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Practice 03

Employer Branding

Employer brand strategy and employee value proposition development, built with your people, HR and operations leaders and grounded in employee research rather than marketing copy.

Employer brand collateral including a careers page, brochure and branded materials in an office

The business problem

You compete for the same candidates as organizations with larger budgets and better known names. This lands on people and HR teams first, but the cost is carried by the operations teams left short staffed. Roles stay open longer than planned, offers are declined late in the process, and a portion of the people who do join leave within the first year because the job did not match what hiring described. The cost sits in vacancy time and repeat hiring rather than in a marketing line item.

Where clients usually startSample
Early attrition tracked59
Message consistency across channels51
Candidate experience mapped44
EVP documented and evidenced38
Sample baseline. Dimensions and weighting are agreed with you at kickoff.

What we usually hear

Signs your employer brand is costing you

Strong candidates go quiet after the first conversation.

We lose offers to companies people have simply heard of.

New hires leave inside the first year and say the job was not what was described.

Every recruiter and hiring manager describes us differently.

Roles sit open for months and we end up filling the same seat twice.

We cannot explain, in one sentence, why someone should join us.

If two or three of these sound familiar, the work below is where we would start.

Key solutions

What we deliver

Employer brand research

Establish what your people actually value and how the market sees you as an employer. We gather this across operations, people and HR teams, before writing anything.

EVP development

Define an employee value proposition the organization can evidence, then test it against the people expected to live it.

Activation and measurement

Align careers content, job descriptions and the interview experience, then track time to hire and first year attrition against the baseline.

Framework

An EVP that is not measured drifts back to marketing copy.

INTERNAL Employee evidence EXTERNAL Market perception Research what is true Define EVP what you offer Activate across channels Measure and correct findings return to research
Employer brand cycle. Research grounds the proposition in evidence, and measurement returns findings to research rather than ending the programme.

Expected business outcomes

What you have at the end

EVP documented and grounded in employee researchArtifact
Consistent messaging across careers, job ads and interviewsArtifact
Candidate experience mapped end to endArtifact
Baseline and tracking for time to hireMeasure
Baseline and tracking for first year attritionMeasure

Proof points

Reputation is assessed before a candidate ever applies.

Published third-party research on candidate behaviour and transformation staffing.

03 / THE CONSTRAINT
75%of job seekers

You cannot deliver transformation without the people to staff it.

Three in four candidates research an employer's reputation before they apply. If your employer brand is unclear, the roles a transformation depends on stay open longer and cost more to fill.

Source: LinkedIn
Each block is 10 percent

3 of 4 research your reputation before applying

01 / THE PROBLEM
70%of large-scale transformation programs

Most transformation programs do not deliver what was approved.

Seven in ten large-scale programs miss the goals set out in the business case. The money is spent and the program is closed, but the operating result the board signed off never arrives.

Source: McKinsey & Company
Each block is 10 percent

7 of 10 programs fall short of their stated goals

Case study

Unilever: rebuilding graduate hiring around a stated proposition

Unilever redesigned its graduate recruitment around digital assessment and a purpose-led employee value proposition, replacing a large part of the traditional screening process. The case is widely documented in business and HR press because the employer brand and the hiring mechanics were rebuilt in the same programme rather than treated as separate projects owned by marketing and recruitment.

The transferable point is sequence. The proposition was defined and evidenced first, and the candidate experience was then rebuilt to deliver it, which is the order this practice follows.

Discuss this practice.

Send a short brief describing the situation. We respond with an approach, the team who would deliver it, and the measures we report against.

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