the company verbiage. Have the talent brand take spotlight on your career site and feature it in your social posts, too. But weave it into the story in an organic way.
Remember that, essentially, the talent brand exists in the fabric of how you operate. It’s not one specific point in time — it’s a journey.
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