As the race for talent becomes yet one more choked supply chain, we often see those with this responsibility wrestling with this very question. Is the talent my business requires, both existing and new, resonating with my brand? Should I create something unique to communicate solely to this segment?  

We’ve found that the notion of separating an employer brand from the enterprise brand is not just outdated—it's counterproductive. The concept of a distinct employer brand stems from a fragmented view of organizational identity, one that fails to recognize the holistic nature of modern businesses and the savvy of their diverse stakeholders.

At its core, a brand represents the essence of an organization—its purpose, value, and unique audience it serves. This essence shouldn't change whether you're addressing customers, investors, or potential employees. Instead, what changes is how you articulate and emphasize different aspects of your brand to resonate with specific audiences.

Consider the absurdity of creating a separate brand solely for the investment community. It would not only be resource-intensive but also potentially confusing and even damaging to the organization's overall reputation. 

The same principle applies to employer branding. Rather than constructing a separate branded ecosystem for talent acquisition and retention, organizations should focus on developing a robust, multifaceted primary brand that can be modulated to speak effectively—verbally and visually—to all critical audiences, including current and prospective employees.

This approach recognizes that in our media-overloaded age, stakeholders are too well-informed and interconnected to be siloed. An employee is often also a customer, an investor, or a community member, or even all three. They encounter your brand through multiple touchpoints and expect consistency across these experiences. A unified brand strategy ensures that your organization presents a coherent identity that builds trust and reinforces your core values across all audiences.

For talent acquisition and retention, this means highlighting aspects of your primary brand that resonate most with the workforce. It's about emphasizing your organization's culture, growth opportunities, and impact—all of which should be integral parts of your overall brand story, not separate constructs.

In recent years, during our work on a global brand refresh for a large, complicated company, we were chartered to devise a core brand essence that resonated effectively across nine separate stakeholder groups. Midstream, we learned the HR team had been investing and developing its own unique employer brand, with a distinct brand proposition and design expression system. 

As we compared our initiative with this work, similarities emerged of audience-focused benefits — one specifically for talent, and the other, a higher order inclusive of all stakeholders. In the end, it was far more powerful to fold the employer brand work into the enterprise effort for maximum impact.

To be fair, this HR department embarked on its effort within an organization that was very institutionalized, and frankly, had very little at the enterprise brand level from which to extend. Despite this brand vacuum, we believe that HR departments that pursue the creation of a separate employer brand risk not only wasting resources but also potentially undermining the organization's broader brand strategy. 

Instead, HR should collaborate closely with marketing, communications, and other departments to ensure that the employee value proposition is seamlessly integrated into the organization's overarching brand narrative. And if a brand strategy and narrative doesn’t exist, or is too narrow, then it may be more appropriate to be asking a different question. Stepping back to deepen and diversify the enterprise brand can help ensure a more powerful connection to your own audience needs.

In the end, the employer brand isn't different from the enterprise brand—it's an essential facet of it. Here at The Indelible, we believe that by developing the essentials of a strong, flexible primary brand that can speak compellingly to all stakeholders, organizations create a more authentic, efficient, and powerful means of attracting and retaining top talent while maintaining a consistent identity across all fronts.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeff Walker has architected global brand transformation in award-winning work for Cargill, Marvin, GE, IBM and Wilson, among many others. His passion for the interconnections in strategy, communication and design as a force for change led him to recently help establish the Design Innovation Lab at his alma mater.

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