Why Your People Are Your Brand in B2B

CBRE is the largest commercial real estate firm in the world, but if you’re not a broker, you’ve probably never heard of them. So what do they do with their employer brand to stand out to other talent pools? And how do they measure their impact?

That’s exactly what we discussed with Debbie Celado, the Global Head of Talent Marketing at CBRE. We caught up with her at Talent Acquisition Week for a fireside chat about measuring your employer reputation and why, for a B2B, your people are your brand.

Reaching Talent Outside of Your Industry

If you’re a longtime listener of the Employer Branding Podcast, you may remember Celado from her time as Head of Employer Brand Marketing at Citizens Bank. When last we spoke, she was working to rebuild Citizens’ employer brand after they were sold by RBS.

At CBRE, the talent challenges are a little different. Their business touches on every dimension of commercial real estate, including:

• Outsourcing services and running buildings
• Leasing and selling real estate
• Consulting in the workplace

“We are a B2B so our people are everything,” Celado says, “our people are the services that we offer, they deliver those services for our clients, so they are our brand.” Attracting and hiring the right talent is pivotal to success, so CBRE has heavily invested in employer branding.

The biggest talent challenge is awareness for folks outside the real estate industry. As Celado puts it, “We’re either the premier destination or they have no idea who we are.” For roles like engineering and tech, or corporate function, they need to find a way to cut through the noise and get on the radar.

Setting Goals for Your EVP

Celado and her team got to work, with three clear goals:

1. Increase external brand awareness.
2. Improve the 1st-year retention rate.
3. Increase employee engagement scores across the board.

To meet their first goal, they partnered with recruitment marketing and talent attraction to look at how they could elevate their talent differentiation. “We needed to make sure people understand who we are, understand our new value proposition, and why that’s different than working at any other company,” Celado says.

They also needed to get specific about what the unique hiring challenges were for each persona they were looking for. Were there certain channels, like Substack or LinkedIn, that were more effective for reaching these talent pools?

For the second and third goals, Celado and her team needed to take a close look at the employee experience. They partnered with the onboarding and orientation team and other business partners to make sure that their talent programs aligned with CBRE’s EVP.

Measuring Employer Brand Impact

Goals are one thing, but they mean nothing if you don’t have a way to measure your results. “We need to make sure we have the most robust data and analytics to inform what we do,” Celado says.

That’s where Link Humans comes in. The Employer Brand Index helps CBRE understand what’s going on with their brand’s reputation. As Celado says, “Your reputation is your brand; they are one and the same.” The employee experience is all about improving sentiment, and the EBI gives the team a scoreboard to see where their work is making an impact and where they still have work to do.

For brand awareness, Celado recommends looking at engagement metrics like impressions, site traffic, and signups. Paid advertising is an important part of CBRE’s strategy for reaching specific talent pools, so it’s important to understand media value and the cost of improving these metrics.

How to Talk About Employer Brand with Business Leaders

The final piece of the puzzle is how Celado takes her results to leadership. “You have to tell the story of the data, not just report on it,” she explains. Don’t just show what you did but explain what the outcome was. Data is only helpful if it makes the impact of your work clear.

It helps to ground metrics like impressions or reach in how they create results. In employer brand, we often describe our marketing spend in terms of the cost per lead. But, as Celado points out, you need to give those numbers context in order to be persuasive to leadership.

That’s why she highly recommends figuring out how much vacancies are costing your business. This allows you to compare numbers and demonstrate the ROI of employer branding to leadership.

In a business where the people are everything, measuring the impact of employer branding is the key to getting results.