Recruitment MarketingHow to Hire an Employer Branding Specialist
Recruitment Marketing

How to Hire an Employer Branding Specialist

There are two ways to build your employer brand: 1) build an in house team or 2) partner with an agency for 3-6 months to kickstart the journey. And then transition over to the in-house team. Either ways, the skills you are looking at are the same. 

In this article, we go into the details of what a day in the life of an employer branding specialist looks like, skills the person must have,  and the gap in the industry. 

Table of Contents

    What does an Employer Branding specialist do?

    An employer branding specialist is responsible for all the external and internal communications to attract candidates. Channels of communication are typically digital / social media, events, career fairs, and agencies.
     
    This role requires one to position his/her organization as a great place to work at. By showcasing the firm’s culture, what it is like to work there, what kind of people one will be working with, and the kind of work one does.
     
    Will working in the organization add meaning to their personal & professional lives? This is all in an effort to attract and retain the right talent.
     
    If we were to break down, this is what the role would entail:
    1. Craft an employer brand story; create campaigns that narrate the story from ideation to execution.
    2. Develop employer brand guidelines (written and visual messaging, typography, color scheme, and tone).
    3. Identify the channels where the employer brand should be present based on market-fit. The market is the talent audience you are targeting.
    4. Create the employer brand on relevant social channels and amplify its presence over time.
    5. Create an employee value proposition – EVP.
    6. Put tools and processes in place to set the EB machine in motion.
    7. Encourage employees to continue the company narrative on their social channels.
    8. Build a communication engine with internal and external stakeholders – agencies, universities, PR.
    9. Analytics – baseline metrics before embarking on employer branding initiative and continually measure to assess the impact.
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    Skills you should look for in Employer Branding specialist:

    We’ve analyzed over 50 employer branding roles and these are the most desired:
     
    1. A background in digital marketing as you can leverage your social media marketing skills. A person with working knowledge of recruitment and marketing is at an unfair advantage.
    2. Hands on in LinkedIn and LinkedIn talent solutions.
    3. Good knowledge of recruitment marketing – the entire lifecycle from understanding the needs of the hiring manager to onboarding. Every touchpoint in this process is reflective of what the organization and brand stands for.
    4. Designing and delivering social media content.
    5. Coordinating employer branding events like career fairs, workshops, webinars.
     

    Where is the gap today?

    The gap is primarily at the intersection of these diverse skill sets: recruitment and marketing. Most recruitment specialists do not come with a marketing background or vice versa.
     
    So there is some upskilling required in terms of getting them acquainted with tactics such as SEM, SMM, and analytics. If the initiative has a sizeable budget, then one can explore paid social and events to build brand awareness.

    Is Employer Branding the same across industries?

    It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to employer branding. The forums that tech industry talent is present in is different from where you will find marketing or sales talent.
     
    For instance, if it is a SaaS company, the employer branding lead will have to identify key events, topics, and trends within the industry, and secure/support speakers or speaking opportunities. Or participate in relevant SaaS podcasts to position the company as a place to work for.

    Sample job description of an employer branding specialist

    Collated from live job postings for Employer Branding Specialists:

     

    Starting with more structured employer branding activities will be your first challenge. At the same time already thinking about building blocks and frameworks that easily can be copied or tweaked for fast deployment in other countries. Even though we have our own course we still believe that it is very important that you liaise with our colleagues in Asia-Pacific and North America to get insights on best practices and leverage their knowledge and experience.

    Our main goal is to get more natural in-flow of candidates. To make this happen you will further determine your own deliverables. For the first six months we at least want you to deliver:

    • Framework for social media outings
    • Develop a recruitment marketing guide to serve as a reference for business partners
    • Support early career activities such as career events, local partnerships, and engagements.
    • Multiple communication outings
    • Leverage marketing department, tooling, and channels
    • Improve candidate application experience
    • Implement measuring system or tooling to improve data for future business cases
    • Playbooks EMEA
    • Plan, run and optimize acquisition activities to serve for recruitment, in term of lead generation and contacts crawling with defined KPIs
    • Cooperate closely with Talent Acquisition Team to build Sourcing Plan/ Strategies.

    Here is what you bring:

    • You have a pragmatic way of working without losing sight on the bigger picture.
    • You are a person who loves to deliver surprising insights and see results on short term.
    • Switching between operational and tactical (sometimes strategic) topics is something you have zero problem with.
    • You will work very closely with our recruiters to deliver support on launching new vacancies with sometimes have very high priority. Therefore, from a recruiting operations point of view, we would like you to have a next-day-delivery mind-set.

     

    Furthermore, you have:

    • Experience in setting up employer brands or lifting them to the next level
    • Experience with branding campaigns across regions
    • Professional level English

    Closing Thoughts

    The role of an employer branding lead or specialist is still a nascent one in most organizations. Many are still in the process of discovering the need for one. To kickstart your talent branding journey and gain momentum as an organization, partner with an agency and then transition to building an in-house team.

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