Hiring amazing people is a top challenge for businesses, founders, and managers. But that's not easy in today's recruiting landscape - candidates today are looking for employers with great company cultures, a strong mission, and more.
That's why it's critical for every company to build their employer brand. Employer branding is how you can differentiate your workplace and attract talent in a scalable way. According to LinkedIn, a strong employer brand can reduce your cost-per-hire by 50%. So where do you start with employer branding?
In this session, Hannah Fleishman, Global Director of Employer Brand & Internal Comms at HubSpot, will share the ROI of employer branding and 3 easy ways to get started.
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HANNAH Hi, Turing Fest. My name is Hannah Fleishman. And today, we're going to talk about employer branding and three ways that you can attract talent with marketing to your team, to your business, or to your organization. And so let's jump in first with who am I?
So my name is Hannah Fleishman. I am the director of employer brand and internal communications at HubSpot. HubSpot is a B2B tech company. We are the leading CRM for scaling companies. And we are based in Boston, but we have offices, employees, and customers all over the world.
So we have about one hundred and eighty thousand customers, and we have offices in eleven countries. I am based in Boston, so I work remotely most of the time. HubSpot has a hybrid office policy where you can work fully remotely, you can work fully in the office, or you can do a mix of the two.
I have chosen to do a mix of the two. So I am hybrid and working right now from home in my guest bedroom, also known as my office. A little bit more about me, I love to wear earrings. This is called my Zoom bling.
You will always see me in these. I love to read fiction, and I love a good Friday cocktail. So enough about me, let's jump into our topic of employer branding and what we are going to cover. So really, our goals for the next twenty ish minutes are to define what employer branding is and just give a loose introduction into how it works and why you would need it.
Then we're going to really dig in to understand its impact and its actual ROI on your recruiting pipeline, but also on your business overall. And then lastly, we're going to share three easy ways for getting started that require no budget, no team, no resources, just three easy ways to start building brand and creating content about your company as a place to work.
So let's jump in, starting with defining the employer brand. So what is employer branding and how does it work? And really simply put, employer branding is positioning your organization as a uniquely great place to work. It's how you communicate your culture and your employee value proposition to candidates, to prospective talent, but also it has an impact on your customers.
So it's really talking about your values, your mission, and what you believe that makes you different from other competitors. And one thing that I think is important to note about employer branding is that every company has an employer brand, whether you actively invest in it or not.
And so if you think about the old adage about what a brand is, it's essentially what people say about you when you are not in the room. And employer branding is the same way. If you have employees or teammates who when they're at a happy hour and somebody asks, hey, how's it going at work?
Kind of their response and how they talk about your organization as a workplace, that is your employer brand, right? It's word-of-mouth. It's the way that people experience your company. And so whether you're investing in telling that story yourself or not, you're going to have an employer brand.
And so at HubSpot, we believe why not be proactive and be transparent about that with candidates, with talent and with customers. And there are really two core components to employer branding. The first is defining your EVP, so your employee value proposition. And that really states what your unique mission and values are compared to competitors.
And this is a screenshot of HubSpot's culture code. So we have a slide deck very similar to something like Netflix has that you've probably heard about or read. But we have a deck called the culture code. And this really captures who we are, who we aspire to be, and what it's really like to work at HubSpot as an employee.
And so that's one version of an employee value proposition. And we're gonna talk a little bit about that in a second. And then the second part here is amplifying that EVP. So how do you go to market with that? How do you actually share that with candidates and passive talent and meet them where they are in telling that story?
And these are just a couple examples of some of the work my team does today, and some of the employer branding kind of vehicles and assets that we use. So you'll see examples like the Great Place to Work certification in lists like Europe's best workplaces, content from employees on LinkedIn and on social media, videos about a day in the life.
That's a screenshot from our careers website, which has tons of content about what it's like to work at HubSpot. And then it's even things like press in the news, right? So we also think about PR as an employer branding tool. So how can we make our name kind of a familiar household name in some of the regions that we're growing in?
And so those are really the two core aspects of employer branding. And you might be thinking, this sounds like a lot of work. Do I really need to market our culture and our jobs? Won't people just come and apply? Do I really need to do all of this?
And the short answer is yes. Increasingly, recruiting is becoming harder and harder. Hiring great people has always been hard, but really the expectations of candidates have changed pretty dramatically in the past decade. And so it used to be people would sort of expect a paycheck, some health benefits, and to be treated well at work.
And those were kind of the baseline expectations. Over the past few years, expectations have really evolved, and people are really picky about where they work. They want to care about the mission. They want to have a great culture. And so in that way, with changing expectations, it's super important to be proactive so that you're actually a competitive employer when it comes to recruiting.
And to illustrate this a little bit more, I find this really fascinating that over the past few years, the number one concern of founders has actually been hiring good people. It hasn't been revenue growth. It hasn't been customer acquisition. The biggest thing keeping business owners up at night is hiring.
And that goes to show that really recruiting is so competitive, and it's getting so difficult. And so you'll only be able to grow your business to acquire customers if you have the right people on your team. And that's why recruiting is so critical today, and that's where employer branding comes into play.
So in short, basically, employer branding is about making your organization a magnet for talent, so attracting people to you as opposed to going out and looking for them. And so next, we're going to talk about really the ROI of that and why that magnet feature feature and the way that it works in an inbound way is so beneficial to your company.
So digging into the impact. Seventy two percent of recruiting leaders worldwide agree that employer branding has a significant impact on hiring. And so that's great that recruiters feel that way, but what does that actually mean for your business? How can it actually affect your ROI?
And there are a couple stats here that I think are fascinating for illustrating this. The first is that a strong employer brand can actually reduce your cost per hire by up to fifty percent. And that goes back to that magnet idea, right? It's significantly more cost effective to attract people to you and to pull them into you with great content so that they're discovering you versus that outbound way of marketing of hiring agencies or doing lots of advertising to try to get people to notice you externally.
And so really, that magnet factor helps reduce your cost per hire. The next is that recruiters who represent a strong employer brand are two times more likely to get a response from passive talent. And so if you think about all of the LinkedIn messages and all of the emails that great talent gets, know, hey, we have a job opening, your profile looks great, we think you'd be good for it, those are incredibly easy to ignore if you're not coming from a company that people have heard of, are familiar with,
and know a little bit about the culture. And so I think this is a great stat for illustrating that you're actually getting a warm introduction, and you're more likely to get a response if you have a strong brand behind you. And then last but not least, this one is a little bit more about retention, which I think is really interesting, which is that companies investing in employer brand can reduce their turnover by about twenty eight percent.
And I would say there are two reasons for this. The first is that employer branding can attract people to you and make them want to work for your business, but actually can have the opposite effect in a good way. It helps people self select if you're the right employer for them.
And so I showed a screenshot earlier of HubSpot's culture code, that deck about who we are as a place to work. A lot of people read that and think, wow, HubSpot sounds great. I'm gonna go apply now. This is exactly the kind of company I've been looking for.
But a lot of people also read it and think to themselves, that's not the kind of organization I would thrive at. I am now able to self select out of that application process, and I'm not going to apply because it's not for me.
And I actually think that's really powerful. That's just as much of a benefit as getting people to apply, because it can really reduce that turnover because people aren't applying for jobs where they might not be successful or happy. The second reason here, I think, has to do a little bit with pride, right?
So one thing we think about employer brand is not just the recruiting element of it, there's a retention element too. Employees are proud of where they work, but they'll be even prouder if they can share that with their families, if they can share that with their friends, if they work in an organization that people have heard of, and they're incredibly proud of it.
And so I think in that way, it can really reduce turnover through retention, through pride, but then also through that cost. And so hopefully, through these stats, you're now thinking to yourself, Okay, I get it. Employer brand sounds great. I get the data.
But it doesn't really tell the whole story either. And so I think it's important to also think about anecdotes and qualitative information and really the humans behind some of this data. And these are just some screenshots from employees and recruiters at HubSpot sharing that they wouldn't have joined our company if it hadn't been for some of the employer branding work that they had seen.
If it weren't for that specific campaign, they never would have heard of us before. If it weren't for that certain piece of social media content, they probably wouldn't have applied. And so we collect some of this as, you know, kind of qualitative data as well, because I think it's really powerful for putting a face to some of that data.
And so hopefully, at this stage, you're thinking to yourself, okay, I get what Employer Brand is, I kind of know where to get started, I see the value, I see the impact, what do I actually do? Where do I actually get started? And so we're gonna walk through three steps for getting started with this.
And I wanna preface by saying you do not need to have budget, you do not need resources, and you don't need a team to start building employer brand and to start actively doing it. When I started doing employer branding at HubSpot, it wasn't my full time job.
I asked recruiters for help when they had free time. It was really something we were all doing on the side of our desks, and that's how it got started. And so that's just to say you don't need really a big marketing team to help you with this.
You don't need marketing resources. It's just about sharing your existing stories externally, and you can do that in some pretty scrappy ways. So the first step here is all about defining your employee value prop, so that EVP that we talked about. And this is really going to be the foundation and the basis from which all of your marketing is going to STEM and all of your branding efforts are going to STEM.
And so specifically, that EVP should describe the unique values and benefits that make your organization different from other employers. So if you're in marketing, just think of this as your positioning statement. Every product has some sort of positioning about its benefits over its competitor product.
And so that's what this is, but it's about your culture. And on the right hand side, there's an example from that culture code deck that I mentioned. And so early on in the slide deck, HubSpot has a slide that really sums up our EVP with these five core tenets, and they're called the culture code tenets.
And they just capture some of the things that we believe make us unique to our competitive employers, things like being customer driven, some of our values of transparency and autonomy, really investing in our people because we believe they're our biggest perk, and then leaning towards long term impact.
So we want to build a company that future generations can be proud of. And so that's how we share some of that with candidates. And so if you're looking at this thinking, I don't want to write one hundred and twenty page slide deck, do not worry, that is not the goal.
We're going to talk about how to really just boil it down into a sentence and into that positioning statement. And so to get started on how you actually find your own EVP and discover what that is for your company, it all comes down to persona research.
So again, this is all about thinking like a marketer. You wouldn't market a new product or you wouldn't build a new product or service if you didn't really know what your users or customers wanted. And similarly, with candidates and employees, you need to know what makes you different to them.
And so really, the best way to do this is by doing research through interviews, through surveys, through hosting focus groups, and you do this with your employees. Now, I will say I think the best way to do this is with employees who are your top performers or some of your best people.
Who are your employees who you wish you had more of? And then those are the people you really want to be interviewing and understanding their motivations, because then you can build your aspirational employer brand based on them. And so when you're doing some of this research, some great questions to ask them are things like, what three words would you use to describe our culture?
Why did you decide to join in the first place? What attracted you? What surprised you when you joined? Was there anything about our culture you weren't expecting that you like or don't like? And then once you've done enough of this research, and you've had a good handful of conversations, and you feel like you you see patterns emerging, that's when you can really start to develop that EVP and write that down.
And the goal is just to get it on paper. So identify some of those patterns, identify some of those themes, and then let's put that into a Positioning Statement. And really, that can look as simple as this. People love working at blank because blank, blank, and blank.
And then filling in those blanks based on your research is just what makes your company and your unique values, and there's probably two to three, what makes you different, what makes you stand out? And that's going to be your EPP. So once you have your employee value proposition, you have your positioning statement, it's time to really bring that to market and share that and meet candidates where they are with some of that information.
And the first way that I would focus on doing this, and so this is tip number two, would be to publish LinkedIn content on your EVP. And this might sound kind of simple, but you would be surprised how many people struggle to just hit publish on LinkedIn, how many conversations I have with executives and hiring managers about the fear of not being good enough writer, of not knowing what to say, and really the intimidation factor of publishing content.
And so this is just to make it really easy and show you the impact that it can have and that it's absolutely worth it. And so when I say LinkedIn content, I don't mean really long articles or like blog posts. We're talking about those short statuses you see in your LinkedIn feed, just that short form content, which is actually really, really great for driving traction.
And so for that reason, I think we shouldn't underestimate the value of LinkedIn for content creation. Because firstly, you'll meet job seekers and passive talent where they are. I talked to a lot of people who are starting their employer brand efforts, and they ask if they should start a careers blog, like a standalone careers blog.
My advice is usually no, because it's really hard to drive traffic to blogs if you're not doing consistently. And even if you are, it's incredibly hard to drive sustained traffic over time. Whereas you could just use LinkedIn, which already has a built in audience, and you can really extend expand your network that way.
The next is that LinkedIn favors short form content. And so those statuses in the feed that you see, or some of that content in the feed, those can only be three thousand characters. So that's not words, that is characters. And that's actually pretty short.
That's only a couple paragraphs, and it could be even shorter than that. The next piece is that you don't need to be an amazing writer. The goal here is just to write like how you talk. You do not need to sound like Shakespeare.
You don't need to publish a novel. And so get some of that intimidation out of the way. You just need to write what you know, and that's the only expectation for this content. And lastly, most importantly, your content will extend far beyond your existing network.
And so the way that the LinkedIn algorithm works is that, say, you have two hundred connections on LinkedIn. If you publish a piece of content, there's a very good chance that you will reach thousands of people, so well beyond those two hundred connections.
And that's because it really favors people who are publishing content regularly and getting shared as well. And so there's a chance that you can really expand that network pretty easily. And so where to start here? How to actually do this? So this is really the template that I give to a lot of our executives and hiring managers just to make it super simple and accessible.
And it's about picking a prompt. So if you're not sure what to write about, just pick one of these. What's your favorite part of your work? What's an example of your company's values in action that you've seen recently? What's What's something you're working on that you're super excited about and why?
And then why should someone consider applying to work with you? These are all things that if I asked you right now, you could probably answer off the top of your head, right? And so the goal is to draft that into like two paragraphs or less.
So just put that onto paper. And again, don't overthink it. Write like how you would talk. Authenticity is key here, so you don't really need to overthink it. And then you're going to hit Publish, you're going to share it. And then if you can, the goal here is to repeat.
Again, LinkedIn favors really that repetition and people who publish content frequently. So if you can, try to set a reminder on your calendar to do this every other week or once a month. The goal is just to be doing it regularly. And lastly, for our third tip here as far as amplifying your EVP, we talked about LinkedIn content and written content, which is great for this.
Lastly, let's talk about how you can experiment with visual content. And so how can you really bring that EVP to life and help people visualize themselves working with you? And so about sixty two percent of job seekers will visit a company's social media profiles to evaluate their brand before applying.
And that's not too surprising. It really goes back to that piece of visualizing yourself there. Social media profiles are typically more visual and photo driven and video driven than some other platforms, and people really wanna get a glimpse and actually have a front row seat into the company.
And so we're going to talk about a couple ways that you can pretty easily start doing that. The first and very obvious one is photos. What I will say about photos is I think there's this expectation that you have to do these fancy employee photoshoots, hire photographers, and make it really high production, I actually think being scrappy and just being authentic is the best way to go here.
People and candidates just want to see what it's really, really like. They want the human side of it, of your culture. And so there are two examples here. One is from a pride parade we attended a couple years ago. The other is more recent from a Zoom photo screenshot.
And that's because that's kind of how we work today. And so there's no expectation to make work look like something it's not. I recommend just reflecting what it's actually like to work today. The second is easy video. And I really mean easy. So one thing we've been doing a lot of that's worked really, really well for us is asking employees who volunteer to just record a thirty or sixty second video on their phone.
We send them one of those simple prompts that we talked about, like what keeps you at the company, what's one aspect of the culture that you love, and they record for thirty or sixty seconds, really scrappy. We throw a little bit of branding on it, and then they share it on LinkedIn, we share it on LinkedIn, our recruiters send them to candidates.
And so these have become really valuable and incredibly easy to create. And last but not least, going back to that social media piece, if your organization has a Facebook account, a Twitter account, an Instagram account, ask if you can start doing some social media takeovers on those.
And that's really just about handing the reins over to an employee for the day, asking them to share what they're working on, what it's actually like to work from home. And we have found that these perform really, really well. And they're incredibly easy because you're asking employees to help you create the content.
So hopefully, this gives you an idea of how to really bring that to life and some easy ways to get started with visuals. All right, so let's talk about our takeaways and everything we talked about in the past twenty ish minutes. So first one is that I hope you can just remember that employer branding will position your company as a great place to work and help you attract candidates through that magnet mechanism.
Second is that strong employer brands can reduce the cost per hire and your turnover rates. So really strong ROI there and impact on the bottom line. To get started, you want to determine your EVP and the differentiators your company has by doing that persona research and talking with your employees.
And last but not least, start creating content on that EVP. Amplify it through LinkedIn content and by experimenting with visuals that work for you and for your employees and teammates. Hopefully this was helpful and you learned a lot about employer branding. I hope you can use some of these tips and bring these back to your work.
Thank you so much for your time. My name is Hannah Fleishman. Thank you Turing Fest for having me. I'd love to connect on LinkedIn or email me at hannahhubspot dot com. Thank you.
