What Is Employer Branding?

Full Transcript

Enrollify_IWannaWorkThere_Audio_Epsiode1_CraigFisher+Version1

[00:00:00] Eddie Francis: Nevada, the institution, company or organization, 

[00:00:09] Eddie Rrancis: everyone wants to find the best talent and everyone wants to keep their best talent. Higher education is no different. I'm Eddie Francis. I've worked at both Talent Acquisition. And higher ed marketing. On this podcast, we're going to explore the ways to create a great experience for faculty and staff on your campus, because in education, a great employee experience equals a great student experience.

[00:00:34] And who doesn't want that? We'll have some honest conversation. Get insights from experts and hear success stories from campuses. It's all about developing an attractive employer brand. Something that'll make the people say, I wanna work there.

[00:00:54] Eddie Francis: So we're gonna get this party started with a very simple question, what is employer branding? And the [00:01:00] guest who's gonna answer that is someone I know from my recruitment days. Craig Fisher, he's the founder, 

[00:01:05] Eddie Rrancis: employer brand and marketing strategist for Talent Net Media. He's consulted with such brands as Toyota, Accenture, Siemens, Samsung, subway, and JP Morgan Chase, just to 

[00:01:15] Eddie Francis: name a few.

[00:01:16] Eddie Rrancis: You can find out more about Craig and his work@talentnetlive.com. Here's my conversation with Craig Fisher. Craig, thank you so much for joining me 

[00:01:24] Eddie Francis: on the podcast. How are you? 

[00:01:26] Craig FIsher: Fantastic, Eddie. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. 

[00:01:30] Eddie Francis: Hey, listen, the, so the world of employer branding, it's interesting in higher education is still relatively a new concept for some colleges and universities.

[00:01:42] And so just to kind of lay some groundwork here, um, the first thing is, let's find out about you. How did you even get into employer branding in the first place? 

[00:01:52] Craig FIsher: So, I've got an advertising degree, right? And how many of us actually use our, our. Our degree in any [00:02:00] way, shape, or form, but like everyone else, uh, ended up in recruiting somehow.

[00:02:06] When I started my own firm, eventually I had been sort of taking advantage of what the, uh, internet had to offer. Right. I'd been recruiting since the days that were just fledgling internet, like 1996. Uh, but by the mid two thousands I was taking apart LinkedIn and figuring out what it could do, and I was also trying to help.

[00:02:27] My employers, my, the, the companies that I was recruiting for, to brand themselves better, to make my job easier when recruiting for them. Eventually, companies started asking me to come speak to their recruiting annual meetings and fireside chats and sales kickoffs and things like that because I got sort of Twitter famous for my opinions on the matter, and, and I got invited to, uh, write the first ever employer brand.

[00:02:55] Article for, uh, Universal's Quarterly, first [00:03:00] ever Quarterly magazine. Wow. And that's a, that's an employer branding, uh, magazine in 2009. Really, it just became a thought leadership. Business of its own. And eventually I was able to just do that kind of strategy work and, and sell my part of the staffing business and, and, uh, executive search business.

[00:03:19] And since, uh, 2011, have been doing literally talent attraction, employer branding, recruitment marketing, and process improvement. So 

[00:03:28] Eddie Francis: what exactly is employer branding? 

[00:03:31] Craig FIsher: Right. So employer branding is, is really the process of managing your reputation as an employer amongst job seekers, right? Your potential universe of hires current employees and key stakeholders as a, for instance, university or a privately held startup, or, You know, you may have investors and other [00:04:00] people who are interested in how you brand yourself for employment, not just your.

[00:04:05] Goods and services, 

[00:04:07] Eddie Francis: and I'm very curious as to the university that you have worked with. Mm-hmm. When you had this initial conversation about them, how did you explain to them about the importance of employer branding to an organization in particular? Uh, an institution of higher learning. 

[00:04:25] Craig FIsher: Right. Well, if you want to attract the best type of people for your specific organization, you want to take a.

[00:04:35] Practiced and focused approach versus being generic, right? Yeah. So you wanna look at what's interesting and unique about your organization as a great place to work. And sometimes that might mean interviewing the people who work there about what they love about it, right? Mm-hmm. You wanna be transparent, uh, as an employer.

[00:04:57] You want to emphasize the great things, [00:05:00] um, and acknowledge, you know, what might be lacking. In your offering and say, Hey, we're striving to get better. That's why we need you to come join us and help us be the greatest. It's funny because large employers, and even sometimes large universities, think that because they've got a good reputation for their, you know, their service offering that mm-hmm.

[00:05:25] That, that makes everyone want to join them as an employee, but that's not necessarily true. You have to kind of showcase what's good. 

[00:05:33] Eddie Francis: Yeah, I wanna come back to the data collection part in just a little bit, especially the role that HR plays in this. But I wanna bring you into, um, uh, just very quickly into a situation I was in where, uh, I was talking to a higher up from an institution I.

[00:05:50] I just got into this thing with them and I don't remember what the conversation was, but it did turn to employee branding. I told them that it was something that I was pretty [00:06:00] passionate about, and I'm standing there going, this, this, this is the future though. This is the future of higher ed. We gotta really, really dive into this thing.

[00:06:07] And this person's response to me was, Well, our employers aren't exactly happy to be here, so I don't know how that's even gonna work. And so my question is, when it comes to building an EM a competitive employer brand, is it about employees being happy? Air quotes? 

[00:06:28] Craig FIsher: Well, okay. So there's a whole sort of, uh, part of employer branding where you are marketing to your existing employees, right?

[00:06:39] Right. And one of the things that makes for happy employees is having engaged employees. Okay. And so that data collection piece, right? If you're active about asking your employees what are they like and what needs improvement, they feel more engaged if you are [00:07:00] active about asking your employees to help deliver the message to the world about the good parts of the company's culture.

[00:07:07] And in the process, reminding them of what the good parts of the company's culture are based on the surveys that you've done with them or the interviews that you've done and say, you know, we need your help to attract more great people like you and become a better place to work. Uh, they feel more engaged, right?

[00:07:24] And so making them part of the process instead of just trying to brand around them if they're not happy, uh, goes a long way towards creating a happier work environment. 

[00:07:36] Eddie Francis: I know that. In recruiting and in HR in general. There had been this research that basically said, um, is not so much about the money, it is about the engagement.

[00:07:49] Is that still true today? 

[00:07:51] Craig FIsher: It's also about the money. 

[00:07:52] Eddie Francis: Okay. Okay. Let's not be mistaken. 

[00:07:57] Craig FIsher: Yeah. Um, but, [00:08:00] uh, sometimes it is what it is. Yeah. Right. Um, we, companies have bans and those bans don't get easily changed. Right? So your, your salary bands may be stuck for a little while and you have to do other things.

[00:08:16] And so not just engagement, but opportunity to learn. To contribute in other ways, like e r G groups. Right. Um, and the e 

[00:08:27] Eddie Francis: r d being employ employment are resources. Employer employee employee 

[00:08:30] Craig FIsher: resource groups. That's right. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, lean in groups where they can sort of make an impact aside from their job.

[00:08:37] And then also an opportunity to help the organization or institution make a good impact on the community. Right. Um, and so all of these things, it's, it's learning and growth and, uh, participation that help employees feel more connected to the company or to the institution. 

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[00:10:46] Eddie Francis: One other conversation that was really kind of interesting to me. I was, uh, talking to yet another institutional leader, and, uh, again, going through the whole employee brand, uh, spiel.

[00:10:57] And, uh, this, this leader, uh, [00:11:00] said, well, I. Listen, you know that, that, that's fluff. Okay. This whole employer brand thing, we're, we're mission based okay. Colleges, as if I didn't know this. Colleges and universities are mission based, so yeah, we don't necessarily have to do this employer brand thing. How do you respond to that?

[00:11:17] Craig FIsher: Well, again, this is like Toyota saying, we're Toyota. Everyone wants to work for us. We're mission-based, Kaizen, right? Continuous improvement. Everyone knows this. Everyone wants to work for us. Well, no, not not, not everyone knows what you're really about and. Even great brands get bad reputations because disgruntled people who leave the organization are the ones who post reviews, right?

[00:11:47] Yeah. So if you look at Indeed or a Glass Door, uh, about comments about working at a certain employer, it's really only the bad comments that, uh, take up most of the room. And so you [00:12:00] have to be active about acknowledging people's. Responses there and saying, thank you for the feedback. We're working on this.

[00:12:08] We'd love to talk to you about it offline. Right? Just being heard helps a lot of people to feel better, and then it's really that reputation management piece there, because it's those people who go out in the world who you can turn into, people who would actually refer. Great people back to your organization and, uh, you know, hiring is a lot about referring, and just because you're mission based doesn't mean that you're good at the process piece of getting referrals and or making it easy for people to apply to your jobs.

[00:12:44] Eddie Francis: And you can't necessarily just write these folks off as disgruntled employees or somebody who you know, you, you can't exactly just go back and say, well, if you go back and look at their record, they really weren't all that great an employee anyway. So of course they wrote something horrible on [00:13:00] Glassdoor about us.

[00:13:00] Craig FIsher: Yes, but you also can't say that half or more of the people in the world aren't good at some point somewhere. Right. Right. And, and that's kind of what you're saying in that situation, that's not necessarily true. It might have just been the wrong situation. Many involuntary le levers or involuntary levers of an organization go on to do great things in other places.

[00:13:25] Mm-hmm. And that's why you don't burn bridges. That's why you don't, uh, You know, make it a very uncomfortable last conversation or sight of your organization is with security or Right. I mean there, there's, there are ways to have reputation management even as people are walking out the door. And that may be a small thing, like having their, their leader just say Thank you for your service.

[00:13:54] I appreciate you and I hope you're doing well, and check in with me when you get settled. 

[00:13:59] Eddie Francis: [00:14:00] So the higher education market is really crowded. You got over 4,000 colleges and universities Yeah. In the country. So it's really hard for one institution to be truly different unless they do have something that's truly different, like a gender-based institution or someone who's focused on a particular, uh, type of thing, like aeronautics.

[00:14:19] When an institution decides that they're gonna start the process of building that competitive employer brand, What kind of HR data do you think that they should start collecting in order to put themselves in a competitive position? 

[00:14:35] Craig FIsher: Certainly surveying your own employees about what's great about your culture is a good place to start and also what needs improvement.

[00:14:45] Mm-hmm. And you should survey a, a wide swath of types of employees, right. Leaders, new people, um, folks that work at all. Levels, uh, in your organization. And then you [00:15:00] should also do some sort of group design thinking workshops to get people talking amongst each other because things come out in those conversations that don't necessarily come out in one-on-one conversations.

[00:15:12] Uh, and the comments start to build on each other. So this is a really good place to start. And then also interviewing your. Job candidates, right? The people who applied to jobs at your organization that, uh, either didn't get the job for whatever reason, or didn't take the job for whatever reason. Those are also great PE people to survey about their experience applying and interviewing with your company, and then includes some people who did get hired, right, and talk to them about their experience.

[00:15:43] There's an institution called the Candidate Experience Awards or the candies. For short that you can participate in for a few hundred dollars administrative fee. And they'll give you the setup to talk to the people who have applied to your jobs and, uh, and [00:16:00] survey them and, and then they'll help analyze the data for you and tell you what it means.

[00:16:04] Craig, 

[00:16:04] Eddie Francis: this is, uh, some good information to get us started to at least get the, the car, you know, going down the road. Um, how can people get in touch with you if they have any questions for you? 

[00:16:15] Craig FIsher: I'm craig@talentnetlive.com. I'm pretty easy to find on places like LinkedIn. I'm all over the place there and I'm on Twitter and Instagram at Fish Dogs.

[00:16:29] That is my hacker name on the interwebs, and, uh, I, I'd love for you to join me there as well. 

[00:16:36] Eddie Francis: Outstanding. Thanks a lot Craig. Really appreciate your time and uh, thanks for joining us on, I wanna work 

[00:16:41] Craig FIsher: there. Thanks Eddie. Appreciate it.

[00:16:52] Eddie Rrancis: I wanna work there as part of the Enroll Fire Podcast network. If you like this podcast, check out other enroll five shows. The Enroll five Podcast [00:17:00] Network is 

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