If you're an employer branding professional – or an aspiring one – be prepared to make some mistakes. Employer brand work usually spans multiple departments, and you have a lot of different jobs. (Check out this article for more on that.)
Most of us in the EB space started our careers in HR, recruiting, or marketing and accidentally found this amazing thing called employer branding and recruitment marketing. OOPS! (Spoiler: this is the only good “oops” here!)
I started as a temporary Talent Acquisition Coordinator. As I became confident in my ideas and abilities – and realized that I did not want to become a traditional recruiter – I found myself in charge of partnership work related to job boards and other online platforms. And, one project at a time, I began enhancing our candidate experience and partnering with our corporate marketing team to show off our amazing culture on social media. Now, as a Senior Talent Acquisition Operations Specialist (wordy title, I know), I am involved in everything EB and RM at my organization, and I love it! I’ve also learned a few things from mistakes I’ve made throughout my career.
OOPS #1: Did anyone tell Marketing about this?
Early in my career, when I thought about LinkedIn, the first thing that came to mind was recruiting. I was in charge of our relationship with LinkedIn, and when I had the idea to do a company-wide lunch and learn about enhancing your LinkedIn profile and sharing updates about our company, it became very clear that we should have involved someone from the marketing team. Too bad I realized this after the lunch and learn took place. (And by “I realized this,” I mean I received a not-so-happy email from Marketing.) At the time, my manager knew about this lunch and learn, my director knew, and even my VP! But no one thought to let Marketing know.
As a company gets bigger, it becomes more and more siloed. It’s just a reality in growing organizations. But the key to success for an EB professional is to create close relationships with other departments that you may not have meetings with every day (like Marketing, the DEI team, Comms – the list goes on). Before starting a project, it’s best to ask yourself, “Does anyone else in the organization need to be involved in this?”
OOPS #2: Expectations vs. Reality
When featuring employees, always view it through a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens. This doesn’t mean that you should only highlight the typical DEI groups because you do need to feature your true employee base. However, it’s always good to think about the person you want to feature in terms of relatability to readers.
A few years back, we did an employee feature on one of our VPs. We expected great feedback since we were highlighting an amazing company leader who everyone in the organization loved. But that was not what happened. Let’s just say it did not connect with the average job seeker. We received comments like “Must be nice to have an assistant,” and other similar sentiments, even though most VP-level employees DO have an assistant or a shared admin of some kind. Regardless, we should have thought more about our audience and who they would like to see versus who we wanted to show.
OOPS #3: Wait, I did that too!
Another common scenario for EB professionals (and probably all functions of an organization), is that sometimes two people end up doing the same thing, resulting in double work. If you had just communicated with the other person, one of you could have saved some time/money/valuable brain power!
One of my biggest learnings has been the critical nature of maintaining strong interdepartmental relationships and cross team communication. I cannot stress this enough. The importance of this came to life for me during an event my company was sponsoring. It was the Grace Hopper Celebration which is meant to inspire women to consider tech careers. It’s a huge undertaking that requires many people to plan.
I took the lead on our booth presence and thought that we should have snacks and water bottles for employees who were working the booth. Like similar big events, people in the booths are on their feet for 8+ hours, talking to hundreds of attendees. I think it’s a lot of fun! And snacks and waters are a must.
I went out the day before, bought a bunch of items, and lugged them to our booth. Much to my surprise, someone else had already done the same thing. Oops! This wasn’t a huge problem since the cost was pretty low, and it wasn’t like we both spent hours creating the same presentation. But this lesson certainly relates to other tasks and projects that you might focus on.
The moral is “actively seek out information in order to know what’s going on in your organization.” You might be surprised by what you discover. Maybe the Communications team is doing the same thing you are. No need to do double the work if you’re both trying to accomplish the same objectives.
Parting Words
I hope you’ve enjoyed learning about some of my blunders. Here are my final thoughts.
Own your mistakes. Learn from them. Keep moving forward :)
About our TBA Member
Haley Sasser is currently a Sr. Talent Operations Specialist on the Talent Acquisition team at UKG where she focuses on employer branding, recruitment marketing, and TA operations. Haley began her career after graduating from the University of Florida in 2014 with degrees in advertising and entrepreneurship. In her free time, Haley enjoys playing with her dog, Obi, and using any excuse to sing or dance.