Is a strong brand the same as a strong employer brand?

Is a strong brand the same as a strong employer brand? LinkedIn study: key findings

A study performed in March 2012 by LinkedIn’s Hiring Solutions Insight Team amongst 7,250 members worldwide shows this:

1. A strong overall company brand certainly helps with attracting talent. It stands to reason that if people admire your brand, they’re more likely to be aware of your company as an employer and potentially think it would be a good place to work.
2. Overall brand impacts job consideration, though not as much as you might think. Thinking favorably of a company isn’t the same as genuinely wanting to work there.
3. A strong employer brand – as indicated by an individual having a positive impression of your company as a place to work – is twice as likely to be linked to job consideration as a strong company brand.
4. A strong employer brand is especially critical for attracting more junior employees, candidates from younger demographics, and those outside the country.

Our belief: There is a “natural” order in priorities.

When new trends occur, we take a step back and look at it from a broader perspective. Why does this all of a sudden become so important and what else stays important? We believe you should always start from the company stakeholders when looking at company decisions. It’s about finding the right balance and order between all stakeholders. At Herculean, we believe in the following stakeholder order when it comes to running a successful business:

1. Happy employees believing in the company
2. Produce awesome customer experiences, that generate profit
3. Of which part should be given back to society
4. And all this will eventually create shareholder value in the long run.

Employer brand equation: strikingly simple

A strong employer brand = more highly engaged employees = better service to clients = more satisfied clients = more business and more referrals = bigger bottom line.

Make no mistake: your performance is only as good as your people. We believe that before the economic recession, a lot of companies had other priorities. To put it bluntly:

1. Shareholders need short term, unrealistic returns.
2. Therefor companies tried to sell as much as possible, quarter after quarter, in order to show growth and please shareholders. Regardless of quality. No matter what the effect is on customer relationships.
3. To maximize profits further, cost cuts are crucial. Employees and suppliers are the biggest costs, so let’s cut there.
4. “Giving back to society is an interesting way to avoid taxes and to do cheap marketing”.

We all know how that turned out, right?

You don’t need a degree in rocket science to understand why employer brand has become strategic: after the recession most companies have realized that employees come first, not shareholders. They had forgotten that during the crazy years.