case study employer branding

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Inspiring case studies for companies looking to transform their employer brand.

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Employer branding is a discipline that has grown in prominence in recent years. It combines the best of HR (talent acquisition and retention) with the best of marketing (strategic brand management) to help identify a distinct positioning territory. Emerging as a new area of emphasis, firms are grappling to figure out how to structure and integrate the two functions. To better understand how some firms are doing this successfully, I sought insight from Hattie Ghaui, Research Director at Wiser, a firm that helps brands strengthen their employer brands and connect with the best talent for their business. Below, Ghaui shares her perspective on the process of strengthening an employer brand and a couple of case studies.

Kimberly A. Whitler: Employer branding is a newer concept. Can you talk a little about your company’s role in helping firms develop their employer brands?

Hattie Ghaui : Sure, Wiser has quite a hybrid offering. We’re an award-winning employer branding agency, based in the U.K., that brings together research, creative and recruitment expertise under one roof. We’re on a mission to change the way people think about work, and the way businesses think about talent. To do this, our Research & Insights team consults businesses on how to develop their employee value proposition (EVP) and employer brand strategies, and our creative teams use copywriting, branding, design, film-making, marketing and software engineering skills to bring these employer brands to life. We’ve worked with a number of great brands such as Nike, Kraft Heinz, Fidelity International, Lloyd’s of London, Knight Frank and others to transform their employer brands and attract the right talent

Whitler: Can you share an example of a company that was able to improve talent acquisition/retention metrics through better employer branding? 

Ghaui : We have several case studies but perhaps the best examples of elevating a company's employer brand for a specific audience and therefore increasing applications in line with their strategic objectives are Lloyd’s of London and Knight Frank .

 For Lloyd’s, we created an overarching emerging talent campaign for its 2019/20 application cycle, starting with a piece of intensive research and strategy work that resulted in a new careers website and video suite. The aim was to diversify the emerging talent application pool (specifically BAME and female applications) and modernize the Lloyd’s brand for a student audience ( see early careers microsite here ). We have several metrics that highlight the success. For example, the site saw 25000+ views in the first two months of its launch from September 2019 (42% female) and 5000+ applications. The number of female applicants increased by 8% (YoY) and they had a 14.6% increase in BAME applicants YoY (48% of all applicants).

For Knight Frank, our first project was to work with their team to build a new early careers brand for the firm in the U.K. It needed to address the lack of awareness students (who don’t study a property-related degree) have of the opportunities within the property industry. We were asked to research and develop an early careers value proposition for Knight Frank, and then create an early careers microsite , graduate campaign video and internship video series for use in marketing and campus engagement activity.. The impact of the campaign can be seen in this year’s internship programme intake, which Knight Frank, standing by their commitment to future talent in tumultuous year, chose to run as a virtual insight programme 72% of the intern group had non-real estate degree backgrounds; 55% of the intern group was female; 20% of the interns were BAME; and the target number of applications was exceeded by 15%.

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Whitler: What was the process you used?

Ghaui : Our process is research-led. We start with value proposition research that has an internal and external focus. We’ll analyze the company’s current employer brand, conduct interviews with existing employees and run focus groups with key stakeholders. We’ve developed a bespoke quantitative methodology to track people’s career priorities so we can understand how a company matches up to their expectations and where there may be gaps. We then turn our attention to external perceptions, talent mapping and competitor benchmarking. We’ll conduct interviews with industry experts and run focus groups with the target talent audiences.

 Once the data gathering phases are complete, our team will pull together a set of insights and recommendations for how your business can connect with the right talent and motivate them to drive your business goals forward. This research phase culminates in a distilled Employee Value Proposition narrative, with its key supporting messages, as well as employer brand and tone of voice guidelines.

Our creative teams will then work with the client to bring the chosen creative concepts and activation plans to life - designing and developing websites and branded assets, filming attraction and culture videos, and launching marketing initiatives.

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How Unilever Developed a New EVP and Employer Brand

Unilever is a global company selling fast-moving consumer goods, whose purpose it is to make sustainable living commonplace. You will recognize consumer brands such as Axe/Lynx, Ben & Jerry’s, Dermalogica, Dollar Shave Club, Dove, Hellmann’s, Knorr, Lipton, and Magnum. But what about the employer brand?

Anuradha Razdan is Vice President HR, Home Care and Head of Global Talent Attraction and Employer Brand at Unilever. In this interview, she talks us through the culture and purpose of the company, and about how they recently developed and launched a new employer value proposition (EVP).

Have a listen to the episode below, keep reading for a summary and be sure to subscribe to the  Employer Branding Podcast .

Listen on  Apple Podcasts ,  Stitcher Radio ,  Google Play  or  SoundCloud .

How would you describe the culture at Unilever?

When I joined Unilever, surprisingly, I didn’t know much about the company. Only that it was the most aspirational employer that came to hire at our campus. It was the company that everyone wanted to be a part of, sure I knew some of the consumer brands but not the intricacies of the business. Anyone who made it through the Unilever interview process felt so thoroughly selected, the interview process was a success in itself.

Why I’ve stayed on is another matter. First and foremost, this is a business that cares about making a difference. Of course, we want to create results and profits, but we also want to create a better world, and we want our employees and stakeholders to be part of this journey. The values and professional ethics that stem from the legacy that Unilever has, and that has kept us with the larger purpose, it spoils you. It’s a culture that makes you want to come in and give your best every day. 20 years down the line, I’ve been through so many experiences and roles, and yet there has been no sense of fatigue & boredom, and that has kept me going.

How is sustainability part of the business strategy?

What is unique with Unilever is that the business strategy has sustainability at its heart. The way we build our brands and the way we craft processes across the business are all sustainable by design. We have a clear roadmap and goals that we have set across the next four or five years. It’s at the heart of everything we do, and everyone who is a part of Unilever is enrolled in this, feels bought into this and feels proud of this.

What talent challenges are you faced with?

Today our attractiveness as an employer is at an all-time high, as we measure it through campus surveys, university scores across the world. We’re the #1 employer of choice in more than 40 markets where we hire.

But even as we raise the bar on our attractiveness, our talent context is being disrupted, just like our customers and channels are being disrupted. The talent canvas is no longer homogenous, and the talent needs in different parts of our business are different, and therefore there is no one-size-fits-all. Hence, there is a need for us to be able to shape and deliver a talent strategy that can be successful in a world of seeming paradoxes. On the one hand, you have surplus talent as technology seeks to replace people. Equally, you have talent shortages in areas where you want to ramp up skills, whether it’s digital or precision marketing – these are where we need to build skills for the future, but yet there are gaps. There is a dichotomy of too little and not enough at the same time.

Tell us about your employer brand strategy?

The employer brand strategy draws from our talent challenges; the need to be attractive in a world that is increasingly disrupted. There is no one employer brand campaign or message. Of course, there is a core EVP but other than that; you can’t have one global employer brand and rest on that. Every employer brand battle, every talent challenge is won in the market, that’s where the moment of truth is. That’s at the heart of our employer brand strategy.

Equally, it’s moving away from a view where you want to win everywhere to winning where it matters. From a consistent approach to a differentiated approach depending on what the specific micro-segments you want to hire are.

It’s no longer about one top-down campaign and attractiveness that is communicated by the company. That is no longer the single source of truth. Talent is everywhere, and there are conversations about you, around you that you don’t control. Therefore the employer brand strategy has to be something which is very consistent with the real employee experience. And thus it’s not an outside-in, but an inside-out employer brand strategy.

How did you develop the new EVP?

Unilever is a company that builds excellent brands; our employer brand has to be a reflection of this. We approached this employer brand development just like we craft any of our product brands. We completed an exhaustive piece of research, covering 300 internal and external voices, we benchmarked our competitors, and other employer brands we think are aspirational. And we extensively tested and validated this with talent internally, externally, marketing leaders, our different target audiences, and in that process, we learned that for an employer brand to make an impact, it has to be credible, relevant, differentiating and aspirational.

What is the new EVP?

Unilever is a business that genuinely cares about making a difference, and this is at the core of our employer brand and EVP. When you join Unilever, it is not just a job; you are joining a movement to create a better business, a better world, and a better you . You are more than your job title because you create a much bigger impact in the world through the work that you do.

At the heart of our value proposition is that we build leaders… we develop leaders for Unilever, and Unilever leaders go on to be leaders elsewhere in the world.

What pillars underpin the EVP?

• Purpose Power – sustainability is at the core of everything we do. The power of purpose is at the heart of our employee experience, where we say that you are empowered to make a positive impact on the world and our business, by bringing your purpose into action. This is more than a job; this is an opportunity to make a difference by doing something you’re passionate about.
• Be the Catalyst – you can be a catalyst for change in the world, you can unleash your curiosity, you can disrupt processes, you can use your pioneering spirit to make things happen.
• Brilliantly Different Together – like our product brands are all different, and yet they come together under one Unilever umbrella. As individuals, we are all different and yet; we can bring our real selves to work. In Unilever, we can combine our differences to achieve greater things.
• Go Beyond – this is not just a company, this a place where you can go beyond, with the quality of experiences, the quality of interactions and when you give more, and you get more.

These four pillars make the EVP uniquely Unilever, especially Purpose Power.

How do you communicate and activate this?

It’s very easy to come up with a statement, a few words which we all get excited about. But at the end of the day, it has to be translated and has to help us win the best talent in the various markets where we win the employer brand battles. What’s happening next is that we will deploy a number of global and local channels; digital, face-to-face to give a wider reach to our employee value proposition.

We also created a hero campaign which is designed to boost brand awareness, it’s called “You’re more than your job title,” and it brings out this whole notion of purpose power which is so core to us as a brand. And we believe this will generate a lot of conversations and serve as a vehicle for employee advocacy.

Finally, we’re not the people who build the employer brand. It’s our employees, it’s our employer brand managers in over 50 markets, and they will work with us to tailor strategies and local activation ideas to bring this to life.

What hard lessons can you share with us?

One can take attractiveness of a company, of an employer brand for granted until it goes away. I was part of a business which always enjoyed the position of being very attractive and getting the best of the best talent. We heard conversations in the business along the lines of “is this effort really worth it, why should we put so much budget and resource into employer brand?”.

And that is the point where you’re really at the edge of the cliff, and that’s a real watch out. In that business at that point in time, we took our foot off the pedal, and nothing happened in the first few years because obviously, the power of an employer brand is not something that fades in a year or two. But slowly and slowly we started seeing the impact in the quality of talent that would turn up for interviews, in the number of people who would accept other offers and who would list other competitors as dream employers. We saw rankings beginning to dip, and more important than any ranking is the quality of talent that you hire.

This is not something that shows up immediately, but luckily for us, some of these indicators gave us a real jolt, and we reset and came back with a bang. That was a real moment of humility, and it’s a real lesson I will not forget.

How do you measure ROI on employer brand?

The return on investment of an employer brand is bigger than what one might see through metrics and measurement tools. It’s the intangible impact which is the biggest.

How would I know this? If you want to measure the impact of an initiative you have to look at three things:

• What are the conversations in the hallways?
• What is the external press saying about this? 
• What are the metrics saying? 

We look at metrics such as the volume of applicants and how many accept offers etc. One very interesting measurement is the Employer Brand Index which listens to social media and conversations taking place online, to come to a compositive view of what the success of the employer brand is, and this is something we can track over time.

What are your top 3 tips to employer brand managers?

• Only take this role on if you feel real passion and if you feel it in your bones. Because employer brand is a thing you cannot do as one more thing, it’s not just a job you have to feel true passion for this. Have a clear rationale as to why employer brand makes sense to your business and stick to that no matter what the challenges or questions might be internally.
• Learn from the marketers in your business. Use the same techniques and build a science around employer brand, it’s not just a thing that’s fluffy and creative.
• The more you enroll employees and business leaders to take ownership of this, the easier your work becomes because then you create a cascading impact which is far greater than the effort you have to put in.

Check out the Unilever Career site.

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Employer Branding and EVP: 3 Ways Sky Does it Right (case study)

Employer Branding and EVP: 3 Ways Sky Does it Right

#1. employer brand strategy.

• to create an EVP that was compelling and yet flexible enough to meet the range of roles they recruit for at Sky,
• but also one that would work across territories
• We’re fans too
• Be brilliant
• Embrace pace
• Together we can      

#3. Activate your Employer Brand

How to get started (3 tips).

• Align with consumer and corporate brand teams – Educate them in terms of the values the employer brand brings, how it all fits together, etc. For us, the ‘in’ was working together on the articulation of our purpose and values that really gave us an opportunity to align all of our research and they were very close then to the employer brand development. So, find an in!
• Secondly: base what you do on insights – We find out through research and looking externally what the current perception of Sky is. This was extremely useful when it came down to think about how to better shape that perception going forward. Validation is crucial too, so for us testing our messaging in the market and internally was essential in making sure that what we were creating was both attractive and reflective of the current experience.
• Keep the user in mind – For us, that was about how do we keep it practical and how do we make sure that we have the right kind of support for our recruiters (we have easy to use toolkits and brand books as part of this).

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Why We Need to Rethink “Employer Brand”

by Ken Banta and Michael Watras

Summary .   

Today, a strong employer brand is routinely seen as a critical asset to attract, engage, and retain the best people. But too often its management is left to HR, leaving it disconnected from the corporate brand and the core drivers of the business. What should organizations do instead? First, create a talent framework that lays out the key qualities, behaviors, and motivations C-suite managers want to see in their workforce. Next, validate the talent framework with key stakeholders, especially customer-facing employees. Finally, embed the talent framework into the business by incentivizing the right behaviors.

Today, a strong employer brand is seen as a critical way to attract, engage, and retain the best people. At a time when top talent is highly mobile, those are certainly laudable goals. But is building a special, separate employer brand the way to achieve them? No.

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