Employment Brand Valuation- Do You Know Yours?

How well do you know your company’s employment brand? Have you ever thought about measuring the value of your employment brand or understand what components that would include? Simply put, your employment brand is what potential and current employees think about working for your organization – your reputation as an employer. It’s the thoughts, feelings and data points that people evaluate when they hear your company’s name. Every company has an employment brand regardless of whether it is managed, understood or even acknowledged that it exists.

Every day we talk with potential candidates about great new opportunities. During the course of those conversations, candidates want to know everything we know about a client. They want information not only on the specifics of the role but on the client’s culture, their values/operating principles, how strong they are at developing people, how good they are at internally promoting, what leadership style fits, what rewards/recognition systems they have, etc. All of these questions can be summed up simply as the candidate asking us ‘why should I go to work for this company?’ The process is similar to researching any major purchase in life by assessing the brand and quality of the product you are thinking of buying.

Once the candidate has the general information in hand is when the client’s employment brand takes over. Candidates begin their own investigation. They start with your website, then they look through their network to see who works there or worked there and who has connections. They ask questions, they do their research and they even read comments on Glassdoor. And that’s when the critical question comes in to play – does the client’s perception of themselves match their employment brand reality?

Regardless of company size, building a strong employment brand is important. As the saying goes, first impressions are hard to change. But being able to effectively measure your employment brand is also critically important. Think about how marketing departments invest heavily into understanding their company and product brand. Why should your employment brand be any different? At the end of the day, every company wants to hire the best possible talent. Developing, managing, measuring and improving your employment brand can be a critical success factor in attracting the talent you want.

Westport Intl’s Human Resources Practice places human resources executives in publicly-traded and privately owned organizations across all industries, ranging in size from mid-cap’s to the Fortune 200. We understand the changing dynamics of the human resources function and the talent needed to keep pace with the new environments. We continually develop relationships with human resources talent across many industries and within many of the core functional disciplines.