Employer Branding Part 5:
Setting Sail for your Employer Brand

Like beacons, employ­er brands radi­ate orien­ta­tion in their own unique way, to the inside as well as the outside and quite often with exis­ten­tial rele­vance to the enter­pris­es. For, with the pandem­ic ceas­ing, the fluc­tu­a­tion of employ­ees is increas­ing. Every fifth employ­er is current­ly receiv­ing more resig­na­tions than before 2020. The same is true of the build­ing and real estate indus­try where the fluc­tu­a­tion rate was substan­tial even before 2019: 36.6 % in the build­ing sector, 30 % in real estate*. In this envi­ron­ment, employ­er brand­ing is a support­ing element in the attempt to retain or recruit high­ly moti­vat­ed skilled workers.

Laying a Sound Foun­da­tion: Employ­er Value Propo­si­tion (EVP)

In our Valdivia Expert Tip Series – Employ­er Brand­ing“, we have so far described three essen­tial pillars of a success­ful employ­er brand:

• Open-mind­ed and honest self-assessment
• Appre­ci­a­tion for each indi­vid­ual as the core of good copro­rate culture
• Promot­ing diver­si­ty as a recipe for success and a core char­ac­ter­is­tic of modern enterpreneurship

Now it is time to put things into prac­tice. The first step will be your Employ­er Value Propo­si­tion (EVP), which is the foun­da­tion of your employ­er brand. It will serve as the crucial guide­line for how you present your­self on the job market as well as with­in your compa­ny. For that reason, you should put your EVP in writ­ing and declare it offi­cial­ly bind­ing for use in all HR-relat­ed areas. A solid EVP will answer the follow­ing ques­tions as clear­ly and easy-to-under­stand as possible:

• What do we as an employ­er stand for; which values and prin­ci­ples do we observe?
• Which advan­tages, extra bene­fits, and bonus­es do we offer? What about career options, further educa­tion and train­ings as well as flex­i­bil­i­ty in the work flow (remote work­ing, work­ing-time accounts, fami­ly-friend­li­ness, etc)?
• What is the corpo­rate culture we prac­tice? How do we tack­le ques­tions like equal oppor­tu­ni­ties, diver­si­ty, etc as well as conflicts and bullying?

Feel free to involve your staff in the word­ing process: gath­er sugges­tions, keep your employ­ees post­ed – also on inter­me­di­ate progress – and initi­ate votings on suit­able aspects. Do not shy away from involv­ing experts for HR market­ing. After all, you want the brand to be fully func­tion­al – which neces­sar­i­ly inludes consis­tent design and up-to-date language.

Support­ing Compo­nents: Media and Fields of Application

As soon as the EVP is ‘hard­ened and tampered’ and ‘robust’, it is time to make your employ­er brand come to life. In the coming months, we will detail on indi­vid­ual elements of this in our Valdivia Expert Tips. Here is a first over­iew of the most impor­tant media and touch points in which your employ­er brand should be visi­ble and tangible:

• Job open­ings in any shape or form, i.e. not only clas­sic adver­tise­ments but also social media posts, videos as well as the Carrer/Jobs section on your website
• The full range of gener­ic commu­ni­ca­tion with your employ­ees: announce­ments, stan­dard messages, employ­er maga­zines and newslet­ters, the intranet
• ‘Roadmaps’ and elements of infor­ma­tion for job inter­views and on-board­ing processes
• HR-rele­vant press releases
• The look and feel of your presen­ta­tion at HR fairs and recruit­ing events

A Report­ing Scheme for Sustain­abil­i­ty and Posi­tive Impulses

The day-to-day consis­ten­cy with which we put into prac­tice an employ­er brand will make or break its success. That is why we recom­mend you assign an Employ­er Brand­ing Offi­cer who accom­pa­nies the imple­men­ta­tion process and inter­venes in case of devi­a­tion. Addi­tion­al­ly, a broad panel should audit the devel­op­ment progress on a regu­lar basis. This does not always have to be about diffi­cul­ties: expe­ri­ence shows that active­ly culti­vat­ing your employ­er brand will often trig­ger even more open­ness and novel ideas. And you will not want to miss out on that, will you?

*Feder­al Statis­ti­cal Office (Statis­tis­ches Bunde­samt) 2021, based on 2019 job market data