It’s easy to see how Employer Branding is useful to HR departments and potential job applicants.
Employer Branding, the practice of marketing images of your organization as a desirable place to work towards potential job applicants, is a sensible strategy for attracting the right people onto your bus (-iness).
Employer Branding works to draw to an organization the kind of people the organization wants to hire, by making the organization look like it has specific, compelling, desirable characteristics.
Promoting an idealized or crystallized view of “what it’s like to work here”, organizations and their HR departments hope to increase applicants, reduce recruiting inefficiencies, improve yield, and keep employees longer, all because these new employees experience improved person-organization /employee-employer fit.
Sounds good for HR, sounds good for potential employees.
And, although it is designed to attract future employees, Employee Branding also has a few benefits for current employees.
3 Ways Employer Branding Can Benefit Current Employees
l. The Employer Brand may bring new insight to key managers.
An Employer Branding campaign requires someone in the organization to spend time thinking about “what it’s like to work here” from the employees’ point of view.
Taking the employees’ perspective (however briefly and instrumentally) may give managers and HR departments new insights about the everyday experiences of organization members. These new insights might inspire managers to systematize, reinforce or change the environment at work to make the environment more attractive.
2. The Employer Brand may trigger sense-making and action by current employees.
The messages of an Employee Branding campaign are seen not only by outside, potential employees but also by inside, current employees.
An Employer Branding campaign can create an opportunity for people in the organization to talk with each other about what their organization is like as an employer. Conversations about the Employer Brand might address questions like ” Is this what its like to work here?” and “How can we work together to make this environment more like that idealized picture?”
An uptick in awareness, the invitation to consider the Employer Brand, and the opportunity to talk about it together might lead employees to reinforce and/or improve the organizational environment themselves.
3. The Employer Brand can improve the contributions of new employees to the experience of current employees.
The Employer Brand can help draw the ‘right kind’ of coworkers into the organization, reinforcing the desirable elements of the work environment and helping to fulfill the promise of ‘the brand’ for current and new employees alike.
Of course, the Employer Brand can only have these positive effects if it is somewhat true and reasonably credible. An Employer Brand made up of unreal claims, however desirable these claims may be, would only create disappointment and resentment among current employees.
An Employer Branding campaign can help a current employee these three ways, as long as the current employee has a good personal fit with the desired, projected Employer Brand.
Bonus Benefit if you don’t fit
And for the employee who doesn’t fit the work context of this projected Employer Brand?
There’s still a positive influence. The Employer Branding campaign may help that current employee realize that this organization really *isn’t* a good fit, and inspire the employee to look for a different employer, an organization that has a better fit with his or her own values and needs.
See also:
Images:
GoodFitting When Fastened, and CloseUp 
Some rights reserved by Lee Turner on Flickr