Maximising marketing to attract and retain talent: Employer Branding

Employer branding is the term we use to describe marketing aimed at attracting and retaining staff. Despite the skill shortages in the sector, employer branding is often overlooked in engineering and manufacturing.

Who are you targeting?

The same principles you use to market to customers apply. Step one is determining your target audience. You need to ask: Who are you trying to reach? What skills do you need? What media do they use?

Another thing to think about is external potential employees Vs internal employees. Most businesses focus on one or the other – but both are vital. You want to retain employees: Research shows that the average cost of replacing an employee is six to nine months’ salary. This includes expenses such as advertising, training, onboarding, extra management and lost productivity. Bringing someone up to speed in a specialised environment like engineering and manufacturing can often take even longer than average. All of these costs have a direct impact on your bottom line.

However, you cannot grow without growing staff, and with the best will in the world, you will always lose some employees. New ideas and outside viewpoints are also essential for business and product innovation.

With your external employer branding, don’t overfocus on new graduates or those with existing skills and expertise; you will need both. While you don’t want to miss out on the cream of the crop of new apprentices and graduates, you also don’t want to find yourself in trouble because a long-serving member of staff suddenly leaves.

Building a strong employer brand

You may need a slightly different brand proposition and messaging for your employer branding, but the same principles apply. See our blog on brand here. If you cannot articulate your brand, you cannot be employer brand-focused, so the first step is coming up with the employer brand proposition.

There are a few ways to do this, but we use Wolff Olins’ “Brand Butterfly” model (BCG has a very similar model). The idea is that you look at “what is wrong with the world of employees/potential employees” and “what is special about you,” and the overlap is your brand proposition.

This is easier than creating your overall brand proposition because you already have staff who will give you the exact information you need. However, you may find at this stage that there is not enough overlap and that you need to rethink what you are offering (not just financially). If your staff retention is poor, this is likely to be the case.

Once you have your proposition and the messaging that comes from it, you need to be consistent and continually get that message out there. Internal staff need to be consistently reminded of what is on offer, and you want potential employees to want to work for you before you even have a position open. If they already have a good opinion of you, they are far more likely to apply – they may even consider jumping ship even if they haven’t been actively looking for a new job.

Achieving your Employer Branding goals

Just like any marketing plan, your employer branding needs SMART objectives (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Time-Bound).

Like all objectives, these should stem from business objectives (e.g., growth targets). In the case of employer branding, there will also be HR objectives. These need to be both long-term and short-term objectives.

Employer branding objectives could be an % increase of applications per role per year, improving brand recognition at career fairs (what % has already heard of the company), or boosting employee retention.

Without objectives, you cannot measure success.

Have a plan

As they say, a goal without a plan is just a wish. You should have a specific marketing plan for your employer branding. There are many different marketing plan templates – many of which are as good for your employer brand plan as for your overall marketing plan.

I prefer to use PR Smith’s SOSTAC® planning model as it helps you ensure that you have covered every element and it is circular, making sure that corrections are made where necessary.

How to reach your audience

The communication tactics and channels you use will be different from the ones you use for customers. That’s not to say that all messages will only be for one audience or another – you will find that there is a lot of crossover, but your audience will be in places your customers aren’t and vice versa.

Internal:

Your internal audience – your existing employees are going to be the easiest to reach. They are a captive audience. You can run anonymous surveys (that can feed back into your brand), you can send regular newsletters, hold quarterly updates to keep them informed etc. Don’t just rely on employees looking the benefits up on your HR portal – actively remind them. There has been more than one employee who has switched jobs for a benefit that their existing employer offered.

You also need to consider the environment your teams are working in as part of your communication – particularly for those who work on-premises. What does it say about you as an employer?

External:

You may need to do some research to find out where your external audience is, and you might find that the mix of channels is quite different from that of your customers. You also need to remember that the channel mix needs to reflect the fact that you want people to want to work for you before they are looking for a job—don’t wait until you have a job opening.

Take social media as an example. LinkedIn is often used regularly by some types of professionals, and it may be somewhere that graduates look for jobs, but it isn’t necessarily the only channel you should be using. For example, younger audiences use TikTok and YouTube, and some older audiences are never on LinkedIn and even use other platforms, such as Indeed, when they are job hunting, but they are on Facebook.

When you advertise for a role, make sure that it includes the messaging that has come out of your research, and don’t forget to include what is most important to your audience. For example, flexible working is very attractive to potential employees, yet while 80% of employers offer flexible work, only 30% mention it in their job ads (Flexibility Works).

Breaking Down Silos

Just like with any area of marketing, you cannot optimise your employer branding by working in silos. Just like you cannot create a good marketing plan for customers without involvement from customer and product experts and the marketing team, you cannot create a good employer brand without marketing and HR working closely together.

The HR department knows what the business’s recruitment needs are and should have long-term and short-term objectives. However, they are not experts in marketing communications and will need the marketing department to take the lead on that. Even job ads should be collaborative so that they meet HR’s standards while still reflecting the brand and messaging.

All too often, the HR department is left to handle all of the employer branding tasks, or worse, HR and Marketing are both doing their thing without talking to each other. If you are in marketing, actively approach HR; if you are in HR, approach marketing. Management should facilitate this and give the marketing department some KPIs that are connected to employer branding, not just sales.

Conclusion

If you’re reading this, chances are that you are already a great employer. Now, it’s time to let others know. Don’t wait until you advertise a job to showcase what makes your organisation special. Be proactive in sharing your values, achievements, and benefits.

By focusing on employer branding, you’re not only attracting and retaining talent but also building a stronger, more resilient business for the future.

Watch out for our podcast on Employer Branding coming soon!

Author: Samantha Tonge, Co-Founder