Diverse talent won’t be interested in joining your company unless they can see themselves in it, says John Graham, and they won’t be interested in staying either. Graham, the VP of employer branding at Shaker Recruitment Marketing, believes that companies can excel at recruiting and retaining workers when employer branding works hand-in-hand with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). “For those who are shaping culture, it's really a natural partnership. It’s just that nobody has made the match yet.”

It’s Graham's job to make that match, and he emphasizes that the work is not superficial. It always begins internally: Unless an organization supports the diverse talent it already has, peppering employer brand messaging with DEI promises is a waste of time. Employers must first think about how they will mitigate bias in recruiting and the work experience, as well as how they will support behavioral change–and respond to the lack of it. In other words, after the unconscious bias training is over, what happens to those who don’t comply? How will inclusive behavior be reinforced?

If there’s no substantial DEI practice inside the company, said Graham, there’s no point in trying to attract diverse talent to your organization. “Employer branding should be an inside-out experience,” he said. Shaker itself is Graham’s laboratory for merging DEI and employer branding. In addition to linking DEI and recruitment marketing for clients, Graham is also the diversity officer for Shaker internally. I spoke with him about his work at Shaker, the common misunderstandings about recruitment marketing, and how the future of employer branding includes a merger with DEI. Excerpts:

Even though employer branding as a discipline has been around for a while, the HR profession is starting to take more notice of it.

I agree. I think companies have always tried to position themselves as an employer of choice, but never as a focused discipline. You're looking at 15 to 20 years of doing it, but it's in the last five to seven years when it's really exploded as a necessity, recognized by chief executives and chief HR officers.

Why do you think that's the case?

Mainly because it's hard to differentiate yourself as an organization through your consumer brand, and if nobody knows you as a consumer brand or B2B brand, then they certainly won't know your employer brand. It's a different audience. It's a different voice, a different facet of oneself.

Employer brand really is the articulator of company culture from an employer perspective–telling human stories, diverse perspectives, working with employee resource groups (ERGs) to connect personal and professional storytelling. DEI helps to shape culture, to create inclusive cultures, educate and inform, but they tend to not have strong communication support.

Still, today [employer branding] is selling champagne and roses. It's all the great, fluffy, fuzzy things about the culture, but not necessarily through the lens of marginalized talent. That has really been my mandate at Shaker–not only to build the DEI consultancy from the ground up, but also to make sure that we're walking our talk.

You said that employer branding may express internal company culture, but not the lived experience of marginalized people. Can you give an example?

Ask any of the employees at a company that in the last 18 months made a magnanimous commitment statement towards DEI–whether it be allocation of resources, head count, appointing chief diversity officers, making contributions to external organizations, or building relationships with HBCUs—ask any of their Black or marginalized talent groups within that organization if they've seen a change in their daily lived experience.

So how can employers guage whether their employer branding is representative of the lived experiences of marginalized employees?

I came up with this vision of creating a survey that would identify the gaps in culture and lived experience for marginalized talent, in contrast to their majority counterparts, and the Lived Experience Survey and Index Score was born.

We have several clients who are deploying that as a part of the way we build employee value propositions. In addition to the focus groups and the leadership interviews, now we have a quantitative tool to really identify your culture through the lens of marginalized talent, which helps us position not only your DEI initiatives, but also design your DEI initiatives to address these culture gaps.

That’s how the lived-experience-based approaches define success.

What are some common misconceptions about the role of DEI as it applies to employer branding?

This is literally a new approach. Baking DEI into the way that you build your employer brand hasn't happened before. At best, you would get a diverse ratio of different cultural representations on your career site. Now what we're talking about is truly holding up the mirror from all sides for an organization to understand their culture as it is lived by all your employees, not just the majority group.

The question is, how do we build that employer brand in a way that the marketing actually matches the reality of the experience that you'll have as a candidate, moving into an employee? That's where the DEI consultant kicks in to help solve some of those gaps around representation, around authenticity, and being able to express voice, identity, and culture and then develop the ability to grow with an organization.

As you said, marrying employer branding with DEI is new. So where do companies begin?

First and foremost, it's having the right people at the table in the conversation. Historically, we talked to talent acquisition leaders, talent management, and chief HR officers. Now we're having chief diversity officers or DEI leaders in those conversations at the beginning to discuss the brand. The research that we do touches all of these things, not just the traditional functions and marketing and communications and so forth.

Secondly, it's really identifying where your gaps are. Most companies know where they're underrepresented, and they often come seeking tactics or strategies to attract those groups of talent. But before you go out and start bringing more people into a culture that might not be conducive to them staying, let's identify where those opportunities or those attrition catalysts are and mitigate those as much as possible so that those you bring in stay.

So, you have to start by cleaning your house before you invite anybody over?

Preach!

How can employers consider DEI when building an employer value proposition?

It starts with analysis and assessment, both quantitatively and qualitatively, then we create a Lived Experience Index Score that becomes a benchmark.

If we see very low scores and representation, we’ll look at not just how you're connecting or sourcing talent, but the cultural competency gaps in your recruiting teams and hiring manager teams. What are the bias-mitigation mechanisms that are built into your process for selecting and sourcing [talent]?

Employers should also think about structural support for behavioral change. A company may establish training and unconscious-bias workshops, all of those things that are designed to educate and open perspectives, but there's nothing holding employees to what they just learned. We help our clients think about what happens after the training. How are we going to determine success? Who gets fired?

So one reason, among many, why you need to have a lot of interests represented at the decision-making table is that it does—and should—affect the whole organization.

Yes. We have to identify the intended beneficiary of the work before we even start. Who's going to benefit from all this commitment, work, and resource allocation? The company is going to get the benefit indirectly, but if you're not centering the people that need the most help or have the biggest gaps in their experiences, then what you get is somebody trying to create a solution for everyone and, in effect, impacting no one.

How can employer branding teams and DEI teams work together better?

It's about plugging into your DEI strategy, understanding it, and figuring out how the employer brand plays out from a recruitment perspective and from an engagement and retention perspective. What gets lost in the sauce is that employer brand is like a three-legged stool. It has to support talent attraction, engagement, and retention.

DEI is one of your strongest levers of engagement and retention, especially when it comes to diverse and marginalized talent pools. So how can you support your DEI leadership as a communications extension, supporting programming through visual representation of the brand, making sure that DEI can latch onto the employer brand in their communications and their tools?

How does a company know if their employer brand is successful? 

There are a couple of ways to measure employer brand success. We start with brand awareness. There are great services that do benchmarking of employer brand saturation across different digital platforms, your digital footprint. One of the biggest indicators for an employer brand leader is how it's resonating internally, how your employer-brand imagery is popping up in leadership meetings, in town halls, in PowerPoint presentations. How is it being leveraged in onboarding to communicate cultural-foundation points for new hires? Do they see continuity of the brand throughout their daily experiences in the organization?

Brand is a feeling. It's not a tangible thing per se, but it is a feeling, and you can see when the brand is working, the sentiment and how people express the culture and celebrate it.

It sounds like the first litmus test of an employer brand is how well it works internally.

One hundred percent. It should be an inside-out experience. That's when you see employee brands thrive.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in Richmond, Va.