How much of what we know about employer branding is proven?

An evening among peers

On Wednesday 14 October, our Employer Branding Community met for the second time, hosted this year by delaware in Ghent. Twenty people who work on employer branding or recruitment marketing every day, gathered around the same tables.

Why do we organise this? At Pauwels Consulting, we spend every day looking for talent that is hard to find, and we run into the same questions as our peers at other companies. Those questions are easier to answer together than alone. That is why we deliberately keep the format small, and why the topics come from a survey of the people we invite. Both speakers came from the community itself, too.

Doubt as a starting point

Tomas Castro teaches marketing, HR and employer branding at VIVES and has written a book on the subject. Yet he deliberately chose not to talk about it. Instead, he brought new insights he only gained after writing the book, insights that made him question what he thought he knew.

He opened with a claim everyone in the room had come across at some point: "A strong employer brand means a 50% lower cost per hire." Where does a figure like that come from? In consumer marketing, there is a body of research into what actually works, and its findings are often counterintuitive. In employer branding, that research has never been done.

So Tomas held two insights from marketing and psychology up against our field, insights backed by decades of data yet never tested in employer branding. One was about how brands really grow, the other about what makes a campaign effective. Both challenge things we tend to take for granted in employer branding, the EVP included. One of the questions he left the room with: how far should we go in building EVPs, and wouldn't that extra effort be better spent on being recognisable?

He didn't offer easy answers, and that was the point. Whether these insights hold up in employer branding was exactly what he wanted to explore with the room. Pushback was more than welcome. As we put it when we announced him: he would rather have discussion than applause.

"I enjoyed being made to doubt. Food for thought."

From the participant feedback

Reading between the numbers

Jan-Bart Cassimon, one of the founders of Doorstep and a recruitment marketing strategist, then put the room to work. Each group received a report from a fictitious agency and a single question: what would you do with the budget for the next period? Increase it, cut it, reallocate it or leave it as it is?

Every report came with a clear recommendation, and every report hid a mistake. We're not saying which. Anyone who looked only at the numbers gave the wrong advice. Everyone left with one question in mind: compared to what?

One participant later described the session as "very hands on, the perfect way to end the evening".

What we see in our own work

One of the questions in Tomas's pitch was: how do candidates really choose a job? We ask ourselves the same thing, and our own consultants and Talent Managers have already given us some answers.

For ambassador Florian Scheenaerts, it came down to being able to keep growing without leaving everything behind. He has taken on three completely different roles at two sites: "I changed jobs without changing employer, and that is exactly what made the step small enough that I dared to take it."

Ambassador Maarten Osstyn wanted to leave shift work behind and find a better balance: "When a recruiter from Pauwels Consulting called to ask whether consultancy appealed to me, that phone call came at exactly the right moment."

And once people are in, what matters is who stays by their side. Consultants moved to Talent Manager Amandine Jansen for one reason: "so that their follow up would happen in their own language."

None of them mentioned a slogan.

What stays with you

Two sessions, one common thread: take a hard look at what we do and at what we measure. As one participant put it: "Well researched, strong figures and a fun delivery from great guys."

Yet when we asked people for their highlight, the answer that came up most was something else: the people and the conversations. "The lovely people, and everyone's openness," wrote one. "Talking with kindred spirits," wrote another.

"It's still valuable to do this in a group of people you know less well. Otherwise you always end up talking to the same people."

From the participant feedback on the round table

That is exactly why this community exists. In employer branding, you often have to work things out on your own within your organisation. An evening like this shows you that others are grappling with the same questions, and that you can learn from how they answer them.

On to the third edition

There will be a third edition. When we asked whether the next one could be held at their office, several participants said yes. That says a lot about how much life there is in this community. Asked if they had anything else to share, one participant simply wrote: "Keep it going." That's exactly the plan.

And the door is always open. We stay in touch between editions, and new members are always welcome.

Thank you to Caro and delaware for their hospitality, to Tomas and Jan-Bart for their sessions, and to everyone who joined us at the table.