Welcome to the final part of Comparably’s five-part series on employer brand. You can find the previous articles here, here, here, and here. Today we’re talking about the key differences between employer brand and recruitment marketing in definition and in action.
Employer brand and recruitment marketing are both HR buzzwords that have arrived in popular usage over the past decade or two. When combined into a successful campaign, significant positive results can be reached. The two have a deep symbiotic relationship, but to specialists in each discipline, the differences in definition are key.
For HR professionals, of course, the distinction between employer brand and recruitment marketing is vast and crucial to an understanding of the entire hiring and culture-building process.
Employer branding is all about defining a company’s identity as a place to work.
Recruitment marketing is the process of taking that brand and promoting it for the practical purpose of attracting top talent to the company.
Looking at the talent acquisition funnel, employer branding is at the top. That brand is based largely on employees’ experiential opinions regarding working for their company. At the middle and bottom of the funnel is recruitment marketing, which is ultimately about more traditional marketing in order to improve talent pipelines.
The order they happen is important. Employer branding always comes first, with recruitment marketing picking up the baton at a point when that brand is focused and ready. And “focused and ready” is key here, as a half-baked brand is not going to travel well, regardless of any maneuvering on the part of recruitment marketing efforts.
Recruitment marketing methods are expected to change, but employer brands need to remains consistent to be effective. There are always going to be new strategies on how to get an employer brand in front of the right sets of eyes, but too much shifting in terms of brand can instantly raise alarms in the minds of job seekers, especially savvy young ones.
According to LinkedIn, three-quarters of candidates will research a company’s reputation as an employer before deciding whether or not to apply for a position at that company. And of those people, 69% won’t apply if that reputation search sets off any internal alarms. The era when any respectable company could get by with a bad reputation as a workplace is quickly drawing to a close, if it hasn’t ended already.
A positive employer brand can help with improving the three key hiring metrics: time-to-hire, cost-to-hire, and quality-of-hire. That successful brand is reached via what can be a very lengthy process of defining the Employer Value Proposition (EVP), then generating ideal candidate personae models, while managing the company’s reputation, and – most profoundly – actually building a culture worthy of a strong employer brand in the first place.
In defining employer brand, consistency itself is the currency of the land. And it is the result of the real hard work done on internal culture to keep current employees satisfied and happy to spread the word about the brand organically. Small adjustments in the brand are okay and largely unavoidable in terms of trying to hone on ideal target candidate models, but consistency is key.
In recruitment marketing, strategies change, content methods are adjusted, and new ideas come along often: that newness and ability to reinvent methods is how recruitment marketing can be so effective. Companies with the most cutting-edge recruitment marketing techniques have a competitive advantage over other companies that may be sleeping on the job in that regard.
The main parts of recruitment marketing are communicating with candidates via social media and other methods, writing effective job opening posts, creating worthwhile content that includes a real presence from the company’s employees, and creating general awareness of your company as a great place to work.
Remember, it’s key to put yourself in the shoes of a talented jobseeker in the current job market, and most certainly in tech. As a confident jobseeker, the number of companies one has to choose from are often enormous. That job seeker has the luxury of picking a company that both produces something he or she is interested in and that also seems like a great place to work. A company builds an attractive nest for that job seeker to call their home via a strong employer brand, and – if we’re going to continue the avian metaphor – recruitment marketing is the birdsong of contentment that follows.
And that birdsong goes out over channels like a company’s career site, blog, talent networking events, and social media posts, with the purpose of inbound marketing, i.e. maintaining a constant interest in a company as an employer whether it is currently hiring for a particular position or not. Eventually, successful inbound marketing of a compelling employer brand can lead to a pool of top applications to choose from when an opening does pop up needing to be filled.
The truth of the employer branding vs recruitment marketing debate is a bit grey, it must be said. It’s easy to say that employer branding is about the way a company’s name “makes you feel,” and that recruitment marketing is about the practical marketing of that brand in order to enrich job prospects for the company. Despite fairly clear definitions, however, the two terms have been misused – and used interchangeably.- enough at this point that in order to be an effective HR specialist, one has to constantly recognize what the difference is while remembering that some people may mean one when they say the other, while others will mean both when they say either. Every term that enters the business lexicon has to clear the hurdles of popular usage, and the fact is that employer brand and recruitment marketing – while different ideas – are also similar concepts that entered our understanding at around the same point in history.
As long as the overall concepts are grasped, combined, and acted upon, however, an employer branding campaign can attract discerning talent in an ever-more-sophisticated hiring landscape.
We’re not going to factor ourselves into these pieces, but if you’d like to learn more about us please visit Comparably to learn more about the company and the tools we offer.
This article is the fourth part of a 5-part series on employer branding. The other parts of this series are available here: I: Employer Brand Definition, Strategy, & Benefits. II: 12 Examples of Great Employer Brands III: The Best Employer Branding Software Solutions. IV: New Employer Branding Ideas.
