2023 Employer Branding Trends (& Which Ones to Ignore)
Like any other field, HR is subject to the ebb and flow of Trend. There will always be faddy phrases (like “whole self” and “new normal”), new tech applications, new recruiting platforms, new workplace benefits and policies, new CSR emphases. But so many of them remain trends and never produce any change. After all, how long did fear of “quiet quitting” last?
Look, no one here is a prophet, but there are some things that just smell like trends, no? Nap rooms and pingpong tables for talent attraction, for example. Interview questions that are unsolvable problems. May they never return.
Others feel like signs of meaningful change to the way companies recruit and retain talent. The ability to work remotely, though some employers have reneged on Covid WFH policies, will almost certainly be here in 15 years.
So, what of it for 2023?
Don’t ignore: Compensation disclosure
In many cases, disclosing compensation ranges is not a trend but an imperative. If you advertise for a job that could be performed in New York City, California, or Colorado, for instance, you must provide a salary range in the job posting.
More states and municipalities are expected to pass pay transparency laws, and soon, job seekers will expect it. Go ahead and make comp disclosure a practice at your firm. This one is not going away.
Ignore: Early career expectations for rapid advancement
Since 2021, job seekers increasingly want to see that an employer offers learning and development, plus the opportunity for internal mobility.
But with the employer branding trend of touting L&D as a means to career advancement come unrealistic expectations from early career professionals that promotions and pay raises are as simple as completing a few courses. Employers must be explicit that workers must still demonstrate the ability to apply these new skills over the long term.
According to PwC, in the next twelve months, Gen Zers are more than twice as likely to ask for a promotion and more than twice as likely to ask for a raise than are their peers.
This isn’t a new trend, but one that comes along every five to ten years as the next generation enters the workforce. Who, at twenty-two, didn’t think they deserved a promotion and a team to manage within their first few years? Employers should be cautious that they don’t over-promise or promote prematurely.
Don’t ignore: Job stability
This one comes and goes as the job market fluctuates, and may no longer be relevant in eighteen months, but in 2023, it absolutely matters.
Following waves of mass layoffs, your current employees want to know their positions are secure, and potential hires want to know they won’t be let go in six months. Job seekers will be acutely aware of your company’s track record of layoffs, and, particularly, whether you subject workers to the cruel cycle of hiring surges and massive cuts.
If you do have a stable record of employee retention, don’t omit this from your employer brand strategy.
Ignore: Smackin’ lipstick on a pig
The Achilles’ heel of employer branding is the temptation to overpromise, and many have made this mistake in the lately competitive labor market. Workers who were sold a dream about a specific role or a company are pissed.
Joanna York reported for BBC Worklife that the intense pressure to hire has led recruiters to oversell the company and tell candidates what they want to hear, which “could include talking up the advantages of a role, and playing down or staying silent on any negatives.” York acknowledges that this is pretty standard in job interviews, on both sides of the table, but it seems that companies have been abusing the tools of employer branding and in too many cases putting lipstick on a pig.
The Muse’s survey on this problem, which it calls “shift shock,” found that 80% of workers believe it’s acceptable to leave a new job before the six month mark if it doesn’t meet expectations, and 48% say they would try to get their old job back if they experienced this “shift shock.”
Don’t ignore: Prioritizing DEI
Will your company continue to prioritize DEI, or will this be the first thing to go when the purse strings tighten?
According to Monster’s 2023 Work Watch Report, 11% of employers say that DEI is the first to go when budgets are cut, and according to Paige McGlauflin and Paolo Confino at SHRM, when Lyft laid off 13% of its workforce late last year, most of the DEI team was let go, Twitter “saw its DEI team evaporate almost overnight. Twitter’s chief diversity officer Dalana Brand resigned within hours of Muskss acquisition, and employees reported that the company has since dissolved its employee resource groups.”
There are other ways to damage diversity, equity, and inclusion, even if you don’t get rid of your DEI teams or your ERGs. Doyinsola Oladipo reported for Reuters this month that “women and Latino workers represent 46.64% and 11.49%, respectively, of the tech layoffs from September to December 2022, while those segments make up 39.09% and 9.96%, respectively, of the entire industry”
Ignore (sort of): AI in candidate sourcing
Beautifully packaged “algorithms” that promise to source candidates, vet them, and improve hiring and retention numbers (some advertise they can even predict attrition) are so very tempting, especially when employers are laying off HR teams and the remaining recruiters are left to take on more work.
AI is already popular among the HR set. According to EEOC data cited by the American Bar Association (ABA), “more than 80% of employers are using AI in some form of their work and employment decision-making.” The problem is that these tools can be based on terribly flawed assumptions, or nothing but pseudoscience.
“Right now, developers who design AI work in different realms from the social scientists who can anticipate what might go wrong . . . very few projects integrate social needs with engineering innovation,” writes Mona Sloane, senior researcher at the NYU Center for Responsible AI, in Nature.
Lindsey Wagner at the ABA provides this example: Let’s say a company uses an algorithm to predict ideal candidates by analyzing their resumes. That algorithm is trained on resumes of people who have already been hired by the company. But what if that company is composed of mostly men?
Wagner writes: “The algorithm may downgrade terms that were not commonly included in the benchmark resume group, like ‘women’ (such as in ‘women’s bowling league’), so that resumes containing those terms would score ‘lower’ than resumes coming from individuals belonging to the same group as those in the benchmark resumes.”
And that’s just one of the softer sins these tools are capable of committing.
Regulation is coming. The European Union will likely pass the AI Act, and New York CIty has a law ready to roll out in April that will require all tools to submit to an annual “bias” audit by a third-party.
The use of AI in employment decisions is not likely just a “trend” without long-term repercussions, but it is one employers are wise to approach with great caution, lest they introduce more problems than they solve.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance reporter based in Richmond, VA, who covers the future of work and women’s experience in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Fast Company, Quartz at Work, and Digiday’s Worklife.news, among others.
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