The promise and the challenges of Employer Branding

As some of you know I joined Flipkart with the designation of Director - Talent Branding. Many people after that have asked me what exactly is my role and what would I be doing.

Here are my top few thoughts on the need for employer branding:

Why is it important?

• Attracting great talent biggest challenge (Randstad Report)
• Brand Image and company reputation play most important (Aon Hewitt, LinkedIn India survey)
• New communication / media platforms require organizations to build their presence across a variety of media platforms
• Employer Branding strategy helps in attracting better culturally fit candidates (CEB)

Objectives

• Communicate the distinctive Employee Value Proposition (EVP) for specific talent segments 
• Build the organizations' brand leveraging digital media 
• Help the recruiting team move from “outreach” (sales model) to build “inbound” (marketing model) talent - attracting the "right" kind of talent. 

Components of Employer Branding

The process

The Challenges

• Finding the right partner agency to work along with - Most communications agencies have little or no understanding of the O2C - Organization to Candidate ecosystem
• Helping your Top Leaders, Recruiters and Hiring Managers to start thinking of themselves as brand ambassadors. It's great if your CEO is active on Twitter and constantly looking for talent :)
  
• Creating a culture where employees think of themselves as storytellers and feel free to share internal stories with their professional networks - without waiting for permission
• Finding a tool to track conversation to inbound traffic to applicants to effective hiring

So we made a start, we created a Twitter handle for Flipkart Careers and have taken to aggressively posting on our Flipkart LinkedIn page too. Take a look at the content and let me know what you think.