Modern HR professionals are getting more brand-savvy by the day. Why? In simple terms, HR professionals need to be as effective in branding their organizations in the minds of existing and future employees as marketing professionals are in branding their organizations in the minds of customers. This is especially true for HR professionals tasked with employer branding—helping their organization develop a reputation as a great place to work.

The worlds of branding and HR are evolving—rapidly.  Scroll back just a few decades, and branding was all about engaging the customer, and only the customer. But now, modern business leaders understand that brands are built from the inside, not the outside, and are putting more emphasis on building highly engaged cultures where employees are excited to come to work and are committed to helping their organizations meet their branding and business goals. 

Brand defenders

These leaders understand that there is a direct correlation between their companies’ levels of employee experience and the experience their customers receive from those employees. As author Sybil F. Stershic notes, “The way your employees feel is the way your customers will feel. And if your employees don’t feel valued, neither will your customers.” 

So, if brands (including employer brands) are built from the inside, it stands to reason that HR professionals, the individuals most likely to be responsible for company culture, internal communication, employee engagement, and the overall employee experience, should be considered as codefenders of their organizations’ brands—right alongside their marketing peers. And this is exactly what business leaders, practitioners and observers are seeing in organizations all across the globe, with companies encouraging their branding and HR teams to work more closely together, either in fully integrated units or on a project-by-project basis in a relationship which I refer to as “Bhranding” (Branding + HR = “Bhranding”).

HR evolution

Caroline Stokes, in an article entitled Employer Branding: Why it’s Time Marketing, Execs, and HR Worked Together, gives an interesting exposition on the changes which the HR industry is currently undergoing. 

She notes:  “The line between the marketing department and human resources department continues to blur in this emerging corporate and employer branding environment. The future will require HR to be more marketing literate, and as a result more involved during company evolution, changes in market developments, workforce crisis management and other challenges that affect the acquisition and long-term retention of talent.”

And, in an article entitled HR and Marketing: Building Your Employer Brand Together, the author notes that, “Today, HR is tasked with creating an employee experience that markets the business to recruits and employees. Crafting a relevant and resonant employer brand involves aligning your organization’s aspirations, values, needs, and wants with the people you are looking to recruit and retain—no easy feat.”

Notice that in both of these quotes, the authors note explicitly that a part of the modern HR professional’s role is to market the organization. Not to an audience of consumers, but to an audience of current and future employees.

Collaboration with marketing

To effectively market the business to recruits and employees, HR professionals need to have at least a cursory knowledge of the principles of branding and know how to apply those principles across several channels to reach HR’s intended audiences—starting, not as marketers do, with external channels, but with internal channels. As bestselling author Stan Slap writes, “you can’t sell it outside unless you can sell it inside.” And, “selling it inside” is where employer branding truly begins.

Modern HR professionals tasked with building a strong employer brand market their organizations to employees first, quite often in collaboration with their marketing colleagues from across the hall. Modern HR professionals circulate compelling brand stories internally using tools like 15Five, WorkTango, and BambooHR. When circulated effectively, these stories help keep employees who already work in the organization informed and, more importantly, engaged. Only after HR applies the principles of branding (such as storytelling) to market the organization to current employees can it then effectively market the organization to the individuals it hopes to recruit.

Telling brand stories

Modern recruiters, who are usually a part of their company’s HR team, are skilled at proactively marketing their employer brands by telling brand stories specifically targeting people who might be a good fit to join their organization (in much the same way that marketing may digitally tell stories to entice customers to purchase products and services). Companies like Marriot, PetSmart, Netflix, Innocent, and Airbnb all do a great job of using dedicated career websites, as well as dedicated social media pages to give potential employees an idea of the types of opportunities available at their organizations, their company cultures, and their workplace environments—and in the process contribute to their organizations’ employer brands.

Brand-savvy HR professionals also now use many of the technology tools that have long been used by marketers. Marketers have used tools like Brand24, Hootsuite and BrandMentions to “listen in” on what consumers were saying online about their buying experience. HR professionals now use these same tools to gauge what current employees and potential recruits are saying about the company’s culture, working environment, and its overall employer brand. When HR can effectively “listen in” to these conversations, they can get a better pulse of what people really feel about the organization’s reputation as an employer and take steps to improve the company’s employer brand.

Employer branding in action

Here’s another example of HR being brand-savvy and partnering with their marketing colleagues to get the job done. In order to modernize their company’s employer brand, the General Electric (GE) recruitment team took the extraordinary step to produce a marketing-style video aimed not at getting consumers to purchase its products, but at getting their industry’s “best and brightest” to apply to the company. The campaign, entitled What’s the matter with Owen is a series of humorous 30-second video spots that follow a character called Owen as he announces to his friends and family that he has just gotten a new job working as a programmer for GE. 

As he shares the good news, his friends and family are clearly confused—they still see GE as a staid manufacturing company rather than the dynamic, multi-industry digital Goliath that it had evolved to become. The aim of the campaign was clearly to clear up misconceptions about the brand and get highly qualified candidates to apply to the company—even if it meant poking fun at the company itself. The campaign was a success.

According to Linda Boff, chief marketing officer at GE, after the commercial aired, recruitment leapt up eightfold. To produce the campaign, GE partnered with well-known ad agency BBDO. Partnering with an agency to produce a shiny, new, high-flying campaign is a move typically reserved for enticing customers, not necessarily for recruiting new employees, making this campaign even more noteworthy.

HR as ‘internal marketing’ 

While there are several other instances that we could pull of modern HR professionals being just as brand savvy as their branding colleagues, the above examples of HR using social media channels and social media management tools usually reserved for marketers, and producing marketing-style videos for recruitment purposes, should suffice to show which way the wind is blowing in terms of the expectation that HR professionals help their marketing colleagues brand their organizations. And, as modern HR professionals continue to embrace their roles as “internal marketing,” we can reasonably conclude that this wind will strengthen over time. 

HR could, of course, outsource their slice of marketing the organization to their workmates in the marketing department or to a marketing or ad agency, but that likely won’t produce the desired results. When HR understands the principles of branding and can speak the language of branding with their marketing partners, the HR team is likely to do a much better job of helping their organizations to build stronger brands and stronger businesses.