Chapter 6
Elephant: Your Employer Brand Isn’t Compelling
When it comes to attracting talent, your employer brand is everything. It’s your calling card to would-be unicorns. For companies that aren’t Google or Facebook or another giant, a recruiter can provide the first taste of your employer brand. You want them to keep your good reputation intact.
Bryan Chaney, director of employer brand and talent attraction at online recruitment company Indeed, put it this way when he was a guest on the EI Recruiter podcast: “Employer brand is all about the story. If we’re telling a story that doesn’t line up with the actual experience, what might not be a talent attraction problem will turn into an employee engagement and employee retention problem.”
Recruiters must tell a good story to get talent through the door. But then the actual employee experience must align with that story. If the two pieces are out of alignment, the new employees will become disenchanted—fast.
A stellar employer brand doesn’t happen by accident. Just like everything else, a good employer brand comes from the top. It starts with the CEO consciously thinking about what type of environment he would like to cultivate. People leaders must constantly strive to make sure the culture reflects their highest ideals. What is allowed? What is celebrated? To what does leadership turn a blind eye—and how does that affect people and operations at every level? These are all questions you should be able to answer for potential employees.
A 2018 Stanford study led by Shelley Correll, head of Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and Alison Wynn, a postdoctoral researcher at the institute, bore out the importance of developing a strong employer brand to attract top-notch talent. Researchers attended 84 recruiting sessions for top tech firms. These sessions were overwhelmingly led by white men who made frequent references to “geek culture” touchstones such as Star Trek. They focused almost exclusively on the technical aspects of coding. The male presenters made frequent attempts to bond with attendees and adopted a loose, off-the-cuff style. This informality allowed for some pretty reprehensible language, including references to pornography and inappropriate sexual behavior. On the few occasions that women did speak, they kept their remarks to generalized statements about company culture. The researchers concluded: “Through gender-imbalanced presenter roles, geek culture references, overt use of gender stereotypes, and other gendered speech and actions, representatives may puncture the pipeline, lessening the interest of women at the point of recruitment into technology careers.”
The employer brand seemed to favor a certain type of (white) man. Who knows how many women, after attending these presentations, decided to pack their bags and head into a different industry. That’s a tragedy! Warren Buffett famously claimed that one of the reasons he’s achieved such success is that he was only competing against half the population. When only half the talent pool is engaged, companies miss out on a wealth of ideas and limit their own potential. These tech companies were only hurting themselves with their blatant displays of “bro culture” in recruiting sessions.
In this chapter, we’ll examine how understanding what words you use within your organization influence the way you think and behave with your team and talent you wish to attract. Are you using your words to create a space where all employees feel safe and able to do their best work? We’ll see how this dynamic shapes your employer brand—and how that brand affects everything else about your company.
Words maketh the company. How do you speak to your employees? How do your employees speak to one another? Is language permitted that marginalizes certain groups of people? Is this sort of talk even subtly encouraged? The chauvinistic talk of the tech recruiters in the Stanford study may have driven away talent before they ever had the chance to effect positive change within an organization. Is your company too “dude-centric”? Is one type of political opinion loudly espoused, while others are laughed at or silenced? Is everyone expected to stay beyond the end of the working day (thus sidelining employees with commitments outside of work), and if so, do employees know that?
There’s a lot at play here: diversity, culture, and values that drive decisions. Employer branding is complex. There are many different ways an employer brand can be misrepresented, and this can cost you dearly. I heard an amazing story at the annual ERE Media’s recruiting conference about an employer brand turnaround and knew I had to speak with its architect, Graeme Johnson. Graeme is the former global head of employer brand and talent acquisition strategy at British Telecommunications (BT). In our conversation on the EI Recruiter podcast, he spoke about how telling a truer employer brand story and the words used to communicate can significantly increase profits.
CASE STUDY
How Redefining Your Employer Brand and Its Language Can Change Everything
When Graeme arrived at BT, he’d heard anecdotal accounts of candidates having negative interview experiences, so he set out to measure the impact these bad experiences were having on revenue. He and his team developed a metric by which interviewees could rate their interviewers. Graeme sensed the problem was significant, and he was spot-on. The data revealed that overall, candidates rated their experience as a negative number!
“How many people are we losing by not treating them respectfully?” he asked himself. He next wanted to know the exact cost of having an “in the red” recruiting process, so he and his team crunched the numbers. BT is an enormous brand with approximately 225,000 applicants every year. It’s also a subscription broadcasting service. Graeme determined that, as the result of a bad candidate experience, about 10 percent of BT’s rejected candidates switched their subscription to a competitor. This amounted to more than $10 million in lost revenue annually. The need to strengthen employer brand with different stories became abundantly clear.
Graeme set about doing just that, but he wanted to do it in a way that went beyond the typical “how to improve candidate experience” training provided to HR managers and interviewers. Graeme set out to inspire BT employees—to renew their commitment to and appreciation for the company. This revived sense of purpose and shared identity would then inspire hiring managers to give candidates the best possible experience.
Since he’d arrived at BT from Virgin, Graeme had found the company to have a very low opinion of itself. This self-deprecation belied BT’s many accomplishments, from broadcasting the Olympics to managing air traffic control systems to keeping banks in the United Kingdom up and running. Graeme realized that BT needed to do a better job of telling its own stories.
Thus, with the CEO’s backing, BT invested in resources to create films that powerfully told the story of its many achievements. The goal was to inspire BT employees and remind them of the greater mission they all served. Then Graeme went after the candidate experience. Because BT invested in telling its own stories well internally, hiring managers approached their work with a renewed sense of pride and a desire to have candidates’ experience of BT be similarly positive.
It was a brilliant solution. Graeme’s campaign got at the heart of why everyone at BT had a stake in maintaining a positive employer brand.
A Stellar Employer Brand Improves the Candidate Experience
Committed to the goal of improving the candidate experience, Graeme and his team also tested recruitment systems for competitors across the industry by applying for the same job across 25 different organizations. How long did it take? Could candidates apply on their mobile phones? Were there glitches—did the system kick them off?
The team found that length of application time wasn’t the only metric by which candidates judged the recruitment system. Candidates did not mind answering questions about themselves even if the questions were somewhat involved. What applicants did mind was being asked to reproduce their entire CV. The team discovered that if candidates felt they were repeating themselves unnecessarily, 70 to 80 percent quit filling out the application.
By and large, the industry bar for a satisfactory recruitment process was low. Graeme and his team repeatedly found the application process convoluted and frustrating.
After streamlining BT’s application process, Graeme sought to further improve the candidate experience by offering applicants the chance to receive feedback after interviews. The team is currently refining this process, using the same approach taken in marketing: giving candidates information in the way they would most like to receive it.
First, candidates are asked if they would like to receive feedback on their interview. This may take the form of an automated report, which might be positive or negative. The key is that the applicant can choose whether to receive it. Graeme’s team has found that overall, candidates are open to constructive criticism after interviews. If the applicant knows that feedback is coming, she can prepare herself for a candid performance review and manage her expectations. Even negative feedback is preferable to silence after an interview with a potential employer.
The Emotional Intelligence Factor
From an emotional intelligence lens, offering post-interview feedback is an ingenious way for employers to help candidates with the stress-management component of EQ and have a positive effect on the employer brand. In giving candidates the choice of whether to receive feedback, BT is helping them know what to expect during the process and giving them some measure of control. Candidates who feel more in control of their job search have better stress tolerance and have a better experience, making the conversations more exploratory and open. They will then share their experience with friends and acquaintances, which positively impacts the employer brand.
I’m a huge fan of Graeme’s approach at BT. By strengthening the employer brand internally, Graeme and his team successfully improved the external brand as well. If employer branding truly is all about a story, then it’s incumbent on you to tell a good one—and then to ensure that the interactions employees have with one another and with candidates bear that story out.
Any company can do it. You don’t have to be a Google or a Facebook to attract unicorns. A bad employer brand is a big elephant. But, as Graeme proved at BT, you can find your way around it to the unicorns standing on the other side.
I truly believe that a strong employer brand starts at the top. Graeme could help transform BT’s brand because he had the backing of the CEO. Below I invite you to reflect on your leadership’s attitude toward your employer brand. Here are some questions to ask yourself, other people leaders, and your recruitment team:
▶ If you’re the CEO, what are you doing to improve your company’s story? A How can recruiters pitch that story to candidates?
▶ For people leaders at any level, do you see a gap between your employer brand and the candidate experience?
▶ If yes, can you identify what changes need to be made?
▶ How can you pitch these needed changes to company leadership?
Remember that essentially every person in your organization is a recruiter—from the CEO to the actual recruiters and everyone in between. Everyone who works at your company uses language and words to tell its story to the world, whether or not they mean to. Be sure they’re telling a good one.