How to Make the Case for Employer Branding to Stakeholders

We talk to a lot of businesses on the Employer Branding Podcast that each face their own talent challenges. But Booking.com might take the cake for how specific the skill sets can get for the roles they’re trying to fill.

Headquartered in Amsterdam, this organization acts as a platform to book accommodations, flights, car rentals, and experiences all over the world. And that global presence means that they might need a customer service rep who is based in the UK and speaks Norwegian.

That’s why we were so excited to sit down with Sandra Petschar, the Global Talent Marketing & Employer Branding Manager at Booking.com. In this episode, she shares how they’ve attracted the right people for their very specific requirements by defining a strong employer brand.

Defining a Strong Employer Brand

The first thing that stands out about Booking.com is that they have a relatively large employer branding team. Petschar’s team is comprised of 20 people who cover employer branding, recruitment marketing, and early careers.

There are five managers who each focus on a specific area. Petschar is in charge of reputation management and corporate events, but other areas of focus include advocacy programs like Women in Tech, advertising, and analytics.

In order to develop their employer brand, the team conducted extensive interviews with employees to understand how they perceived Booking.com and what they saw as the main benefits of working there. The responses they got helped them define the four key pillars of their EVP:

1. Belonging
2. Development
3. Discovery
4. Impact

What kept coming up in employee interviews, time and again, was how Booking.com fosters a culture of curiosity. Putting it all together, they settled on a simple mission statement for their employer branding: “It’s more than a job, it’s a journey.”

How Booking.com Activates Their EVP

For Petschar and her team, EVP activation is the name of the game. “What really unites people at Booking.com is a love for travel,” she says, “we hire people who like to move, who are very curious, and like to explore.” People are serious about travel throughout the organization, and so they’ve established a group chat where employees can share travel tips and pictures from their journeys.

The other thing that stood out was Booking.com’s focus on employee advocacy. “A lot of companies are missing the internal part of activation,” Petschar says, so they’ve placed an emphaisis on developing each team member’s personal brand. They have a platform for employee advocacy that makes it easy for everyone to share content on their own social media channels, and have done a lot of work to consolidate the branding.

They also run personal branding workshops where they invite employees who are successful on LinkedIn and other platforms to give a presentation about how their social media success has benefited their career.

Petschar and her team are currently in the midst of a world tour, where they’re interviewing employees around the world about working at Booking.com. It fits with the main theme of travel, while also giving them the opportunity to spotlight each local office and the people who work there.

Measuring Success with the EBI

When it comes to measuring their success, the proof is in the pudding. Petschar and her team track the performance of their careers site and advertising campaigns quite closely, paying close attention to engagement rates and hires per campaign or event.

They’re also a Link Humans client, so they rely heavily on the Employer Brand Index to give them a bottom-up view of what their past, present, and future employees are saying. “That’s what we use to measure our employer branding and track it year-over-year so we can see our success,” Petschar says.

The EBI is especially helpful for Petschar when she talks to stakeholders across the organization. Management wants to know how the metrics have changed from year to year and what the employer branding team has done to make an impact on the numbers. And the talent intelligence and sourcing teams are especially interesting in what the EBI has to say about how Booking.com compares to its competitors.

Booking.com has been officially certified as a Great Place to Work, so Petschar and her team know that their work is paying off.

To follow Sandra Petschar’s work in employer brand, connect with her on LinkedIn. For help identifying the values and culture you want to create in your company, get in touch.