Employer branding is nothing new

If you Google ‘What is employer branding?’, you get this answer:

“Employer branding is the strategy an organization uses to manage its reputation as a place to work, aiming to attract, recruit, and retain the best talent.”

In its simplest form, this boils down to your employer brand being the reason why someone would choose to work at your organisation, rather than somewhere else.

And ever since I first started in recruitment advertising (as it was called back in 1987), that’s the essence of what I’ve tried to understand about every single client I’ve worked with.

Because I’ve always argued that to help my clients attract and recruit the best talent, I need to understand their offer. That should be the basis of any messaging, summing up both them and their opportunity.

It’s an approach I started to take at my very first agency.

We focused exclusively on helping clients to attract people with IT skills. And like today, back in the late ‘80s those skills were in high demand and short supply. Which often meant that clients were expecting to poach someone with the skills they needed from another organisation.

So I’d ask them one killer question: “If your ideal candidate’s doing this job for someone else, why would they want to come and do it for you?”

In essence, I was asking them to explain their employer brand.

Except, of course, I didn’t call it that.

Back then, I just called it common sense.