Communicating the Employer Brand from the Inside Out

How do you communicate an employer brand from the inside out? It all starts from within your organization.

Kristin Dudley is a producer of stories that attract and engage, as well as the Founder of Co-Create LLC. In this episode, we’ll learn what impact employee stories have on talent attraction, how to go about capturing the best workplace moments and we’ll find out what candidate chemistry is all about.

Have a listen to the interview below, keep reading for a summary and be sure to subscribe to the Employer Branding Podcast.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher Radio, Google Play or SoundCloud.

What does employer brand from the inside out mean?

When I began my experience in employer branding, I was coming from managing the user experience and product design team at Comcast. I loved my job, but at the time we were really struggling to attract talent at the organization and a lot of that had to do with how we were perceived from the outside.

Next thing I knew, I found myself working under the HR umbrella at the company, working on all of the talent attraction challenges at the company and decided we needed to tell stories about our brand honestly and authentically.

A tactic I went with was becoming an internal anthropologist, to truly discover who we were as an employer. By being really authentic I knew we were going to be attracting the right type of people to our organization.

Can you give us a step-by-step guide to doing this?

1. Becoming an anthropologist: Start by interviewing with employees and spending enough time with them to understand who they are, what their job is like and what they truly like and hate about the company.
2. Understand who your employees are outside of work: Don’t just focus on their role, but to truly engage with them you should understand who they are on the outside.
3. Showcase your work: Make sure your leaders are involved and you are able to showcase your employer branding work internally through a roadshow to your people so that they can feel the same passion you have for telling these stories.
4. Get aligned with the different employee engagement experiences: Help to design those team off sites or fight for this type of work to happen!

What does output look like when you tell these stories?

My approach has been to truly capture our employees. For example, we will do a day in the life video for them and film for 8-10 to shadow the employee for a full day. We edit that down into a 3-minute video in order to enhance job descriptions and visualize the employee experience.

We did these videos on our top 25 most hired for or desired positions and played these across our career websites. Most hired-for would those high volume roles like care agents and sales. Desired-for would be those in the more unique roles in technology or design. Basically where we receiving the most applications and where we were lacking in talent as well.

It created an incredible foundation for me to help me understand who we were. If you have the opportunity to spend this time, I highly recommend it.

Sr. Director of our Open Source Practice, @nithyaruff, shares what it means to work as an engineer at Comcast #NationalEngineersWeek #YourPlaceAtComcast #Sunnyvale

A post shared by Comcast Stories (@comcastcareers) on Feb 25, 2018 at 4:42pm PST

Any major pitfalls we should steer clear of?

Never make assumptions about what your audiences knows or expects. You really want to study and question the people that you are recruiting and representing!

What is your favorite success story?

One of my greatest success stories was leveraging LinkedIn to attract technology talent to Philadelphia, where I am based. In over a year and a half, we were able to track the hiring of a 163 technologists to Comcast who are reached by our online campaign. Of those 163 hires, 65% were connected to us by the sponsored content we used on LinkedIn. A lot of that content was about a lifestyle that surrounds the career opportunity here in Philidelphia. Only 5% of those hires were attributed to direct InMail’s. So content absolutely was the winner in that effort.

What’s the next big thing in employer branding?

I’m very curious about Generation Z and their perspective of work. As employer branding professionals we have a real responsibility in rebranding work as a more loveable concept. I’m not sure how to capture the next big thing, but I do think that stories will continue to be really critical and will help in our mission to educate the next generation of employees.

Connect with Kristin on LinkedIn.