What’s Your Employer Brand?

by Benjamin Yoskovitz

Hiring the best people isn’t about throwing the most money at them or the most perks. Certainly money and perks help, but it’s how you package those things that matters. And that’s where your employer brand comes in.

The war for talent is most certainly on; there are countless reports, stories and anecdotes of companies struggling to hire great people.

Part of that struggle is a lack of people in specific fields, but the bigger issue is that companies don’t brand themselves properly when pitching candidates.

Employer branding encompasses everything and anything a company and its employees do to market to candidates. The most successful corporate brands are so powerful, we immediately get an impression any time we “touch” them. Bringing that to hiring is what an employer brand is all about.

And employer branding isn’t solely for attracting people to your company, it’s also about retaining existing employees.

Here’s a great definition:

Simply put, your employer brand is your organization’s “trust mark” - the sum of your parts, what makes you unique, what you stand for, your personality. It communicates your employer brand promise, what’s in it for the employee in the business relationship.

If you haven’t thought of your employer brand, you need to. For startups and early stage technology companies this is critical - you don’t have the presence in the market of Google or other “known names” - but you’re working on something cool, you have a great team and you’re building an amazing culture. Focusing on developing an employer brand will help you present that to the market and keep existing employees aligned.

Some additional reading:

June 21st, 2007

8 Responses to “What’s Your Employer Brand?”

#1 Jeff June 22nd, 2007 at 12:00 am

Indeed! The smartest and the best really don’t want to work for just another faceless company, with no identity of a “brand”, or a “culture”. There are SO many dotcoms (and non-dotcoms) out there hiring, and looking for “the best” right now… - what’s to separate your “want” ad from all the want ads out there? It’s *Branding*. Tell us why we have to absolutely work for you.

Btw, guys, whatever happened to your site just a few hours ago? Only your origin could resolve, but even then, I hit into problems accessing it - it either gave me a 403, a “password-protected”, or failed to respond at all…

#2 Fred Ngo June 22nd, 2007 at 1:39 pm

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for writing. We ran into some DNS issues while transferring the site to a new server… But everything should be working now. Thanks for letting us know though!

Fred

#3 Jeff June 22nd, 2007 at 4:16 pm

heheh, sure thing, Fred! ;) I was just afraid you guys had taken the site down for relaunching later… Whew!!! At least now I’ll still be able to get my “standout jobs fix”… :P

Anyway yeah, server migrations can be tricky all right. You definitely need to have cooperating servers at both ends when doing the migration…

#4 Ben Yoskovitz June 22nd, 2007 at 9:54 pm

Jeff - I like the sound of that, “your standout jobs fix” … I hope we can keep feeding it!

#5 Jeff June 22nd, 2007 at 10:53 pm

lol :D yeah, keeping pushing out the stuff! Even if I do finally get my “ideal job”, you guys are really doing a great thing here…. This is almost like a “God-given mission” here, I feel - great companies deserve to matched up with great people - and vice versa - and when that happens, the world just becomes more beautiful…

… And that concludes my sermon for today. ;P

#6 Ben Yoskovitz June 22nd, 2007 at 11:12 pm

Jeff -You’re hired. Grassroots Evangelist…or maybe you’d like another title?

I’m glad you like what we’re doing - I’m curious - how did you hear about Standout Jobs?

#7 Jeff June 22nd, 2007 at 11:54 pm

WOW!! ya serious? :P we gotta talk.

How did I hear about standoutjobs? I think that’s kind of a tough question to answer, but you know what? I did my homework (just for you guys ;P), I *dug* through my browser history - and I think I finally found it. I found out about you guys from Giles Bowkett’s blog, specifically http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2007/06/job-ad-on-youtube.html ….

uh… now about that title… how about “preachin’ evangelist”? “raving mad evangelist”??? :P “standout preacher”???

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