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In this episode, Brandon Laws is joined by Lacey Halpern, HR Business Partner at Xenium, to discuss the concept of ’employer branding’, what it is comprised of, who influences it, and what it can do for employee attraction and retention.
Throughout the conversation, Brandon and Lacey discuss the following topics:
– Defining “employer brand” and what comprises it
– What company departments and roles determine the employer brand
– How culture plays a role
– The role guiding principles plays within the employer brand
– Employer branding as a tool for attracting great employees
Brandon: Welcome back everybody for another podcast! This is the HR for Small Businesses Podcast and I am your host, Brandon Laws.
Before we jump into today’s topic, I want to quickly talk about finding us on iTunes. Feel free to give us a review, we’d be very grateful for it. We’re also always looking for new topics, so email us at info@xeniumhr.com and we’d love to hear what you want to hear. This podcast is for you, the listener, so feel free to send us your topic suggestions and we’ll schedule those for a future podcast.
Onto the topic for the day: employer branding. I have brought Lacey Halpern, an HR Business Partner at Xenium back. She’s been on the podcast several times and we are very fortunate to have her once again. Welcome, Lacey!
Lacey: Thanks for having me here!
Brandon: So we’re going to talk employer branding, and I’ll set the stage a little bit. Lacey and I, along with Suzi Alligood, led a workshop on culture development back in August of 2014. We do plan to offer this workshop again in 2015. One of the sections we talked about was employer branding. We’re hearing this come up quite a bit, that folks want to be perceived as an employer of choice in the market to attract and retain great people. It’s this notion of employer branding.
Lacey, could you kick us off by telling us what an employer brand is and what it’s made up of?
Lacey: I think it’s important to point out first that there are two different types of brand. There’s the internal brand that a company has which is the culture of the environment, and the people who currently work there, the leadership team, and then there’s the external brand, which is more your expertise, Brandon. That’s how the employer shows up in the marketplace, the types of clients that employer attracts, how they attract new talent, and more. It’s usually embedded in the recruiting systems the company has and it’s included in the retention strategy that the company puts in place.
Brandon: I’ll just add a little bit to what you just said, Lacey, and say that the employer brand in my world would be the feeling that internal and external people have about the brand. When you think about marketing, it’s about the way it’s all perceived. A logo would be a symbol of that brand, and when people see it across the marketplace they have a feeling toward it. The employer brand is no different. I think employees have a certain perception of what it is like to work for a company. I think it’s made up of a lot of things: the culture, the way in which you market that brand, the way you approach performance reviews and job descriptions—all these things make up that employer brand.
And what you do on the external side also makes up that employer brand. We’ll talk about that in a little bit, but I will say that it’s very far-reaching and people need to pay more attention to it.
Lacey: Yes. Internally it’s almost just about how employees talk about the place that they work—on social media maybe, with each other, with their friends—and I think we have really seen, with our growth, it really becoming solidified here who Xenium is internally. There’s always been a culture, certainly. We definitely know who we are now, and we’ve found ways to 
integrate that brand into all of our people practices.
Brandon: When you think about the employer brand, naturally you want to say that leadership is the group of people who come up with whatever it is and blast it out to not only the internal folks, but externally as well through job descriptions and all those things. But we both know that that’s not the case.
Lacey: No, I think that’s when it falls down. I think a company that relies on the senior leadership team or the president to carry the brand is losing out on a lot of opportunity to enhance the brand, call out exactly what it is, and find new ways to integrate it. Your people, I think, are typically your best resource to get talent in the door. Their friends, the people they know that they network with are your best bet. I think relying on one small group of people to hold it is not as effective. I do think there needs to be buy-in from leadership, though. I think that the leadership team needs to be aligned together. I think that they need to have a way of interacting with the people that integrate the brand and that people need to feel connected. That goes back to transparency and communication and those things that are important at most businesses.
Brandon: During that culture workshop I put up a Venn Diagram on the PowerPoint screen and talked about how most companies have an HR department, and they’re actively recruiting and supporting the current employees, they also have leadership coming up and defining policies and philosophies and principles, those sorts of things and then they have marketing, who’s reaching out to prospective buyers. And so when you overlap all those resources, what you have in the middle is a number of shared resources that all the employees can use. And I think that’s sort of your point, that the culture is really the result of all those people working together and sharing the resources to create that brand. I think that’s where the employer brand comes to fruition.
Lacey: Right! And that’s often where recruiting stops. HR’s responsible for meeting with the hiring manager and figuring out who it is that we want and what knowledge, skills, and abilities does the applicant have to have and they post the job. In a company of fifty-plus people you may have somebody who’s dedicated to marketing, and why not use that resource to update your careers page and make sure that the brand is communicated in the job postings. We’re seeing a lot of clients now integrate their culture, who they are as a business, and really talking about their brand in those job postings. We’re seeing that if you go on LinkedIn or you go on Indeed, any of the major job posting sites, you’ll begin to notice that what used to be a huge list of job duties and qualifications has been shrunk down. Brand is definitely something that’s talked about at the beginning of the postings and it’s usually taking up a bigger, chunkier part of the job postings nowadays.
Brandon: Let’s pull a thread on that, that’s interesting. So what you’re seeing on job postings historically you would see the job duties almost immediately, right?
Lacey: Right.
Brandon: And it would be a long list of things that this job would do. But now what you’re seeing is that the culture and the employer brand comes first, it’s now “what do we believe in?” or “what it’s like to work here.” That’s the differentiator, right?
Lacey: It is. You want to hire people who believe what you believe, that’s essential. And we can’t all be exactly the same, that wouldn’t be effective either. But I think there is a place in your external recruiting to really highlight and identify the brand. I mean, think about it, when job postings were an ad in the newspaper, a business would have maybe a one-inch by one-inch square and would have to be able to put in exactly what they’re looking for. So there wasn’t a place for brand. And as business have changed, customers have changed, employees have changed, and applicants have changed: they want more. They want more than just a paycheck. So by sharing who the company is and how they show up in the community, that’s one way to do it.
Brandon: You said something about the one-inch by one-inch square ad in the newspaper. I think that may have been effective back in the day, because only some people with the resources to buy the ad in the first place could get the space. And 
what I think we’re talking about here is fighting for eyes. It’s fighting for differentiation. So when you think about all the employers that are out there, if they’re listing their job descriptions in the same way and their websites look and feel the same way, then how does a prospective employee find the right fit?
Lacey: Right, it’s in the brand and in the reputation in the community. So it’s not just what gets posted on LinkedIn and Indeed. There are sites like Glassdoor where you can go on and see how applicants and even employees are talking about businesses. So with social media, the Internet, and just word of mouth, an employer has an opportunity to really show up as an employer of choice if the brand is identified and people are talking about it.
I actually have a really good example of this. We are currently hiring for a position on our HR team here at Xenium and I had an interview yesterday with an applicant. She had talked to a few different people here on the team and spent almost a day meeting with various people for the final stages of the interview. At the end of it I asked her what had been the most surprising about the process, about Xenium, about what she’d learned about us. She said the consistency in every single person she had spoken with and how they talk about working together as a team, even though we manage different books of business.
That, for me, really speaks to our brand. That it’s a pool of resources, it’s deep and wide and what our clients need. We also have that internally here for one another, we have the right people doing the right work.
Brandon: Let’s talk about that more, because that was actually going to be my next question—what are the ways you can build the employer brand? During our podcast on the Xenium Promise we talked about the guiding principles and what it’s like to build those. We built that, and maybe some employers would think “Ok, we’re done. Let’s just go ahead and launch that, publish that, and that’s it.” But we’re integrating those principles throughout all of our practices. So maybe talk about how that’s impacted the culture and how it really impacts the employer brand and how we’re perceived on the outbound side as well.
Lacey: Yes. I think in our last podcast I said that that’s where the rubber meets the road. It’s not just posting it on the wall, it’s not just setting it up as every employee’s screensaver. It’s finding ways to integrate it into people practices. So if the company believes in these guiding principles, the Promise, whatever it is the business calls it. And if employees’ performance isn’t evaluated based on those guiding principles, they’re not effective. There’s no reward for achieving that type of environment and there’s also no follow-up or accountability when someone’s not meeting those expectations. So that’s one way that I think we’ve done a really great job here of integrating it. I think having a committee of employees that’s employee-driven, for a group our size, also helps. People that can be passionate about our Promise, people that have committed time and resources and energy and there’s a budget allocated to it where we can further the Promise and our brand out in the community by volunteering at different places or providing employees a match if they want to make a donation. Like I’ve said, the marketplace has shifted. Customers don’t just want quality, affordable products, they want service with it too. And so employees want the same thing from their employer. And by providing employees of different generations who want different things and meeting everybody where they are, though we can’t meet everybody’s needs all the time, but at least trying to have a diverse array of benefits, integrated pieces that the brand can really shine—that’s what employees are looking for.
Brandon: When you said that not everybody wants the same thing, that’s why the brand is so important; just like when you’re looking for a prospective buyer, you’re trying to find a specific type of person. Not everybody’s going to be a perfect fit for what we do. Some people want low cost over high touch customer service. We’re the high touch customer service, so we’re not a fit for the people who want low cost and low touch. So when you talk about employees, they’re seeking a certain type of employer, maybe one that has a flexible and certain benefits that other places wouldn’t offer. So I think that’s why the employer brand makes sense, because that’s the result of all those things on the external side.
Anyway, I think it’s interesting, but what do you think are some ways that employers can integrate some of those practices to really strengthen the employer brand?
Lacey: Yes, I think this is a topic of conversation that is not going away. We’re going to continue to have these conversations. We’ve got clients that are just at the point of starting to have a discussion about “What is our brand?” and “What differentiates us in the marketplace for prospective employees?” Some people are just in the beginning stages of trying to identify that, we’ve got some clients right now that are working through the project of having a task force, identifying guiding principles. A lot of people were interested in that podcast that we did trying to understand “What would it take for us to do that?” And we have some clients that have done that work and are at the stage of integrating or maintaining the integration that they’ve done. So I think that if I’m hearing your question correctly, you’re interested in knowing that integration stage and what people are doing. And, you know, I’ve got a lot of clients that are looking at their systems that they’ve maybe had for several years, dusting them off, a handbook, job descriptions, performance reviews, kind of the same thing that you hear HR 
people talking about, finding ways to integrate culture and brand into those. Integrating it into the recruiting and hiring processes so that it’s out there and external. I have clients that are creating committees, too, of employees to further their brand and their culture.
Brandon: Which I think is so wise, because they’re the voice of the people at the end of the day, and I think that having our culture committee at Xenium has empowered us to make decisions that impact the culture. And I’m sure that your clients are feeling the same thing.
Lacey: Yes, and one thing just to expand on the committee: our Xenium XCITE committee doesn’t generate revenue. It doesn’t bring in new clients, it doesn’t add any dollars to the bottom line at all. And so a company, a president, a board of directors might say that’s a waste of resources. Why do you have ten people in a room for an hour talking, then sending emails all month long, then planning fun events? Because it doesn’t generate any income.
Brandon: It’s tough because there is no direct link, but I guarantee there’s a parallel between them.
Lacey: Exactly, that’s the point I’m trying to make, that that committee helps with retention and it’s costly to turn over employees. It helps with attracting new employees, it helps keep people here rejuvenated, and it appreciates employees. This week we’re going to be having a coffee cart come here and make coffees for employees for a couple hours. It’s an added expense, but just giving back to employees and making them feel appreciated goes a huge way. Sometimes more than fifty-cent increases or letting people leave early. It’s about meeting everybody’s needs at different times throughout the year and trying to keep the population of your employees satisfied and fulfilled in the work that they’re doing and what they’re receiving from the company.
Brandon: We’re running short on time but I wanted to get through a few more questions before we have to run. If an employer or business leader comes to you and says, “I need to focus on this employer brand thing, what’s the first thing I do?” Maybe they don’t have a ton of resources, so where do they even start?
Lacey: The first place to start is by having a dialogue with employees in the company, people who have been there for a long time, new employees, to figure out what is the brand. Because I think really every employer has it, every company has a culture, so it’s trying to hone in on what that is and pulling the thread on different ways that it’s already integrated and then expanding it. So if the company doesn’t already have guiding principles, that may be a good place to start. If the company doesn’t have a committee or resources dedicated to it, that may be another great place to start. I think trying to figure out what is the status of the system and the business is first, because there may be less work to do than a president or an owner thinks.
Brandon: What I would also add to that is as that a leader, maybe it’s a president of a small company or somebody who’s in charge of all this, look at what your resources are. I know one thing from when we started this whole thing was, what resources do we have in marketing? What do we have in HR? Who wants to lead this thing? And what do we need to pull from? And build it from there.
I know a lot of people are probably feeling like this is such a huge task to do and there are so many things to do, and we haven’t even touched all the areas of employer branding. You could talk about what to do on your website, what to do on 
social media and all those practices. But we’re just talking high level here. And I think that’s where to start—identify the resources, figure out who’s on board to help this project—maybe even create a small committee of three or four people, then go from there. But, once again, it’s once you launch that, you need to put the power in the people’s hands, and that’s what creates the employer brand overall.
Lacey: And keeping the momentum going, too. I think it could be detrimental to announce to employees that there will be focus on this and then to have it fall by the wayside. So just ensuring that the resources you’ve identified are and will be consistent resources that you’ll have as far as you can predict. And what are the pain points, what is really hurting? Maybe it’s a growing company and we’re going to be hiring a lot of people and the focus needs to be on integrating people practices and culture and brand into that arena first before we focus on retention. Because maybe we have a lot of long term employees and it’s not necessarily something we need to have a high focus on. So just being really strategic and mindful and having a conversation with your HR Business Partner about this if you’re currently a client at Xenium I think is another great place to start.
Brandon: This is probably an obvious question, but probably one that needs to be asked. What happens if you don’t pay attention to the employer brand at all and do nothing about it?
Lacey: I think there are companies that will tell you that if they’re not focused on it, they’re having a hard time attracting talent, they’re having a hard time retaining their employees, and it may be that the people they have working for them are not fulfilled, maybe aren’t in the right jobs or doing the right work. I think a company would be wise to spend some time thinking about the topic and maybe sharing here in response to this podcast: what is your employer brand? What are you proud of? What areas maybe do you see to go to work?
Brandon: Lastly, where do you see this all going? Do you think it’s just a phase that we’re talking about or do you think it’s going to be a bigger issue long term?
Lacey: I think it’ll continue to be a bigger issue. I think as baby boomers leave the workplace and millennials and gen x employees continue to grow, social media and the internet and word of mouth networking and how prevalent that is right now in society is just going to continue. I think employers are going to have to start thinking about brand maybe similarly to what they’re thinking about in terms of compensation and benefits, that brand is equally as important. So I think the conversation will continue.
Brandon: We have a workshop on April 16th at 1pm here in Tualatin, Oregon, which is just south of Portland, Oregon, and I know we have listeners all over the nation. So if you’re in the area that’d be a great workshop to go to. We’re going to talk about employer branding, but more importantly we’re going to talk about the culture in general and how to enhance it, how to develop it. So look for that, details may be found here.
Lacey Halpern, thank you again for joining us. I know we didn’t cover probably everything we probably wanted to, but I think this gives listeners a little taste for what this employer branding thing’s all about. So thank you!
Lacey: You’re welcome. I’d love to connect with anyone that’s listening here via email or LinkedIn.
Music Introduction By:
“Cut and Dry Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons “Attribution 3.0″ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/”