How Talent Acquisition Can Get the Marketing Team Up to Speed on Employer Branding

If you talk to someone who works in your marketing department about employer brand, you might hear something like this: We already have a brand strategy for the company. We have an internal team of creatives who know our brand better than anyone. Why do we need an employer brand strategy?

We totally get it. It feels like any marketing department should be able to do both, and some can, but employer branding is a very specialized practice. And unlike brand marketing, employer brand marketing is a relatively new discipline.

So, what makes your company’s consumer facing brand different from your employer brand? This…

Brand teams market a company’s products and services. Employer brand teams market the experience of working at the company that makes those cool products and services. One team makes the case for buying the products, the other makes the case for taking the job (and keeping it).

Employer brand teams ask questions like:

• Why would someone want to work here? 

• What would make them want to stay? What would make them want to leave? 

• What are other companies like ours doing for their employees that we’re not? 

• How happy is our workforce? 

• Do our employees get better at their jobs over time? Do their skills improve?

But really, we’re not so different, you and me. The teams do deal with similar problems. Here are some of the questions that employer branding teams and company branding teams work on every day. 

Employer brand

Why should I work for your company?

How will working at your company improve my life?

Can the company financially support my lifestyle?

What will the company do to make sure I want to keep working there?

What’s the company culture like? Will I feel comfortable and respected?

Company brand 

Why should I buy your product?

How will your product improve my life?

Can I afford to buy your product?

What if I’m not satisfied with the product?

Are your products well made? Are they responsibly and ethically made?

Do the two teams ever work together?

Absolutely. The point is not silos—employer brand teams and company brand teams have to collaborate.

The consumer-facing brand will greatly inform the candidate-facing brand

For example, a company like BarkBox has a playful and fun consumer-facing brand, so their candidate-facing brand also feels very light, very friendly. It doesn’t feel like the serious, corporate, candidate-facing brand at AIG. (It would be mad strange if it did, and a real failure of employer branding.)

The OG marketing team remains the expert on the product

The company brand team needs to help the employer brand team understand the products. How else will they tell job seekers about all the fancy stuff they’ll make if they work there? 

The employer brand team is about the make the marketing team’s like easier

Employer branding is also going to make traditional marketing work a lot easier: Twenty-nine percent of consumers say the way a company treats its employees is the most important factor when deciding whether to become a loyal customer.

We have a careers page. Why bother with more employer brand?

Employees are massively influential—and currently more influential than ever. They live lives outside of the workplace, they use social media, they talk to their friends about work, and they call reporters when it gets really bad. For better or worse, the company's reputation is easily made public by the very people who work for you.

Employer branding overlaps with human resources and talent acquisition that traditional branding and marketing just doesn’t. Employer branding teams are experts on the HR world, on recruiting and retention, on benefits and pay equity, DEI, skill development—all of that. And we like it. We’re good at it.

Think of it this way: Employees are the company’s natural squad of internal influencers, and they deserve special treatment. The job of an employer branding team is to take care of those internal influencers and amplify their voices. 

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza writes about workplace culture, DEI, and hiring. Her work has appeared in Fast Company, From Day One, and InHerSight, among others.

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