A growing biotechnology company engaged us to help develop a strong and authentic employer brand to act as a signal to the people they wanted to hire.
A strong and authentic employer brand can play a pivotal role in establishing what your company stands for and what you expect from employees. Think of your employer brand as a kind of "signal" that needs to cut through all the noise and resonate with the people you care about most.
Having a strong employer brand can make it easier to recruit people in the company at lower costs. It can also help to deliver higher quality candidates and more access to passive candidates (or those who might be on the fence). It can lead to higher levels of engagement, reductions in employee turnover rates, and smoother, more successful onboarding processes. It can lead to more intentional (and believable) brand advocates inside and outside the company. A strong brand - the signal out to the market - also serves as a solid structure the team needs to help coalesce their talent attraction and content development efforts.
The in-house team engaged us to help conduct the employer brand study. They wanted to collect data and feedback, and translate the findings into usable insights which would then be used to strengthen the brand, validate the EVP, and build out a forward-looking roadmap to help improve processes, approaches, and messaging across the talent acquisition and recruitment functions.
Once engaged, our first step was to set up an intake meeting where we meet with the executive team to do a deep-dive into the existing philosophy, procedures, players, brand, and culture – as well as the core vision, goals, and talent strategies already in place. Next, we surveyed employees and asked for their feedback and ratings relative to their relationship with the company.
In parallel, we asked the executive team to define a subset of their employees so we could hold a few deeper, more personal interviews to get an even more nuanced view of the company.
We also held a set of process-only intake meetings with various leaders to gather their perspectives on a whole range of issues. We reached outside the company to survey past candidates and employees about their first impressions – and used that data to score candidate touch-points and map out their journey with the company. We even talked with passive candidates who hadn’t yet engaged with the company. We did all of this to develop the true (authentic) version of the company's brand.
After we completed all interviews, and collected all our survey and interview data - and other materials or information provided by the company - we synthesized the information and presented our findings and potential next steps of action.
The insights were able to help us determine which aspects of the brand and company are functioning at a high-level related to the employee/management experience. Some, we bundled into "themes" to show the team where big changes needed to occur to impact and provide more competitive advantage. Others were used to support follow-on initiatives across talent attraction, employee engagement, recruiting, on-boarding and more.
Within the context of the brand study, we were able to:
- Gather the authentic voice of the employees’ perspective and use new insights to improve the employer brand message and update the core values.
- Help to organize and structure the employer brand message(s) to support attraction marketing, content, messaging, and more.
- Synthesize, and put into context, the feedback for benchmark purposes in the future – to set up improvements across key performance indicators.
- Help the team determine where they could be more successful – including improvements to touch-points, candidate and employee experiences, and more.
- Develop content, candidate personas, potential target audiences, and mapped out attributes, character traits, interests, values, etc.
The entire engagement was customized to their needs and we provided a dedicated team member to serve as the point person to help guide the project through to successful delivery. We also provided the company with aggregate survey results in electronic and hardcopy form. After the employer brand study work was completed, we continued to work directly with the firm to create new content to support attraction and hiring initiatives inside the company.
