While an increased number of organisations are conscious of the importance of employer branding being, less than one third of organisations have a comprehensive communication strategy in place to attract talent, according to a research report.
It found that social media is seen as the most important channel for communicating an employer brand, and most organisations expect their social media budget to increase in the next five years.
However, only about 20 per cent of companies currently have a fulltime employee responsible for employer branding on social media.
“Social media is becoming more popular because it allows companies to do more with less – but that means they are going to need to focus on differentiation,” said David Brudenell, global vice president of product for Universum, which conducted the research report.
“Social media is already becoming a very crowded space, and if employers aren’t intentional and data-driven in their social media efforts, they will have difficulty being successful,” he said.
“Currently, about half of companies measure their social media with KPIs – though this is predicted to increase to about 70 per cent in the next five years.
Employer branding is not just a job for HR, according to Universum, which observed that employer branding is prioritised and approached by different functions and in different industries.
While employer branding clearly seems to be growing in importance, the ways in which companies define it differs depending on the company.
Who owns employer branding?
The research report, which took in more than 2000 senior executives (including 365 CEOs, 887 heads of HR and recruiting, 106 employer branding and 192 marketing leaders) found that while corporate communication and marketing departments are largely responsible for employer branding activities, HR teams and CEOs are held accountable for results.
“The intersection of HR, marketing, and C-level priorities is interesting, because it shows that teams will need to increasingly work together to achieve the right results,” said Petter Nylander, global CEO for Universum.
“Accountability on the C-level and HR side and cross departmental cooperation is imperative for employers to excel in their employer branding activities.”
While more than 60 per cent of marketing, HR, and communications teams see the need for these stakeholders to cooperate more closely over the next five years, only about 53 per cent of CEOs see this as necessary.
Sixty per cent of CEOs feel they own employer branding (and just 32 per cent of CEOs feel the role is owned by HR).
Talent executives view the issue very differently; most say HR owns employer branding (58 per cent of HR executives, 63 per cent of talent acquisition executives, and 57 per cent of recruiting executives say HR owns it).
And marketing is caught in the middle: 39 per cent point to HR, while 40 per cent point to the CEO.
There is generally a broad consensus that more cooperation is needed to support employer branding efforts; 70 per cent of senior executives say they see the need for closer cooperation over the next five years.
The report observed that CEOs don’t have confidence in HR’s ability to solve strategic talent challenges – of which employer branding is a critical component, however, CEOs also don’t generally feel the need to involve HR to a deeper extent.
What are employers looking for?
The report also found that personality and communications skills are considered most important in new hires.
“The importance of culture fit has interesting implications for employers,” said Peter Götenstedt, global head of consulting, Universum.
“As companies continue to become more data-driven in their hiring, we will start to see some interesting ways in which data will be used to measure personality and soft skills.”
When asked about the most important qualifications for hires, respondents listed “work experience” as number one.
This is also predicted to become even more important in the next five years, perhaps indicating the growing importance of internships and development programs that allow early work experience.
Interestingly, “personality” and “communication skills” came in as the second and third most The most in-demand career type is “leader,” both today and in the next five years, according to the report, which said that although most functions agree that they need leaders, CEOs have different expectations of what “leaders” mean.
According to CEOs surveyed, 26 per cent believe leaders empower their employees, 31 per cent say they are goal-oriented, and 26 per cent say they have high levels of responsibility.
Some 31 per cent of HR specialists also believe they clearly define development plans for their teams, while 27 per cent of marketing managers believe that leaders need to be role models.
As companies focus increasingly on culture fit, the report said will be important for them to communicate clearly about what traits they are actually looking for.
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