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Recently, companies have begun to show interest in building an HR brand. Understanding what functions an HR brand has and who should actually build it
About the Author: Alexander Izryadnov, co-founder of Vinci Agency.
When people talk about working on a company’s HR brand, they usually mean optimizing the search for employees, maintaining an internal portal, and team building events. In reality, most of these measures do not lead to the desired result, mainly because the task of building an HR brand is mistakenly entrusted to HR specialists who a priori do not have the tools and resources to solve it.
HR brand and HR specialists
When a company sets out to build an HR brand, this job usually falls on the shoulders of the HR department – traditionally considered their area of uXNUMXbuXNUMXbresponsibility. But in reality, HR doesn’t have the tools to shape an organization’s image, even if it’s about presenting itself as an attractive employer. Why is this happening? In fact, an HR brand has two main tasks, external and internal. The first is aimed at attracting new employees, the second – at retaining existing ones. But for work in the external field, the personnel department does not have the inventory: all their tools are aimed at communication within the company. It turns out a discrepancy: we want the organization to be perceived from the outside as a good employer, but in reality, information about this does not come out.
As for internal interaction, usually the efforts of the personnel department come down to maintaining a corporate intranet portal and, relatively speaking, running in bags – team building activities aimed at team building. But none of these methods bring us closer to building an HR brand: no corporate parties, gifts for March 8 and contests for the best business idea will convince a person that he is incredibly lucky with his employer.
This does not mean that the gifts themselves, contests and corporate parties are somehow bad – it’s just not the tool with which you can increase employee loyalty. Loyalty creates real, and not built on bonuses and free coffee, trust in the employer. If a person understands that he works in an amazing company and together with the team makes a cool product, he will not leave it anywhere. This is what can become a significant factor in retaining staff – and not competitions in nature with a subsequent buffet. Even if a person really loves team building activities, he can always find similar ones at almost any employer.
For an employee to be truly loyal to his company, he must know in which direction it is moving, what its plans are, what is happening in other departments, except for his own, feel like part of a single organism. Understanding what benefits his activities bring to the organization as a whole is extremely important for any employee – but people at best get this information from the speech of one of the tops at the New Year’s corporate party or internal mailings. Moreover, the HR specialists who write these mailings themselves do not always understand what the company’s movement vector is – especially if it is a conservative corporation, where information does not circulate well between departments.
Another task of the HR brand is to turn employees into its ambassadors – in other words, team members must participate in creating a positive reputation for the employer and recommend it to their friends and acquaintances: this is how the word of mouth effect occurs. But even if a person is satisfied with his job, this does not mean that he can formulate the advantages of working in a company. Most often, he can only talk about his position or about the department, but has little idea of how other departments or the entire organization live.
Dialogue from outside
These issues can be closed if internal communications are transferred to external ones. At its core, the formation of an HR brand is not a separate independent direction, but part of a general PR, and there is no point in doing it if you do not conduct regular external communications. All messages related to the HR brand: what the company does and what products it creates, how it works inside, what kind of culture it has and what kind of people work there – all these topics are included in the overall business communication. Now, the more open and humane the organization behaves, the more trust it inspires both clients and those whom it employs.
External communication solves three problems at once in the interests of the HR brand: firstly, with its help you tell potential employees what they can do in the company and why they should choose it, tell them about the brand values, about your projects and products, about people who work here. Secondly, this way you can easily convey this information to an existing team. In this format, it will be more detailed and more valuable: it is one thing to receive a letter from an HR manager, and quite another to read an interview with your director in Forbes. Thirdly, external communication provides company employees with ready-made messages that they can use as brand ambassadors.
In this way, we solve several problems at once: we increase the duration of the work of specialists in the company, attract new people and at the same time reduce the cost of attracting them, since this process is partly due to word of mouth. It is no coincidence that many large corporations often take out internal communications.
Distribution of duties
If we are talking about external communications, this task should be assigned either to the PR department, or, if it is not developed, to outsourcing agencies – but the personnel department should not deal with it. PR specialists have tools for choosing messages that will be broadcast to the external environment, for the right targeting and for communicating with the media. For HR, this is a non-core activity, and you cannot force HR specialists to be responsible for it.
HR can be a customer – in other words, set tasks: explain which vacancies need to be filled, in which departments to reduce turnover, which employees work in the company and which ones are required. But when it comes to choosing a channel for communication with the team, there are already needed PR people who can find the right platform for each audience. So, if we want to convey information to top management, it can be business media or social media targeting. Workers and other personnel hardly read Vedomosti at breakfast, but they are subscribed to Yandex.Zen and regularly visit Odnoklassniki and VKontakte; IT people regularly read Habr. Many companies refuse to communicate with employees using external communications precisely because of the uncertainty that the information will reach the goal – but with the right approach, you can find a way to any segment. There are tools for every audience, and they are definitely more accessible and cheaper than a team building or corporate event for 3 people – you just need to choose the right combination of them.
About content and intranets
Internal communications are often accused of being unimaginably dull. And this is natural: content for staff is created by HR specialists, and this is not their core task – therefore, it rarely turns out to be really interesting and diverse. Intranet portals, through which employees are trying to involve employees in the life of the company, in most cases cannot boast of either high-quality content or high attendance. It is very difficult to find organizations where people really regularly go to the corporate website, read the news and chat.
Yes, such a portal can perform some of its functions, for example, like Cisco, where there is a huge knowledge base for internal use. But if the information that you post on the intranet is uninteresting and useless, it is doomed to a formal existence – and this is even better. Unfortunately, sometimes it happens that employees are required to use the corporate portal – but of course, such measures will rather scare the team than keep it.
Cadres decide everything
Although extending the life of an employee in a company is not a very popular topic for discussion, in 2021 this task has become more relevant than ever, primarily due to the increase in the share of remote work. In 2022, the geographical factor will completely lose its significance. If earlier a person held on to his place simply because he had nowhere else to go in his small town, now he can quite easily get a remote job in another region or country.
Meanwhile, each employee is of great value to the company: he is already aware of all the processes and the internal kitchen, you do not need to wait until he gets used to it and starts to make a profit. And now, in times of crisis, it is especially important to dispel the fears of the team so that people do not run away: to repeat that the business continues to develop, all difficulties are temporary, you are launching new projects and there is a plan how to do everything even better than before. It is desirable that people receive this information from external sources, because this way it inspires more confidence. If instead you invest exclusively in corporate events, you can lose valuable personnel very quickly: people do not like uncertainty, and there is always a hunt for good specialists.
There is one more nuance here: many employers are afraid to promote their employees for fear of attracting the attention of hunters. Yes, there is such a possibility – but if a company regularly deals with its external communications, it always has a way to convey to the team the value of working with it. Then you can highlight your specialists in the external field without fear of losing them. On the contrary, such materials will become an additional incentive both for retaining people who will understand their role in the company and for attracting new audiences – since this is a good demonstration of how the employer treats his staff.