Every time I run a candidate experience workshop, I always ask the TA leaders and recruiters in the room to describe these two things:
- Describe your employer brand in one word.
- Describe your candidate experience in one word.
Now, sometimes folks need more than one word to describe each, and I always give them leeway to do just that.
What usually happens is that I hear positive words that describe employer branding (marketing) and negative words that describe candidate experience (reality).
But the last workshop I did, that’s not what I heard. What I heard were negative words describing employer branding and positive words describing candidate experience.
What multiverse was this? Interestingly, the room was filled with super-transparent recruiting professionals ready to share and engage. While their initial responses threw me, we continued to have a fruitful workshop.
What I did share with them, and where teams usually concur, was that the employer brand should be aligned with candidate experience, and vice-versa. Not an easy task if and when you’re hiring across job types and you want to leverage the idealized company culture while injecting employee realities throughout.
Well, what we know each year in our CandE Benchmark Research is that these are the top content that candidates consume prior to applying for a job across job types (not counting salary and benefits):
- Company values (#1)
- Company culture
- Why employees work there
- Why employees stay there
- Real employee testimonials (video preferred)
- Diversity and inclusion initiatives
- Flexibility & remote work
- Career path opportunities
- The application process and next steps
Company values has been #1 now for many years. Companies that invest in delivering more of this content have a much higher research rating in our research. 54% higher overall. That’s some employer brand magic there!
And there’s some employer brand magic here, too. Every month we have a CandE Community meeting of current and past employers in our benchmark research. The topics rotate and the latest one covered employer branding and talent attraction. While there are challenges across industries and hiring markets, some things of note from our meeting included:
Bridging Gaps: One community member highlighted that their company, which has multiple plant and headquarter locations, uses candidate feedback from (including CandE data, Glassdoor, and Indeed) to identify gaps between messaging and reality, focusing on values that overlap across different employee groups.
Internal Storytelling: Another community member mentioned using internal employee storytelling, often repurposed by their team, to showcase different teams and their work, despite challenges with employees not wanting public exposure due to clearances.
Culture & EVP Alignment: Another community member discussed their company’s journey to align culture with their EVP by using broad cultural surveys, Glassdoor insights, and integrated communications about new benefits into their candidate experience ecosystem.
Externalizing Internal Positives: Another community member described how their company identifies positive employee feedback (e.g., on benefits, work-life balance) from internal sources and then strategically publishes this externally through blogs or LinkedIn to enhance their employer brand.
Highlighting Employee Tenure & Activities: Another community member shared that their company highlights tenured employees’ experiences and engaging quarterly company activities (like “fruit day” or service awards) on their career site and LinkedIn to showcase culture, especially in a challenging manufacturing market.
Differentiating in Industry: Another community member explained the complexity of highlighting their value proposition across 11 brands and 450 locations, focusing on support for specific positions and differentiating from competitors, while balancing internal communication.
Validating EVP with Data: Another community member detailed how their organization validates their employment brand material using associate engagement survey results, internal focus groups, candidate surveys, and employee spotlights to ensure authenticity and align with their long-time brand history.
How would you describe your employer brand and candidate experience in one word? The magical word that encapsulates the balance and alignment between idealized brand marketing and the day-to-day realities of employees doing the work. And why their work’s better than their competitors.
Maybe that should be one of the words describing employer brand (when applicable): magic.
