For many industries, recruiting and staffing remain the biggest barriers to growth following the pandemic. And for companies in highly competitive fields, finding and keeping the attention of qualified candidates is continuing to take more time, creativity and resources.
More than ever, the reputations of the company and its leadership matter during a candidate’s search. According to a recent survey conducted by Randstad, 86% of workers would not apply for, or continue to work for, a company with a bad reputation with former employees or the general public.
So, how do you attract candidates to your organization to help fuel your growth? And, how do you retain the employees you have to avoid the high costs of recruiting and downtime from onboarding?
It starts with developing a solid employer branding strategy. Your employer brand impacts just about every facet of your business, from recruiting and retention to performance and profitability.
Your brand extends beyond the products or services you offer. But while companies spend plenty of time creating a compelling brand story surrounding their products or services, many don’t understand the importance of a strong employer brand in attracting top talent.
In this webinar featuring a panel of experienced marketing leaders, the group explores what employer branding means in today’s job market. They shared insights to help growing businesses understand the importance of having an employer brand strategy, and best practices for developing one that creates a tangible ROI.
Key Takeaways
- Consistency between the employer brand promise and employee experience is crucial for retention and overall employee satisfaction.
- A strong employee value proposition (EVP) clearly communicates the unique benefits and values an organization offers to its employees, making it easier to attract top talent.
- Transparency is crucial for building trust with both employees and potential candidates, as it reflects the company’s values and commitment to open communication.
Links & Resources Mentioned
- Media Minefield
- Authentic Ally Network
- Gravity Payments – $70,000 minimum wage
- More CMOs Are Investing in Their Personal Brands
- Your Employees Are Your Best Brand Advocates
- The CEO Reputation Premium: Gaining Advantage in the Engagement Era
- Brunswick Connected Leadership Report
- The Components of Authentic Growth™ Methodology
Full Webinar Transcription
Welcome and Introductions
Jennifer Zick: Welcome, welcome everybody who’s rolling in for today’s webinar? If you’re here to learn about employer branding, you are in the right place. We’re just going to give everybody a couple moments to roll through the zoom link, get settled, then we’ll officially kick off in 1 minute. But in the meanwhile, I invite you to get comfortable, grab a beverage, grab a notebook, there might be some nuggets you want to jot down through today’s conversation. And I’m just grateful to have you here with us today. I see everybody rolling in. The numbers are ticking up, so we’re going to give it just another moment for everyone to get on board and get settled. You’re here with Authentic® for the Authentic Growth™ webinar series on employer brand, and very soon we’ll start with introductions and jumping right into the content. So thanks again for joining us.
All right, I’ve got just a few introductions and announcements to make, so we don’t want to waste your time. We want to make this hour really count. So let’s get started. Hi, I’m Jennifer Zick. I am founder and CEO of Authentic. We are a community of fractional chief marketing officers that works with growing businesses all across the US, sometimes beyond helping them to Overcome Random Acts of Marketing® and confidently take the next right step toward healthy growth. Absolutely delighted to be with you here today for the next discussion within our Authentic growth webinar series. Today we’re going to talk about a super relevant topic that’s important for any company that employs human beings. So if you’re one of those company representatives, we’re so glad that you’re here with us today as we chat about employment brand.
Before we get started, I want to offer you a little bit of context about who Authentic is, who is our wonderful team of panelists here. And then we’ll dive into a bit of a fireside chat conversation. But we also want to invite you to notice in the zoom controls on the webinar that you have a q and a function. Ignore the chat function. We will pay less attention to that, but use the q and a function. Drop a little comment or question in for our panel as we roll along today’s conversation. I’ll keep a side eye on those questions, and we’ll leave some time at the end if any of you have a burning question for one of the panelists or all of the panel.
So again, I’m Jennifer Zick with Authentic and this webinar series was really grown out of our desire to take a lot of the conversations that we have with our clients and bring them forward to public conversation and learning and growth and Authentic. Just to give you a lens on most of the conversations we’re having, we work with small to mid sized businesses that are usually between 5 million to 100 million in annual revenue. So many of the clients that we serve are founder led, sales driven, ramping growth companies and they want to learn about everything related to growth organizationally and certainly all the way down to the details of marketing. So today, our guests here in our webinar represent a wide range of the connections in our community. Some of you are part of small businesses that we serve.
Whether you’re in a leadership and executive and founder seat or a marketing seat. Some of you are within agencies that we partner with or that work with companies on their brand and marketing programs. Some of you are in larger enterprises and you sit inside of a talent or brand seat that ties into this conversation today. So whatever your role in the audience is today, we’re just delighted that you’re here with us. We’re going to be wearing our lens of entrepreneurial businesses as we talk about this space. But we hope that no matter what your role, no matter what your company or industry, you come away with at least one or two thought nuggets that are going to help you really be intentional about employer branding and the experience for your team members.
So without further ado, I want to jump right in and introduce you to our esteemed panelists for today and our very good friends. We have two of our Authentic Fractional CMO™s with us today, as well as one of our Ally Network partners, Kristi, from Media Minefield. But I’m going to go around the room, starting on my visual left. And so that brings me to Tammy. Tammy, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your experience relative to this topic today.
Tammy Ribaudo: Great. Thank you so much Jennifer. I am really happy to be here. And hello everyone. I’m Tammy Ribaudo and I am a fractional CMO with Authentic. I have been with Authentic for what now, three months, so very new. But I’m enjoying every minute. I have to say that, and not just because Jennifer is there, but I really do enjoy it. It’s a lot of fun. We have great clients and just the whole mind share, which hopefully Jennifer will talk about a little bit later, is tremendous.
I’ve worked in the professional services industry for many years and always in a variety of marketing roles. And I’ve also worked on the fringes of marketing and sales and proposal development, communication, branding, et cetera. And I’ve done that for small companies, really big companies and kind of everything in between.
And with all of that, I’ve always been this really big brand champion. And one of the most important aspects of brand and of marketing is you’re always the glue. Brand is the glue, marketing is the glue. And I think about that, especially in how it relates to HR and when marketing and HR partner, you know, great things happen. And so that’s why I’m really excited about today’s topic of employer branding.
Jennifer Zick: Thank you, Tammy. Veronica.
Veronica Williams: Jennifer, thanks for having me. So for those of you who don’t know me, and I’m guessing that’s most of you, my name is Veronica Williams. I also am a fractional chief marketing officer with Authentic. And actually, I just celebrated my one year anniversary. So that was very exciting. And it’s interesting to me because I love this topic, because I have been involved in marketing for 25 years from both the client side and from the agency side. And I have been an employee and I’ve been a business owner. So the topic of employee branding, of strong employee value proposition, is interesting to me because it affects you. No matter which side of the coin you’re on, either as an employer or as an employee, it has a really big impact on you.
But where I wanted to go with this is one of the primary reasons that I went to work for Authentic is because they have such a great employee value proposition. Right? They walk the talk around, love your life, love your work. And that really attracted me. And again, even our brand proposition of being Authentic and who we talk about ourselves with, our customers really resonated with me. And again, that’s important because then I reflect that back to our customers. So again, I’m really excited about this conversation. My credentials are, as I said, I’ve been in marketing for more than 20 years. I’ve owned my own business. I’ve worked for some places where employment attracting talent has really been an issue. And again, we’ll talk more about that.
But I’m excited to learn from everybody here and to share what I can about the importance of employee value proposition.
Jennifer Zick: Thank you, Veronica. And last but not least, Kristi.
Kristi Piehl: Hi, everybody. It’s a pleasure to spend the lunch hour, depending upon what time zone you’re in. Lunch hour with you, it’s lunch hour where I am. I’m in Minneapolis. I am the CEO and founder of Media Minefield. We’re a public relations agency. We have, we’re the largest woman owned, privately held agency in our region. And we serve clients from five to 10 million into the publicly traded billion large companies. The majority of our team members who work on the media side are former journalists. That’s one of our differentiators. When it comes to crafting a story under a deadline, moving an audience to action, there is no one better, I would argue, than a journalist or formerly a trained journalist. Former working journalist. We work primarily in three areas.
We call it story centric marketing, earned media, the kind of media that you get, that you don’t pay for. So those news interviews, that type of thing, that’s valuable. On the owned media side, we function in a lot of different ways. Thought leadership, writing, article placement, that sort of thing. But our real unique thing that I’m passionate about and what I think I bring to this conversation is what we call positive online presence or pop, which is a focus on executive social media and how getting an executive active on social media, perhaps the whole leadership team, how that can really influence employer brand proposition, the business pension, hiring revenue, all sorts of different things.
I travel around the country speaking around that to different CEO groups, and also do some team training, executive team level training and CEO training as it relates to that specific thing. We also are in the paid media space, so as it relates to search and social ads. So that’s my background before I started the company in 2010. Prior to that, I spent twelve years as a tv news reporter and anchor and worked in a variety of cities, locally, regionally, and did a little bit of national work before I started the company in 2010. And it’s a pleasure to be with you all today.
Jennifer Zick: Thank you so much, ladies of the panel, and I’ve already introduced myself, but relative to this topic, I’m incredibly passionate about this as a business owner and somebody who cares deeply about what brand really means. Because as we marketers talk about a lot, a brand is far more than your logo and your color palette and your fonts. The brand is the promise you make to the world around you and how the world experiences you, either delivering or not delivering on that promise. And that’s true for your buyers, and it’s true for your employees and all the stakeholders that touch into your brand. So it’s every touch.
Difference Between Recruitment and Employer Brand Strategy
Jennifer Zick: Now, before we go further, I’ve been alerted by one of our attendees that perhaps our layout today is different than usual, in that maybe not all four of our faces are showing it all the time, but just the speaker as we speak. So just imagine now that you’ve met each of us, all of us sitting around a table for this conversation and you’ll get to hear from all of us as we throw the ball back and forth on this topic. So, Tammy, I’m going to start with you by asking you to help clarify to our audience what really is the difference between a recruitment and a recruiting strategy and an employer brand strategy from your perspective?
Tammy Ribaudo: From my perspective, I’d say a recruiting strategy is really about attracting people to apply to specific open positions that you have in your company. So it’s all about finding the right talent for that right role. And it’s, you know, I think about it mostly as an acquisition type strategy. It is one component in that bigger strategy, the employer branding strategy. So it is an aspect of employer branding. So with employer branding, that is the promise that the company makes to its current and its prospective employees. So that’s how it sort of pulls in that recruitment strategy. But it is that promise and in that regard, it’s really echoing your brand. Right? So your overall company brand. And it has a lot to do with just how you, not only how you work and how you live, but how those values come to life.
And, you know, your employees are the ones that are, you know, going to be telling the stories and providing that really common sense understanding of why it’s great to work for your company. So one of the things I wanted to mention is that LinkedIn did a survey and so I’m going to kind of read this little thing here, that compelling employer branding can decrease employee turnover rates by 28% and reduce the cost of hiring by 50%. And so I read that stat and I was like, wow, that is such a huge factor in a company’s net profit. I mean, it’s really important. And because it’s so important, it’s also really hard to do.
So companies that don’t do it well that have maybe a disconnect between what they say they do and what they actually are delivering and the experience that those employees have, that’s going to show and they’re just not going to get that same oomph factor that some of the ones that are true to their brand are going to have. So whether they’re onboarding new staff or just thinking about the brand reputation in the market, whatever it is, they need to have that consistency. Cause employees need the reinforcement, right? They need to know that you are talking, you are walking the talk, as Veronica said a little bit earlier, making sure that they feel special, they feel heard, and that they are a part of what you’re building as sort of that bigger employer brand promise.
Jennifer Zick: I love that. And it brings to mind analogy that the marketers in the room are going to appreciate. If recruitment branding is your top of the funnel, getting people to raise their hand and apply for the job, then employment brand is the full lifecycle all the way through the funnel from conversion, retention, advocacy. It’s a broader, more encompassing, strategic approach to brand. Kristi, how would you define the difference there or where? Have you seen that difference or disconnect or connection happen?
Kristi Piehl: Sure. Even since I’ll wear my business owner hat and combine it with my pr filter that I view the world through. And one of the things that’s happened even since I’ve had my company is a pretty significant shift that the employees, and the current employees at any organization have a lot more power about the brand. And it used to be that the brand could control what a prospective employee could find out in the vetting process. Well, now we’ve given Glassdoor some of these other tools. Google what happens inside an organization is public and can play a huge factor in how someone will or won’t apply for a job.
So the amount of power that current employees have, based on my pr hat, many companies and many of the executive teams that we work with, they just don’t realize how much power is out of their hands and they can tell a great story. But your favorite word, Jennifer, if it’s not Authentic, it’s going to be revealed. Back in the day, we used to be able to sort of hide some of our sins. Now, sins that we did commit or didn’t commit. And I use sins in an employee, kind of not a real, not a capital sin. Those things are out there and they can be public, and we’re going to have to combat that. So the power of who has control isn’t just HR, it isn’t just leadership.
Your interns can have a voice in what your brand looks like when it comes to recruitment. And that’s a shift.
Importance of Employee Value Proposition
Jennifer Zick: That’s absolutely true. And that’s a great segue. Then over to Veronica as we tee up the next question. We’ve talked here about recruitment being just the top of the funnel and employment brand being the entire lifecycle and everybody within it, from intern, client, prospect, employee. So, Veronica, as companies think about creating a value proposition around their brand, something that they’re going to promise, what’s the importance of that? And having a strong employee value prop.
Veronica Williams: So that’s a great question, but I do want to talk about something that Kristi just brought up, and it is that, you know, because of social media because there is so much transparency now. Right. Being who you say you are. Right. Having integrity around who you are as an employer is really important. And it’s important for the sake of employees. That’s a given. And so when you ask, why is it so important? Well, having a strong employee value proposition can help you with attraction, retention and productivity and profitability. Right. Like, all of those things are very important. And don’t let me forget to come back to Kristi and about the idea of transparency. But when it comes to attraction, a great employee value proposition can really help you attract more employees. And not only that, attract the right employees.
And I’m going to use Gravity Payments as an example, and I’m a little bit apprehensive to do that because there were some scandals there after the big change that they made. But if you’ll remember, there was an experiment done by Gravity Payments years ago where Dan Price decided that the minimum amount that he was going to pay any of his staff was $75,000. And this is a company in Seattle, and there was a huge uproar about it because there were a lot of people in business who said, you’re going to fail. That’s not sustainable. To have a minimum payment of that high an amount, you just can’t sustain it. And years later, what was uncovered was one when Gravity Payments posted a job anywhere, they got hundreds more applications than any of their competition.
So they were not only seeing a higher quantity, but the other side of it is the best. People wanted to go work there because at that time, they had a great reputation within the employment industry, in the world of employment. And there have, as I said, there’ve been some other challenges. But, like, that’s a really great example about how shaking up the delivery in the marketplace can really upset the apple cart as far as your competition goes. And then, of course, retention, that’s a really big part about this. And one of the things that I think is really important when I’m talking about retention, and this is where I’m going to kind of go back to what Kristi was talking about. Retention isn’t just about retaining your employees.
And again, when you have a good employee value proposition, when you deliver on the promise that you made that attracted someone, they’re more likely to stay with you. People come to work for you because of your mission. They leave because of your manager. So making sure that your management is in alignment with your employee value proposition is important to retaining your customers, excuse me, your employees. But that’s one of the places that I wanted to go with this is that you have to remember that no one does business with a business. They do business with people. And if your employees don’t reflect your brand, it’s disconnected. You’re not just going to lose your employees, you’re going to lose your as much as it is about. It’s about employee retention. And that’s Kristi, where the transparency has always been. Right? Like, that’s always been the case.
If your employees didn’t reflect your brand, you weren’t who you say you were to your customers, and that is a bad customer experience. And then finally, productivity and profitability, right. When your employees are engaged, they’re far more productive. Right? Mastering the rock of the arts. The Rockefeller. I can’t remember the title of the book they talk about. The right person in the right seat is worth three times the wrong person. And that’s. That’s the importance of a good employee value proposition. And it’s also important to remember it affects profitability because it costs one and a half to two times, one half to two times a worker’s annual salary to replace them. So, you know, I have one client that we’ve really. I have two clients, actually, in healthcare. So we have a great challenge when it comes to retention and staffing.
And for one of our clients, we’ve been able to drop our turnover rate by 17%, one 7% in a year. But when you’re looking at a $75,000 a month cost in employee loss, employee turnover, that’s a big number. So, you know, it can really. One of the things that can affect your bottom line almost as much as your brand value can.
Jennifer Zick: That’s absolutely true. And what I’m hearing in the big picture here is that your employee and employment brand and the way you articulate that value prop, it’s not just about the starting line. It’s about living that out. And that will turn your employment brand either into a magnet that attracts the right kind of talent and propels growth, or a repellent that is pushing great talent away or delivering a disconnected experience. So important. And I can’t believe how fast our time is going here. So I know there’s more that we could talk about on that particular point, and I invite that response from the panelists. But I also want to move us into the next layer of questioning. Veronica, this is coming back to you, but I want to make sure we bounce back over to our other panelists.
Measuring Employer Brand Effectiveness
Jennifer Zick: But start us off as a segue on how can organizations start to measure the effectiveness of their employer brand? It’s one thing to say, yeah, we know we need it and we’re going to work on that. But how do you measure that effectiveness?
Veronica Williams: So first I have to apologize. I live in a rural area and my Internet decided that it was going to bottom out just as we started this. So I’m going to have to go off video and I’m going to keep my answer to this question short. There are some really easy tools for measuring employee value proposition, and one of the most clear cut is an ENPS, your employee net promoter score, which it’s really a simple question. Would you recommend working here to a friend? And that’s regular surveys. And using the ENPS is a great way to do that. So when you’re talking about retention, ENPS engagement is measured by employee surveys and participation in surveys, average employee tenure, your glass door, and indeed reviews and your employee candidate referrals.
And then actually, I know I took up some extra time there, so I’m going to stop with those measures. But there are some others that if we don’t cover, I’ll come, I’ll circle back around.
Jennifer Zick: All right, well, I want to invite Tammy and Kristi to chime in on the importance of a strong employment brand value proposition. And also specifically, Kristi, I’d love to ask you’re working with clients and telling their stories. I’m guessing that like ad Authentic, we’re being asked just as much to focus on the. The story that will attract and retain employees as the story that will attract and retain buyers. So where do you start with helping clients to identify how to develop and tell that story?
Kristi Piehl: Sure. We first have to understand what their business proposition is, what their differentiators are, what the, who their audience is, what their purpose is, what their mission, vision, values are. And once we can understand the business landscape, then we can tie the story that needs to get out into the public, and we can then. And now I’m going to go academic because I’m getting my master’s right now and I’m in a talent management class, so I can go full on professor because I had the class anyway, so my last night. But, you know, there are so many. The difference between a transactional leader and a transformational leader and how the talent management strategies have to tie into impact. You know, we used to be able to talk about effectiveness and we used to be able to focus on efficiency.
And for some brands, that makes sense. But what employees want, especially Gen Z and all the stats show it. They really want to be part of something that makes an impact, that ties to a value. And Veronica said it earlier, and if you could see all of us, I was clapping because people don’t work for people, for brands, they work for people. And if your leadership or your leader is not somewhere where people can find out about him or her, you’re just a brand out there that is competing against a bunch of other brands. And one of the reasons is the payment company, which is a decent metric, how many resumes you’re getting. And I think that if you’re doing this well, you should get more resumes and not just a number of resumes, but right fit potential employees.
We have employee matrices and we’re trying to figure out, we call it our ideal minor matrix. We’re trying to figure out if the person removes the unconscious bias to determine if someone who we’re considering is an actual potential ideal minor and then go from there. So we have to make sure that we’re not just getting masses. We want to get the right type of people applying. And one of the reasons that the company in Washington did well is because they made that story that the CEO was out there talking about it and they leveraged a lot of media and they put out press releases and he was all over the national media talking about that. Otherwise people would not know that this was a company that is paying $70,000. And they positioned that from a PR perspective brilliantly.
Now, yeah, they’ve had some issues since, but when that thing came out, their business proposition was well communicated, their employee proposition was communicated well. And anything that you want to find out about them at that time was consistent, it was aligned, and it was Authentic.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, absolutely. And I don’t think any of us missed that story on our newsreel. When it was hitting the headlines, it was all over the place. And Kristi, I’m going to come back to you later for more conversation about the power of people within the brand, the employees and the leaders. But I want to come back to you, Tammy, to ask on this topic of employment, brand value proposition. Where have you seen that make a difference?
Tammy Ribaudo: Well, it’s interesting. One of the examples that comes to mind is a commercial that I saw last night, and it was the first time I’d seen that commercial and it just really hit me. And that was Starbucks. So another one of those brands that we’ve all heard a lot about. But this particular commercial they were having, some of the baristas were talking about their regulars, like the regular customers, and how they bonded with them. And they were each telling stories about that, their regular, their experience with their regular and how much that regular means to them, that particular customer of theirs. And I thought, wow, that is a really good way of showcasing, in my mind, showcasing. This is the kind of barista that we want to hire. These are the kind of values that we care about.
And we want to hire people who care about other people and who want not only to do great customer service, but really want to almost like give those customers like that virtual hug, right, and say, you mean something to me. So that was, I thought, a really good example of a strong employer value proposition in a television commercial.
Employees as Brand Ambassadors
Jennifer Zick: That really is. And it’s a perfect segue to what we’re going to talk about next. There’s something so beautiful and powerful about putting the microphone and or camera in front of the people whose feet are on the ground, representing your brand, within your brand as your employees. Because hearing a company tell you their promise is one thing, but hearing their people reiterate it is something completely different. We did that recently at Authentic with about eight different CMO stories when I wasn’t even in town, and it brought a tear to my eye to watch those interviews back because the brand connection is real and they’re able to articulate that. So, Kristi, tell us about the potential impact of employees as brand ambassadors.
Kristi Piehl: Sure. And I want to start by acknowledging something that I’ve been hearing from a lot of our clients as it relates to this, which is that if you position your employees front and center, they will be poached more regularly. And that is one of, if you’re an executive search or you work with executive search firms, you know that it’s pretty easy to find who the rock stars are with any organization. So I want to acknowledge that before we keep going, that if someone is good at recruiting, they can find your people without you putting them out on social media. So, yes, I realize that’s a potential fear. However, your rock stars will have active LinkedIn presences, probably, and recruiters are well adept at knowing how to leverage all of those.
And if you’re doing a great job, they will not accept the other offer or they’ll give you a chance to counter. So I want to. That’s a fear. I hear it. We’re going to set that off to the side because there are other ways to combat those things. But to answer your question, there’s just an overwhelming majority of Americans, and there’s all sorts of studies that believe that transparency from businesses is more important than ever. And when it comes to being transparent, more than half of the people say brands need to be most transparent on social media, even more so than traditional communications like print ads, email marketing. But you know, it’s really tough for a business to be transparent without the CEO, top executives, or employees being the messenger, playing a role in what that message is.
And here’s a stat that is new, and it kind of blew my mind. Social media content shared by employees receives eight times more engagement than content shared by brand channels. Okay, so what that means in numbers. Employee advocacy on social media can increase the reach of a brand’s message by 561%. So if you’re working with companies or in a company where they’re like, we’re not letting our employees post anything, boy, you’re missing opportunities. You’re missing opportunities because they are real. They have a lot of power. Good, bad, they got a lot of power. Let’s just, we may or may not like it, but it is the truth and it is the world we live in. And one more stat and then I’ll hand it off. But this is from the Wall Street Journal.
People who follow both a company and one or more of its executives on social media are twice as likely to purchase from that company. So pretty remarkable. And these numbers are going nowhere but up. So that’s how I see this, all kinds of weaving together and playing into the importance of handing the mic to the executives and having that controlled. But allow some Authentic engagement with your employees. They have a lot of power.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. And if I may add another eight x multiplier to that research from my own personal research, those of you who know me know I’m pretty prolific on social media. It comes naturally to me to be an open book, and I always invite our team members to join me in that with their own voice, their personal platform. By the way, it’s hard to demand them to be out there, but if you are truly making a difference in their life and their work, we want to equip them to share that story and not police it overly hard, right? But in my own research of sharing as an executive on behalf of my business on LinkedIn, I did some a b testing and went back last year and reviewed two years worth of my posts and the data associated with it.
And I sometimes share thought leadership content about the work we do, and I sometimes share moments of cultural celebration and the people in our business. And I sometimes share little personal glimpses into my life as a wife, a mother, and a person in my community and of my posts. The thought leadership got the least amount of engagement and those personal moments of people. Celebration and human connection had eight x the amount of engagement and conversation because people don’t care about what you do until they know who you are. And the world craves Authentic connection. They want to know who you are, whether you’re an executive or an employee and your human experience matters. There’s such incredible power in that. Tammy or Veronica, anything to weigh in on that.
Veronica Williams: Actually. So I did want to wait. That’s why I came back on camera, because when Kristi said that was new data, I actually hadn’t heard that number. 561% increase. But my experience has been being someone who’s looked at social media, KPI’s exactly what you said. One of my clients, when we would post any kind of anniversary or celebration about the culture, exactly like you’re talking about, outperformed our product and thought leadership posts tremendously. And so, you know, again, you don’t do business with a business, you do business with people. And so the more you can learn about the people that you’re going to interact with, the more trust you’re going to have, whether it is you’re thinking about going to work for someone or you’re talking about buying something.
And I would say even, you know, when you think about it in those terms, when you think about how much time you spend at work, making sure that people have a good experience of your brand before they go to work for you is important. And then, you know, it’s your, it’s you have an obligation to make sure that you deliver on that promise because they’re planning on spending a third of their life with you.
Leadership’s Role in Employer Branding
Jennifer Zick: That’s pretty serious when you put it that way. And Kristi, the next question we had in line you’ve already started to address, which is the leadership’s role in the strategy around employer brand. But I’m going to twist the question just a little bit since we’ve started down the path, and I want to ask because we hear this from our clients a lot. Well, what if your founders and your CEO and your executive team don’t like social media, aren’t comfortable on social media, don’t know what to say on social media, and are never going to log into LinkedIn or whatever the appropriate platform is around your audiences. But they also recognize, like, we probably should be out there, how does an organization help its leaders start and how do you support them in building that muscle?
Kristi Piehl: I heard a stat about four or five years ago, and I’ll share it. And it’s the reason that I went, as the entrepreneur in me said, we have to add this line of business because there’s so much opportunity and we can really help our clients. So according to Forbes, this was the stat. A CEO’s reputation is directly responsible for 44% of a company’s market value. And employees want to work for a CEO who’s active on social media by a four to one ratio. So marketing, again, I do this work all over the country, and every room I walk into, it’s always, you know, the CEO sitting in a room and they bring me in, and there’s always one or two people sitting there like this. I mean, they’re just like, no, I can’t, you know, basically, I can’t believe you’re wasting my time with this.
And my goal with that person is always to get them by the end to understand and they don’t have to like it. I’m not asking them to agree with the concept that social media can impact you or that we need to, like, have an understanding that you’re not always at work. And if you tell your employees they should take a vacation, you probably want to take a vacation and say you went somewhere so that you’re, like, publicly looking like you’re doing what you say you should do. It doesn’t mean you need to give every detail or every meal. You wait, but people want to know that you actually relax and have some friends, and then you do some things outside of work.
And so, you know, one of the things that is just so important is what the mistake that I see people make is. It’s getting, because there’s so much data, marketing teams can get the executive team or the CEO on board with the concept of, okay, I should be active. And then oftentimes, if the CEO or the executive team, someone critical, and if you’re in the HR lead role and you’re doing interviewing or you’re connecting with people, you better be active too, because you’re getting looked up as well by a potential employee. But one of the, what the next most common step is someone in the office will say, you know, so and so just graduated from college. They’re real active in social media. They can do it.
And it’s such oftentimes, and we get brought in to clean it up and to make sure that moving forward, what the CEO is putting out into the world is strategically aligned with the business initiatives of the marketing department and the HR department and those strategies around that. Social media for executives is an art in a science most five year olds understand. The science part of it. Give them a phone, they can figure out how to do something. The art of it. You would never, a CEO would never give their will, their real estate, their travel. Hand that off to a 20 year old. Why on earth would you hand over your digital legacy, which is what you’re leaving. You’re leaving a personal digital legacy for you and your family. You’re leaving a career legacy. You’re impacting the business. It’s so powerful.
And 82% of employees research a CEO’s online presence when joining a company. The top three places they look, company website, CEO’s, LinkedIn and Google. And many people have no idea what’s out there about them on Google. They don’t know what’s out there about the CEO. Look it up. We in background check, most of us are looking at potential employee social media profiles and they’re doing the same thing to us. So let’s make sure that we’re controlling the story and that it’s Authentic. It has to be Authentic. All of that to say, you can tell I’m really passionate about this, so I’ll step back. But it’s got to be strategic, it’s got to be intentional, and it has to move the business strategies forward or it’s just activity.
Jennifer Zick: I am nodding so vigorously over here and double clicking on everything you’re saying because I’ve experienced it myself. I have never, ever let anybody else pretend to be me or given somebody who is not strategic the opportunity to tell the Jennifer Zick story as the leader of Authentic, because it has to be real, it has to be thoughtful, it has to be intentional. And do I have an executive social media calendar and schedule and themes and cadence as well as an Authentic. Yes, I do. I’m an absolute nerd to the level of commitment that I have to being the chief brand ambassador for Authentic and for any CEOs and executives that think they don’t have time for this, I would challenge you that you don’t have time to ignore it.
The value multiplier of being out there in front of your brand and on behalf of your team is worth the time that you invest in getting familiar and getting comfortable.
Kristi Piehl: And Jennifer, if I can say one more thing about that for people that executives don’t like to say they don’t understand something or they don’t know or it’s new and they feel it can feel like you’re too old. Most executives don’t like not knowing how to do things. I get that. I understand the TikTok stuff that we put out there. My team does that. I get how TikTok works. I’m not spending a lot of time there, but it’s important in my line of work that I have an active TikTok profile. But we have some of our clients. They have literally never logged into their LinkedIn profile. We have aligned with them on messaging, they review posts, but they are hands off on that platform.
But for us, if anyone meets one of our clients and they say, oh, that isn’t what I thought after seeing you on social, we’ve failed. And that has never happened. Knock on wood. Because it has to be authentic. What you see has to be what you get. And there’s a way to do it. And if the person doesn’t have time to do it, allow someone else in. Even if that’s training, if that’s taking it over, there are options. But ignoring it is a missed opportunity.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. Absolutely. Wow. This time we are flying together. And Tammy, I have you to kind of bookend us with this last official panel question. But hey, audience, I want to remind you that we have a Q and A. We’ve already got one really smart question, and I’ll be sure to cover that toward the end. But please throw your questions or comments into the q and a before we wrap up the formal panel conversation because we’d love to be able to address anything that’s on your mind. So, Tammy, what are some of the ways that organizations can position their brand as an employer of choice?
Tammy Ribaudo: This is a heavy topic, but it’s one we’ve already talked a lot about. I mean, I think everyone has come to the table with a lot of ideas already about how you do that. But I think you have to approach it like you would any other kind of big project. And that is think about it holistically and think about it from an internal perspective and an external perspective, because there are both. And you always want to start at the beginning doing your research, right? So you want to do research with. Maybe it’s an employee survey, it’s social media searches like we’ve just been talking about. You want to read career boards like Glassdoor.
Glassdoor allows you to compare yourself to competitors on a number of different, you know, scores, and you need to take those things to heart and really think about them. And if what is being said about you doesn’t jive with, you know, who you think you are, you’ve got some real work to do. But on the internal side, I would say, you know, internal branding focuses a lot more on reinforcing culture and strengthening motivation. So it could be some of those perks in the office that many folks can take advantage of. It’s also about rewards and recognition. It’s about virtual and in-person get-togethers. It’s just, it’s a lot of different things. Right. Internal employer branding increases employee engagement and it also reinforces the company’s values, celebrates its culture, and that whole value proposition.
External employer branding, on the other hand, is about building and maintaining a consistent brand reputation externally. So some of the things that we were talking about earlier, like social media, really are just the best for doing this. And I would say one of the other things that I always strive to do with my employers is if they do a great job, I would love for them to seek an award for that recognition. So I live in the Boston area, and so the Boston Business Journal does one. The newspapers, all the local newspapers do them. And they are really, I mean, employees, potential employees, look at those to see who the best employers are, right? And if you’re a really good employer, you want to also participate in those. So those are fantastic.
And even if you don’t win, most of them provide some feedback on what employees said, which is also hugely valuable. Just goes again toward that research that were talking about. Another thing is just considering what it is about your company that makes you unique and really leaning in on that, just really go all out. If you’re a little quirky, make sure that you indicate that you are kind of a little quirky as a company. And if you are super conservative, then maybe that’s the story that you tell and you’re going to attract certain kinds of employees doing that. So whatever you do, as we’ve said, you’ve got to be Authentic, you’ve got to be honest, and you really do need to have the employees as much as you can, telling the story about who you are and how it works.
I will say one of the companies that I worked for recently, one of the best features that they had was a day in the life because they did a lot of really interesting work. And so they had, they showcased different employees doing different kinds of things. And that was always one of my favorite features to read, too, because I love learning about other employees. So they would write about how those employees were doing their work, but they also had another one that they did that was about the employees. And some of the other things that they did could be personal hobbies or what have you.
So I think you know, whatever you do, just pay close attention to, you know, why people want to work there and make sure that those stories are compelling and they’re very true. And the last thing I would say is always pay attention to having a strong kind of diversity and inclusion model and having an initiative because there’s so many benefits to it. But above all, people want to be seen and they want to be recognized and respected. And that way everyone feels comfortable bringing them their best selves to work. Thank you for a few things.
Jennifer Zick: That’s such an important piece touch on and could be an entire webinar in and of itself related to employment experience and brand. Veronica, I know I don’t see your face right now, but I did see you raise your hand. So if your Internet is working, chime in please.
Veronica Williams: Well, so I’m going to stay hidden because it’s not that strong. But when we’re talking about ways to position your brand as the employer of choice, Tammy did talk about best places to work. Most local newspapers have some opportunity for you to participate and that’s a great way to showcase that you are an employer of choice. But there are a couple of other places that I think if you don’t know about them in. Indeed and Glassdoor, regular company updates are a great way to showcase your employees and your culture. And then also you can do review campaigns. And another thing that you can do through Glassdoor is ask for interview reviews, which again, helps people understand what the process is like as they’re going to come closer to you as a potential employer.
And one of the things that I think is often ignored and it’s, it says a lot about who you are as an employer, is you should always, whether it’s a good or bad review, and that can be a product or service review or it can be an employee review, but you have to pay attention to that and you have to respond within 48 hours. And again. Right. We don’t like to hear negative things, but that’s where we learn the most. And so taking the time to actually look at those and digest what they’re saying about your company is important. And remember, you have to be positive in how you receive that as well. So those are other ways that you can really position yourself as an employer that stands out above the rest.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. And just like nobody works with a business, they work with people. The businesses that are led by people aren’t perfect. Every business at some point is going to get negative feedback or someone’s going to have a less than great experience and the world around us. As much as there might be a fear of cancel culture, it really comes down to whether they’re seeing you as Authentic and humble and open. Right. Most businesses are going to have to respond to either a bad review or a crisis at some point. And thank goodness we have resources like Media Minefield to hold our hands and help us take the action in the right direction. Moments like that. But being transparent, being ready with a response, and being humble to acknowledge where you went wrong, that’s what makes a real difference.
That’s what the world is hungry for, and that’s what we need to be ready to be as leaders. We have some awesome questions coming in from the audience and more that are on my mind. This one’s a really quick question and answer for us. Kristi, you shared some really compelling statistics today, and I wonder if you might drop them in my inbox so that we can include them in our email recap. Because some people are saying, I didn’t get a chance to write those down, but I would love to reference them. Can we make that happen?
Kristi Piehl: Yes. And since I’m a journalist, you can fact check them. I will include the original source so that you can have that as well, because a stat without being fact checked is not actually true. So you will get. I’ll give you all that. No problem.
Jennifer Zick: We do not support fake news here at Authentic or Media Minefield. Okay, good. All right, so from Stephen in the audience, how can we prepare executives who are just starting to post content? How can we prepare them to be ambassadors and thought leaders on social media? Do you suggest writing prompts for them having a schedule, just asking them to post what’s on their mind. Kristi, I’m going to go to you on this.
Kristi Piehl: Sure. I think it depends on who the person is. There are many different strategies. I think you have to know who that person is and how they’ll interact with it. So, for example, we have some folks who will say to them, okay, what’s on your mind? Record it for 15 minutes and send me the audio file. And then we’ll write some, you know, we’ll write some posts around that and you can look at them. Other people do it by video. That’s fine. Other people prefer to write their own. Nothing should be posted anywhere from an executive without two sets of eyes on it. Very few people are excellent writers and don’t miss, even if you’re an excellent writer, you can miss a word. And if you miss something or it’s misconstrued or you don’t even know you’re stepping into something.
It’s just better not to. So someone else should read it, just to make sure that you’re not stepping into something you don’t mean to. What I advise people to do, if you can get active. LinkedIn is the platform that is most beneficial for most companies. So I will say most, not all. Most. If an executive, 15 minutes, three times a week, put it on the calendar and not just think about posting, which is important. But right now, in the last few weeks, LinkedIn has changed the algorithm so they will reward you if you comment on someone else’s post the same way as if you post an original post. So these things are constantly changing, which is why we put out a monthly newsletter to alert people because they change a lot.
But if your person is like, I don’t want to post yet, that’s fine, maybe for a couple of months, get them commenting on different things and have them liking things, because that will also move things forward and get them active. But nobody should be active until their bio is updated, their image is updated, and the banner behind their LinkedIn profile is on brand with the company. An executive speaks for the company with a much louder voice than any other employee. So all of that has to be on brand before they get really active or it can work. Negative. And we, you know, when I started the business, we didn’t get involved in a lot of crises that started on social media. And now we’re regularly hired with the glass doorstep to rate my CEO.
And one of the beautiful things about being active and putting positive things out into the world is that when something negative hits, you have a little bit of an armor because it’s just like a restaurant review, right? I’ll go to a restaurant that has a negative review because there’s ten other positive ones. I’m not going to go to a restaurant that has all the negatives. So if you are silent and you’re giving a no comment on social media, essentially people are going to think you’re hiding something and they’re going to listen to the other voices. You’re handing the voice of your executive and your employee brand over to other people. And that’s really dangerous, especially in a crisis. So the key thing with getting started is getting started.
And if you do a content calendar, hold it loosely, don’t get into a crisis and post something the day that your city is in the middle of a shooting, God forbid, or the middle election day. Right? Like these, there are certain days where you have to, okay, we had a scheduled post. We’re going to just wait. We’re just going to pause and because otherwise we look tone deaf..
Jennifer Zick: So you’re saying use wisdom, good. Good judgment, wisdom, and partnership with people who can help weigh in on that. That’s awesome. Good advice. And you already kind of answered this other question from the audience, which was about what’s the right social media mix, right demographically, how do we know where to play? I have to say at Authentic, because we work with formative growing businesses, and they often come to us because they have recognized that they may be committing random acts of marketing. It’s fascinating how often social media comes up as one of the first tactics they’re concerned about. Should we be on Instagram? Should we be on TikTok? What about, you know, Twitter x, whatever we’re calling it these days? And though we have found that LinkedIn, for most businesses, especially if you’re selling to business people, Is a preferred platform, it really comes down to understanding the audience. So, Tammy or Veronica, if you can weigh in on how you help guide those decisions as a CMO leader with clients on helping focus their social media efforts.
Tammy Ribaudo: This is a tough one. Jennifer. I will say that I think it is best left to professionals, but I would. I have always leaned in on LinkedIn over some of the others. And as far as their presence goes, you know, the business first and then everything that’s wrapped around that business. I think that you do a brilliant job because you do share things about your family, the community, your colleagues, you know, things that are happening, and I love that. But not everybody is comfortable. And I think if they could at least start with the business and then include employees in the mix, and then find a little bit of that personality component along with that’s really helpful.
And then talking about the values that company is, you know, is talking about and making sure that you’re demonstrating those values, I feel like that is another great way if you’re not, you know, really comfortable. But all of those things add up to the brand and all the things we’ve been talking about.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. Veronica.
Veronica Williams: Well, so as I mentioned earlier, I work with two clients who are in the healthcare industry, and recruiting in healthcare is one of the most challenging things you can do these days. Post Covid. It’s just, it’s been kind of a nightmare. But the way we work, it is exactly the way we would if were talking about what’s the right social media mix to reach our target audience. And we start with the ideal client, the ideal candidate profile. We find out what their demographics are. We do all of that work to find out what’s important to them. Where are they hanging out? Where are they communicating? And then we develop our candidate journey. Right? So we have, what are they looking for, you know, what are the different questions that they’re asking through all of their stages?
And then that’s how we figure out what our social media mix is going to be. There isn’t. Yes, when it comes to business, LinkedIn is a great place to be, but it’s not the only place to be. And until you understand who your ideal candidate is and their customer journey, it’s hard to answer that question.
Jennifer Zick: That’s right. We have an entire methodology at Authentic, called Authentic growth methodology that leads our clients through strategy down to execution in every element of their marketing. But really underpinning that methodology is the framework of questions every business needs to ask to successfully build brand engagement, which is, you know, what do we believe? What’s our purpose? Who do we want to matter to when we know who we want to matter to? How do we enter their natural habitat and when we get there, how do we build trust? So you need to know who you’re trying to matter to and why you should matter to them and have that value prop built. But identifying their natural habitat is a key part of that formula. And that’s what you were alluding to there. Veronica.
We have time for one more question, and I want to take the first swing at this one because I’m passionate about this. Chip, thank you for the question. The question is around how do you motivate and empower employees to be active on LinkedIn, as the example here, and also address concerns that executives might have about them promoting their personal brands or talking about things that don’t align with the company. So this I’ve actually spoken on quite a bit, aside from the role I have at Authentic, pretty passionate about my experience in building personal brand and how that overlays building a business. So I’ve had the chance to think and speak about this quite a bit. And here’s the fact. Your employees LinkedIn profile is their LinkedIn profile. It’s their personal digital, what did you call it, Kristi? Legacy. Digital. Legacy.
As employers, we cannot mandate, we should not try to mandate that people leverage their personal brands to promote ours. However, if we’re doing a great job of delivering on the value proposition and the brand promise of our employment experience for them, they will want to leverage their personal networks to tell the story of why they love being where they are, the difference they’re making in the world, what it means to live out the values inside the company. And if we don’t over police them, but we equip them with plenty of material, like at Authentic. What we do is new employees are invited to update their LinkedIn banner with our branding, and if they’re proud to be part of our team, they do that naturally. They’re never mandated.
So please bear in mind that your employees social media profiles are their personal brand. It is a privilege that they want to be an ambassador for your business, and you can’t mandate it. The exception being people in the C suite who have skin in the game with you to build the business. You might want to come to some agreements with your executives on that level of a role and what it means to integrate their personal brand with your business and just have agreements in place there. So is there any difference of opinion from the panel on that piece? Kristi?
Kristi Piehl: I have two things. If the CEO models it, then it’s likely that employees are going to take part in it. We know that especially newer employees really want to be seen, heard, and valued. And in a large organization or global or hybrid organization, they aren’t going to have FaceTime with the executive team. But if they are commenting or posting things on LinkedIn and this executive team is active there, we’ve seen great success there. The other thing is a caveat. We work with healthcare companies, big organizations, and med Tech. There are some compliance concerns.
So if you’re in working with an industry where there’s compliance concerned and government controls, we have a few clients where every time, if anyone wants to mention the company in a post, it has to go through some vetting process, which is fine, and it’s encouraged, but just, it can’t, for every company can’t be fully free rein. You can’t go onto some manufacturing floors and take a picture. That would be a problem for that company. So it’s also, you know, making sure that you’re giving the employees the information, what they can and can’t do, where the guardrails are, and then encouraging them to take action. And someone has to be monitoring it.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. I mean, that was true when I worked at PwC. It’s a highly regulated industry. There’s a difference between equipping and guard-railing. What your employees might say about your own business and protecting that, and trying to mandate what they can and can’t talk about professionally in other circles and with other perspectives, because they are truly individuals. So it’s nuanced, and certainly we’re all still, you know, learning best practices as they evolve. But wow, we’re at the top of the hour, and it’s time to wrap up. And I just want to say thank you to the panelists for a robust conversation and to all of our guests for being here with us today. We appreciate your thoughtful questions, and we’d love to stay connected with you.
So watch your inboxes for the email recap and be sure to join us for our next Authentic growth webinar, which will be coming up in just two months. We’ll be sure to send an invite your way soon. So thanks again so much, everybody. Go forth and be blessed and be a blessing, and we’ll see you back again soon. Take care.
