Make your employer brand believable (I)

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about employment branding in reality, it’s that an employment brand alone really won’t get you anywhere.

You might have your PR agency put together a fancy ad that resembles the key points of your employment brand and has imagery that encompasses the culture of your company. But even that only gets you so far.

There comes a point in a candidate’s experience of your employment brand’s message that they either buy into and believe your company’s vision and that you’re actually executing it, or they realize that an ad agency cleverly put together a “pile of BS” that’s too good to be true.

A lot of employment brands tend to end up with the latter, falling flat on their face, damaging the company’s brand and only pushing people away.

You could spend six months to a year talking to every employee in your company, analyzing every aspect of your culture, and discovering what makes your employment value proposition so unique in your market — but all of this really doesn’t matter unless you make it come to life in a way that we, as people, can grasp and buy into.

Once you have them there, everything else, every perk and medical plan, are simply justification for their belief that they belong with you.

So how do you do it? How do you make people believe? It’s easy: stop acting like it’s 2001, build an online campaign, and act human again.