Employer Brand and Employer Branding

Every organisation that employs people already has an employer brand, whether it plans one or not. Ask people in a town about the largest local employers. They will tell you which one pays on time, which one trains its staff, which one has managers who shout, and which one people leave after six months. That picture in people’s minds is the employer brand.

A simple working definition is this: the employer brand is the reputation an organisation has as a place to work, held by current employees, former employees, candidates and the wider public. It is what people believe it is like to work there.

Employer branding is the planned work an organisation does to understand that reputation, make it accurate and attractive, and communicate it to the people it wants to hire and keep.

You cannot invent an employer brand

A product brand can be built partly through advertising, because most buyers never see inside the factory. An employer brand is different. Employees live inside the organisation every day, and they talk. Friends, family, former colleagues and online review sites spread what they say.

This means employer branding is not mainly a design or advertising task. Logos, videos and careers pages matter, but they only work when they describe something true. If the message and the reality are different, new hires discover the gap quickly, leave early and tell others. The reputation then gets worse, not better.

So the work has two sides: communicating what is good and true about working here, and improving the parts of working here that damage the reputation.