The New Face of Corporate America: the Employer Brand

“Today, employees are the most trusted voice about a company, and that impacts both the consumer and the talent brand,” said Tisha Leslie, the director of employer branding at Zillow. It wasn’t that long ago, she said, that “companies were terrified to let their employees talk about the company on social media.”

Companies have always had their employer reputation, but it was typically an outgrowth of internal culture. IBM’s celebrated culture of “THINK,” for example, goes back a century. It’s more recent, however, that employers are allocating plans, budgets, teams, and hiring third-party branding agencies to influence that reputation. To have more control over their employer brand, companies are increasingly investing in it. Yet that raises strategic questions. Among them: What makes a company stand out in the talent marketplace? And who in the corporate structure should lead the effort: HR, marketing, PR, the C-suite, or all of the above?

Twenty years ago, Leslie worked at a company that placed help-wanted ads in newspapers and the Yellow Pages, and as the dot-com bubble expanded, began building websites with career pages and posting open jobs to a brand new site: Monster.com. Even in the early days of Monster, there were only a handful of ways one might find a job: a listing in the paper or a trade publication, a referral from a colleague, friend, or family member, or maybe you were lucky enough to attend a school that had long-standing relationships with employers.

Those doorways have multiplied greatly. “If you were to talk to our most junior workers in the workforce today, you would probably get 20 or 30 different examples of content or sources of influence that they saw or interacted with that led them to that job,” said Leslie. There are so many ways a job seeker might find an employer, and therefore just as many places an employer must represent itself. “People have an impression of you as a place to work in their mind, so if you want to change that impression or you want to shape that impression, or if you want to stand for something different, well, that’s going to take a team and resources,” said Leslie.

Companies are spending huge amounts of money crafting public perception of their employer brands. During the 2022 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, McDonald’s used its float not to promote Big Macs or the McRib, but its employees. The voiceover read by NBC’s hosts went like this: “Today, [Ronald McDonald] is recognizing its golden arches crew members who are at the heart of McDonald’s restaurants. Ronald invites customers to support McDonald’s Thank-You Crew program by sharing stories of how McDonald’s employees go above and beyond in performing their behind-the-counter duties.” There was no mention of the fast-food chain’s products.

While many of these efforts can be stage-managed by the company, many are beyond corporate control, like social media chatter and reviews on sites like Glassdoor, Google, and Yelp. The effects of Covid on the way we work and the way we think about our occupations accelerated the shrinking distance between a company’s overall reputation and its reputation as an employer. In 2020, consumers made purchase decisions based on corporate response to the pandemic and to racial justice protests, often as it manifested in the employee experience, not the customer experience.

According to a 2020 Edelman brand trust report, during the Covid crisis, 90% of consumers said that protecting “the well-being and financial security of their employees and their suppliers, even if it means suffering big financial losses until the pandemic ends,” is necessary to keeping their trust, and 47% said that in order to keep their trust, an employer must set an example of racial justice in its own organization.

Even if they aren’t customers of the company, and even if they aren’t actively looking for a new job, workers are monitoring the way companies treat their employees. The way layoffs are handled, for example, can affect public perception. “Internal delivery, CEO wording, and severance details can burnish or taint a company’s employer brand for years,” wrote Fortune senior-editor-at-large Geoff Colvin.

One of the most persuasive representations of a company’s employer brand is the way its own employees talk about their jobs. “We know that word of mouth and employees’ perception about their employer (i.e., does my employer care about me?) help to drive engagement because it helps employer brands be top of mind in the marketplace,” Jeri Hawthorne, the chief HR officer at insurance company Aflac, told From Day One in an email. “Employees who are compensated well with comprehensive benefits and wellness offerings, treated fairly, and provided with advancement opportunities will serve as ambassadors to their employer brand.”

All this attention on the way companies treat their workers led the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) to ask in 2022, “Is employee experience the new customer experience?” Couple this with a labor market in which workers command the board, and employers had to crank up their brand image to compete for talent. Now that many jobs can be performed from anywhere, companies are now competing with rival employers they never had to go up against in the past, says Anne McCarthy, the global head of employer brand at speciality chemicals company Evonik. There is tactical competition too. “Take paid search, for example,” said Zillow’s Leslie. “If you go to Google and type in ‘remote tech jobs,’ you have to compete for those results, which requires budget, which then requires some form of a team, whether that’s an agency or an in-house team.”

The Temptation to Overpromise

The temptation of any marketer, whether the product is customer experience or employee experience, is to oversell, especially when there’s considerable pressure to hire quickly. Via a 2022 survey of 2,500 of its readers, the careers site the Muse found that 72% of workers have started a new job only to find out that the job or company is not what they were led to believe.

Misrepresenting company culture can be especially tempting to folks who feel the pressure to deliver on DEI-related expectations, like representation of people from marginalized communities and a company that welcomes them, before the company has become genuinely inclusive for the people who work there.

The pressure of public expectations is high. A 2021 poll conducted by CNBC and SurveyMonkey found that 78% of the workforce believes it’s important to work for a company that prioritizes diversity and inclusion. Executives want the DEI message broadcast, and the public wants to see it, but the message might not reflect reality, at least not yet. In this case, “talent acquisition is now tasked with trying to sell a narrative that doesn’t exist,” said John Graham, VP of employer brand and diversity and culture at Shaker Recruitment Marketing. “You can slap on stock images of varying diverse people on your career site, but does the marketing match reality?”

Graham said he sees companies spend money attracting underrepresented talent, “only to bring them into an organization that hasn’t cultivated a culture that would actually retain this talent, make them feel seen, heard, embraced, and belong,” he said. “You’re going to see them leave within eight to 12 months with a bad brand experience that then goes back out into the marketplace, and all your employer brand efforts are now working against actual experience.”

Leslie of Zillow thinks of employer branding as comprising three elements: what the public thinks of your company as an employer, where corporate leadership is taking the company, and what your current employees say it’s really like to work in your organization. Ultimately, a company’s reputation, regardless of audience, should be consistent, but most importantly accurate. Don’t invent qualities for yourself. There might be an element of employee experience you think is under-addressed among competitors, “but if you’re not good at that, you can’t just pretend like you’re good at that,” said Evonik’s McCarthy.

“Whether it’s the corporate brand or employer brand or investor brand, it all has to be consistent and more than anything, it has to be a true reflection of the environment,” said Deborah Frutos-Smith, global head of employer branding and recruitment marketing at pharmaceutical company GSK.

Employers shouldn’t be concerned with projecting the image of a perfect workplace. For example, don’t squash bad reviews–use them to improve. Plus, “believable reviews are much more helpful,” Leslie said, to job seekers and the employers that receive them.

The Role of the HR Department Keeps on Growing

Most companies are tasking the HR department with building the employer brand, often with help of the communications department and marketing, but with input from business leaders as well. Several HR leaders told From Day One they’re delighted with the value of the discipline, and see it as part of the expansion of the department’s influence across the business.

Graham, who works with companies on cultivating their employer brands, sees employer branding moving from the outside, in. “It’s starting to be less of just an external-facing initiative and more, ‘How do we really get people to embrace and espouse these brand messages in real time?’” he said, noting the value of employer branding in employee retention.

In the service of employee retention, employer branding is being used to drum up confidence in the company and unite workers behind a common cause, said Leslie. “The things that we put out to communicate what it’s like to work here need to leave our employees feeling really proud. Retention is everything in an employer brand, mostly because what you’re saying needs to be believable to the people that are already there,” she said. Misrepresent your company culture, and your staff will let the public know.

“Two decades ago, we were trying to just introduce employer brand to comms partners or marketing partners, and now it’s less like education and more like, ‘How do we help each other?’” said Leslie. At Evonik, McCarthy’s capacity as the leader of employer branding has placed her in high demand. “I used to have to market myself in the company and the topic of employer branding and ask people, ‘Can I help you?’ Now there’s an overwhelming need for me. I’m asking for more headcount, for more resources. I can’t help everybody who wants my help.”

Evonik has seated McCarthy on a major project: a partnership with the federal government to build a new production facility that will make the lipids used in mRNA-based therapies. The company will need more than 80 highly skilled workers on site once it opens.

“You would never see an employer branding person sitting on this project team years ago,” said McCarthy. “But, they said, ‘We know we are going to need the right people if this is going to be successful, and we need you to help us to figure out, ‘How do we market ourselves to get these people?’ To me, that really is great when this company starts to see the value in what you’re doing.”

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance reporter who covers the future of work, HR, recruiting, DEI, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Fast Company, Quartz at Work, Digiday’s Worklife, and Food Technology, among others.