Employer Branding

In this episode, Samantha and Steve tackle employer branding in engineering and B2B manufacturing, where the skills shortage makes retention and attraction critical. They discuss why employer branding often gets sidelined in marketing planning, the real cost of high staff, and why your working environment is a product you need to sell. You’ll hear practical advice on building an employer value proposition, using social proof authentically, and ensuring marketing and HR actually work together instead of in silos. If you’re serious about competing for talent in technical sectors, this conversation gives you a solid starting point.

We also wrote a blog on the subject, which can be found here.

Watch the video here, or read the transcript below:

Transcript

Samantha Tonge: Hi. I’m here with my Co-Founder of B2B Different talking about, Employer branding today. It’s something that is often overlooked despite the fact that in engineering and B2B manufacturing, skills, there’s this key issue both retaining and attracting. So, we thought we’d do a quick podcast to cover that.

It’s a huge subject. But it’s something that we wanted to cover, so Steve, any initial thoughts on this one?

Steve Judge: Only really reiterating your point earlier in that it’s often overlooked. a lot of companies ask about it and you can talk to them about what kind of processes and what kind of things you could do creatively to help engage staff.

But it’s often, more often not, it gets overlooked in the initial kind of marketing planning process. It’s often a secondary thought I don’t think people. Undervalue, it , but it does tend to be the last consideration, rather than a primary consideration alongside all of the other activity so that it’s all integrated.

So I do think it’s important that whatever you are doing internally or externally does need to gel together rather than act in total isolation from each other.

Samantha: Yes, absolutely. I think working in isolation is a big problem. a lot of marketers don’t necessarily work with HR and vice versa. Working in silos is a big problem. And it’s not just marketing communications. It’s not just about advertising PR, What you do as well, , the working environment is your product. and you’ve got to sell that internally and externally.

Steve: Yeah, the key thing there is it’s really branding, really trying to bring. It all together. Everything you want to communicate internally needs to be communicated internally. Otherwise you might have a slight disconnection between what you project outside and what your staff communicate to the outside world.

Samantha: Yeah, absolutely. It really does help the business. it’s ultimately bottom line, isn’t it?

Steve: You look at the most effective companies in the world, the biggest companies in the world, have a very strong grip on their employer branding.

The relationship with the company and their employees, is as important, if not more important in some instances than with the customers because your company’s people, and people need to be happy, engaged, driven to be able to deliver the services and the products,

Telling our customers we can deliver and obviously the customer service components become more important from a differentiation point of view. because a lot of products are similar. So why would you choose one over the other? A lot of that comes down to how you feel, how you engage and the communication you get from the companies that are after, your business, that’s very important, especially when there are so many options out there

Samantha: I think you touched on an excellent point there. Ultimately the company is the people, Your employees are the company. so if you get, your employer branding, right, you’re enhancing your company reputation, improving employee engagement, and boosting productivity. and one really interesting stat I found as well: the average cost to replace an employee is six to nine months salary. you’ve got your recruiter, your advertising of the job, you training them, there’s time to get them onboarded, and then you need time for them to get, proficient. If you’ve got high staff turnover, It’s a very expensive problem to have.

Steve: Even if you’re lucky enough, you’re in a sector where there’s a, proliferation of skills (which this isn’t a sector where there is, , this is a sector where, there is a skill shortage)there’s an aging, skills base. and it’s getting harder and harder to encourage. younger people into it. it’s obviously getting better, but we still need more people in these very important sectors to the economy.

Samantha: I even know of one situation where, an engineer was so experienced and they took so long to, replace him they had to replace him with two engineers because they weren’t able to do the job so quickly because they didn’t have decades of knowledge. so you got to think about that as well, passing knowledge down

Steve: In that instance, you’ve also got the problem of, knowledge transfer just experience in these areas. knowing certain ways of doing things can save you a lot of time and money. Learning that that’s the right way to do things. there’s a lot of trial and error, especially in engineering and, you know, not everything that’s scientifically written down on, calculated on a piece of paper does actually behave exactly the way you want it to.

There are tolerances and lots of other things as part of the product development process when you’ve been doing it for those years, you know how to solve. You can look at something and say, that’s not going to work. Even though on paper it says it should,

So looking at the stages of where you’d start, you know, the, what’s the start of trying to build a strong employer brand? I guess the first thing is trying to find out where you are.
We are talking about basic gap analysis activities, so. Interviews with, employees, focus groups, possibly surveys on what they feel, about the company, the brand, the product, the people, the place, the working environment. Find out how they feel, ask them for ideas on, where they think you could improve.

The idea is to get a base of where you are. Because if you don’t know where you are, then where can you go? But one thing is sure you’ll get some very valuable feedback, and some really good insights. from your, team.

I would also strongly recommend that, elements of that audit, are anonymous so people can really open up and give you their honest truth. and then that will give you your strong foundation to start.
Really what you’re looking to develop is your employer value proposition, which would be bespoke to your business. It’s everything you would like. Working at your place of work to be. And that’s from employee engagement, communication, even the environment, remote working policies, hybrid policies, fruit bowls around the office, all the things that make a healthy workplace and somewhere people want to come to and stay to work.

Samantha: It’s a very similar process to selling your products and services. You want to know what’s important to your customers. In this case, it’s your employees. You want to know where you are as a business and where you want to be as a business.

I think that second part is really important. A lot of companies do an employer survey every year. They pat themselves on the back, but they put it in the filing cabinet and forget about it. It’s really important to then take it. Okay, great. What can we improve? And if you are already doing really well, well, okay, we need to make sure that everyone knows we’re doing really well and we’re doing all these amazing things.

It also means that you know what to say to external people for potential employees to attract talent.
I think the key with that also, the use of social media be as real as possible And it’s part of your overall. Content strategy team or internal culture. Communicating values, success stories within teams and staff to the external world will give other people looking to come and work for you. That really nice, warm feeling that you’re a good place to work.

And, you’d be surprised as well, customers tend to interact with those posts more than the ones you might hope they interact with because they like to, you know, face their name. They start to feel like they know you as business if they know who your team are and what they’re doing.

Steve: People stories always get more engagement than product or service stories

Samantha: Always.

Steve: I think a lot of the algorithms now are favouring more personal, more kind of contextual conversations rather than just pure product. people like to hear anecdotes, they like to hear experiences, they like to hear stories.

That’s never changed, that’s not a revolution. Communicating that culture piece and projecting the internal outside. Does require a bit more thinking, but it pays off in the end. Think again about the numbers you mentioned earlier about the time it takes or the cost of employment to get someone to replace someone that’s hard to replace, especially in this sector, that cost is not as much as being able to develop the employee brand and build up that, pool of people queuing at the door rather than going out, posting on boards, you know, going out to all the agencies, having inward bound inquiries. Have a stack of people in a folder that have contacted you and you can contact them when you’re ready.

Samantha: And think about, candidates as well and making sure they have a good experience. I think a lot of. companies forget that it’s a two-way thing they treat people poorly. ghost them. instead of just saying, we had too many applicants, or, we hired someone insisting on five interviews when everyone’s time poor.

Think about it from their point of view as well as your point of view. and that there’s a few little best practices that we wanted to touch on, There’s a blog that goes into a lot more detail about this. As , it’s a huge subject. You need to make sure that you’re consistent. All your communications align with your employer brand, being transparent, internally and externally. I think sometimes companies are frightened to be open with employees, and get your employees involved in writing the values, your mission and your brand proposition

Steve: So, we’ve got the employer brand, complete transparency all the way through. What are your values? What’s the mission? What kind of culture do you want to harbour? What kind of culture do you want to become? visions are there to drive towards.

A vision is the goal to continually strive to be. in the same way your employer brand could be, we aim to be the X, Y, z, this is what we are constantly working hard to deliver for you, for our customers, and everyone that comes into contact with us. this is our dream. so I think it can be quite a creative process as well. And also something that can be very exciting for the teams to get involved with, get people engaged and get the best out of them. Help them realise their goals and dreams as well.

Samantha: Something I really need to drum in. Most clients have worked with. If they’re doing employer branding, they’re either focusing on new graduates and, new skills coming into the business, or they, focusing on internal communications and making sure that their existing employees are engaged.

But you need to make sure that you’re doing both. and always doing both . It’s not a case of, waiting for the job opening that’s too late. You want people to have already heard of you and want to work for you. it really does need to be 50 50.

And talk about those job openings. I had a couple of stats, from a great company called Flexibility Works. they help companies including quite a few manufacturers, get flexible working in those environments.

That’s what they specialise in. And they’ve done some research. That shows that one in five existing workers are unaware that their employer offers flexible working. they’ve also seen that 80% of employers offer flexible work, but only 30% of job ads mention it. which really. brings it home.
Whatever you are doing right, make sure that everyone internally and externally knows about it, because that will really help you. So again, I think marketing departments need to make sure that they’re working really closely with HR. The senior team obviously need to be working to make sure that it all happens, that they’ve got this great culture. But once you have, make sure people know about it.

Steve: Yep. that’s a good point. and just one other, thing to add in there is there’s obviously the good things. One of the things that SMEs we found especially is that SMEs don’t talk about their charitable endeavours. They see it sometimes as embarrassing to talk about because, what’s the big deal? But actually it is a big deal and should be celebrated. It’s something that your staff can celebrate, it’s another, aspect that could help you stand out

Show how good a company you are not just in the services and the products you do and the team, but you’re ethical that you’ve got moral standing and that you do support community that’s very underutilized, because a lot of people feel a little bit guilty for saying it they don’t want to use it as marketing because that’s not why they do it, and that’s not why you do it at all. But if people don’t know you do it, they don’t know that you are the kind of company that they might want to work with. There’s no shame whatsoever in saying that.

Samantha: And if you are feeling guilty about, using charity work that you’ve done in your marketing, think about the boost that you are doing for the charity by boosting their name.

Steve: I think that kind of just about rounds up the basics, doesn’t it? And then, you’ve mentioned the article on the site, which we’re going into a bit more detail. And we are more than happy either of us, to jump on a call to talk about it.