World Employer Branding Day

the
be st
bits May 2016
We were a proud country partner for the
first ever World Employer Branding Day in
Prague, which saw over 250 professionals
from 35 countries gather to share their
employer brand experiences.
Organised by Brett Minchington from
the Employer Brand International,
the day promised a packed schedule
Get the book!
of learning, fact-findings and storytelling… World Employer Branding Day
and it didn’t disappoint! is releasing an e-book with 26
employer brand case studies,
Read on to discover:
including an in-depth look at our
• How adidas is embedding its new EVP work with ODEON & UCI Cinemas,
• How IHG uses employer band to which recently won the Grand Prix
stay competitive and Best Ongoing Commitment
• Why Pepsico puts content first to Employer Brand awards at
the inaugural Employer Brand
A big thanks goes to Brett and the Management Awards.
rest of the team for a fantastic day,
and the opportunity to be a part of it. Order your copy at
www.brettminchington.com
/bookstore
Experts
in employer brand
If you’d like to chat to us about your employer brand, we’d love to hear from you.
We work with global clients devising, designing and delivering their employer
brand from initial audits and research to strategy and creative.
Vodafone, ODEON & UCI Cinemas, Ladbrokes, Aviva...
these are just some of the brands we work with.
But don’t just listen to us!
Recent award wins include:
Nicky
Best Ongoing Commitment to
Employer Brand at the Employer
got top
Brand Management Awards marks!
The Grand Prix Award at the Our director Nicky recently
Employer Brand Management Awards scored the highest marks out of
Best Internal Comms Agency all international students for the
at the IC Brilliance Awards Certificate in Employer Brand
Leadership,
 Best Innovation at the
IC Brilliance Awards a global qualification from Employer
Branding College.
Best IC Campaign at the
IC Brilliance Awards Read more here
Hello
from the World
Employer Branding team
Brett Minchington opened World Employer Branding Day by sharing some of the
amazing experience that he has had across the world, since he began working in
employer brand back in 2006. He also shared some valuable actions organisations
need to take when setting out on their employer brand journeys.

1 Decide your path

  Ask yourself, what is the role of employer brand manager?
Put simply, it’s to attract, engage, and retain
 For 50% of businesses, employer brand means recruitment, for the
other 50% it means the whole lifecycle of an employees’ journey with
a company
 You need to decide what path is right for your business, but the latter
is usually preferable
 Many
2 Be clear on your organisations
brand experience start with
The experience we deliver should be
signature, not just for customers but for attraction, but
every stakeholder involved and their journey over time they
from customer, to candidate to employee realise if we’re
 Map your employees’ journey and look at bringing in great
every touchpoint people why are
 What’s happening with induction? The first they leaving
day is the ideal time to make a memorable after a year?
and lasting impression It’s because
 Assess how people leave. the experience
Staying in touch is invaluable doesn’t match
what was sold.

3 Value your partners

The agency is part of your ecosystem
Don’t just go to them when you can’t do it
yourself, they matter
 They have to research to stay on top of
their game, they have to pitch hard and
fast every time, they have to work hard to
understand your business
 Try and build a deeper relationship with
stakeholders and agencies
Case study: Volvo Cars
Robert Malm, Global Employer Brand Manager
For Volvo, the focus is always on the  
human being and this principle has been
close to the company’s heart ever since
it was founded. Today, Volvo calls this
 
concept “Designed around you” and the
focus is on the human being rather than
the vehicle or the technology. And, as we
discovered from Robert, the same ethos
shapes their employer brand as well as
their consumer strategy.
  503,127 cars sold in 2015
  28,485 people
  2,300 retailers in 100 countries
Volvo’s approach:
 
The motor industry is stereotypically
about motor shows and packed
graduate recruitment fairs where
stand out is impossible
 
Volvo turned this on its head, opening
pop up stores spread across the
world and reaching 3m people in
Germany alone in one year
Volvo uses its Swedish values, but
focuses on the people and culture,
not the geography
Volvo uses people from within the
company to act as ambassadors in
recruitment marketing, including a
powerful 4 minute video
Robert’s top tips
for a successful
employer brand:
  Challenge everything!
 Focus on integration and doing
things for a purpose
 Every brand needs to focus
on their meaning in society
 Customers and employees are
craving for relevance, because
they’re overly exposed by
brands
 An EVP is a lot of words,
but it should be about
actioning them
Case study: adidas Group
Hanna Nordell, Director Talent Acquisition EMEA and Martina Kovacova,
Employer Brand & HR Manager
adidas Group has over 53,000  
employees worldwide working for its
brands adidas, Reebok, TaylorMade,
Golf and CCM Hockey. In 2013, it
 
launched its five pillars EVP, focusing
on Sports Lifestyle, True Craftmanship,
Originality, Tribal Membership and
Globetrotter Careers, which are all  
prominent in employer branding
communications.
But, times are changing and adidas now  
has five generations working within its
business, Gen Z are making waves and  
competition for talent is fiercer than
ever before.
adidas Group’s  
approach:
 
Launched a new five year plan  
‘Creating the New’ which is about
taking everything that adidas knows
and reinventing it
Launched a people strategy,
separate to the HR strategy for
the very first time
Launched campaign called ‘Calling
all Creators’ a core part of the
2020 strategy
Included videos from employees
across the globe on the best
location to work – Amsterdam won!
New careers website launched
Created an archetype of a ‘creator’,
adidas group’s ideal employee – they
think different, and they always want
to improve things
The ‘creator’ archetype is now the
basis of the group’s EVP
Opened up recruiting innovation
challenge to current employees –
encouraging them to share ways of
reaching the best talent
Measuring success:

 ngagement
E Application
rate numbers Combine functional
Cost Quality NPS as statistics with feeling
of hire of hire a metric and gut instincts

Calling all creators!

Creativity: Collaboration: Confidence:
changing behaviours we’re stronger to say I’ll take risk.
and challenging the together I’ll fail, I’ll learn
status quo
Case study: InterContinental
Hotels (IHG)
Lianne Corriette, Global Employer Brand Director and Andrew Farmer,
Global Employer Brand Manager
Employer branding has been a core part of IHG’s business strategy for 10 years,
with its original EVP and values launched back in 2006. With 90,000 employees
to recruit and a changing marketplace, IHG wanted to refresh its brand, ensure its
relevance and build on the fantastic results it was bringing into the business.
IHG’s EVP is ‘Room to be yourself’ a commitment which involves four promises:
Room to have a great start, Room to be involved, Room to grow,
Room to be yourself. IHG has 350,000 people and 5,00 hotels globally.

Challenges:
 
Room to be yourself worked, but wasn’t resonating well enough
  Careers website hadn’t been touched in six years and had a
43% drop off rate
 
IHG is relatively unknown – people wanted to work for its
brands like Crowne Plaza and Holiday Inn
Process:
  EVP/Values
  Employee surveys – in-depth
  Brand wheel
 
Kept the ‘Room for you’ EVP
  Refreshed the look and feel, using real employees in the photography
Introduced Celebrate Service Week – managers cover employees’
shifts, and bring coffee and donuts (yum!) as a way of saying thank you
to frontline staff
Global external insights
 
Created over 10,000+ tools in multiple languages to enable markets
to deliver locally
 
Employees given the chance to design the key card for the London
2012 Olympic Village
Results: Careers website went
from 43% to 19%
IHG calculated that per cent drop off,
a 200 bed hotel can well within industry
see $50,000 increase average
in revenue by focusing
on the people Sunday Times Top
25 Best Places to
A YouTube campaign Work and Fortune’s
resulted in 90,000 World’s Most Admired
views in four weeks, Companies
6m impressions and
2,000 click throughs  3% have a sense of
9
to the careers website achievement
(12% above average)
94% of people would
recommend IHG as a Brand health gone
place to work from 62% to 84%

What’s next?
A
 focus on improving  Regional localization –  Building internal
the candidate experience taking the global capability to deliver
end to end brand and localising it the employer brand
worldwide
Case study: Arla Foods
Michael Holm HR Director

Arla Foods is a cooperative, with over 12,600 owners and 19,000 colleagues.
It is the world’s 5th largest dairy company and aims to provide the highest value
to its farmers in a very challenging global market.
Its EVP, ‘Lead, Sense, Create’, plays a core part in its strategy, attracting the
best talent in the business, providing direction and purpose to its colleagues
and helping to foster a culture of innovation and success. Their EVP is understood,
interpreted and lived locally.

Lead:
show the way Sense:
•  Take ownership for each other Create:
•  Be ambitious • Build professional innovate
relationships
• Be involved • Be innovative
• Respect others
• Be open for
• Commercial change
honesty
• Develop your
potential
Michael’s top tips Getting the
for a successful right people isn’t
employer brand:
  Use the iceberg model (visible
always about
is behaviours, words, customs
and traditions and invisible is
getting the most
beliefs, values, assumptions successful. If we
and thought processes)
 Trust people
find people who
 Build employee advocacy will succeed, but
  Say it like it is at the expense of
 All activities must support and
expose the EVP
others, then they
 Storytelling companies are not the right
excel, story-doing companies
do more fit for Arla.
Case study: PepsiCo
Marnick Vandebroek, Senior Digital Manager Benelux

With over 260,000 employees and brands including Pepsi, Doritos, Tropicana and
Mountain Dew, Pepsico is one of the world’s most well known brands. Marnick
gave a funny and informative talk on how the brand uses content to attract a
millennial audience and shared his content strategy secrets.

Content strategy: Content is everywhere,

use a strategy such as the Hero, Hub, Help to help
yours stand out and stay relevant.

Large-scale, tent-pole events or “go big” Hero

moments designed to raise broad awareness.

Hub
Regularly scheduled “push” content
designed for your prime prospect

Always-on “pull” content

Help
designed for your core target
Content approach:
  Gather insight to see what channels
and content would resonate with
your target audience Top tip:
Look at the core influencers for your
  Look at your
target audience. Who is big on Twitter,
Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat etc? job descriptions
Reach out to them and get them as a first port
involved in your campaigns
of call for
Keep it real, don’t make
 
false promises your employer
Keep it snackable, people’s
  brand content.
attention spans are short so keep
content easy to digest
Boring? Better
get rewriting!
 Thank
We engage people with award winning you!
creative communications.
Our inside out approach inspires your employees
to be brand ambassadors and turns your customers
into brand advocates.
The result is a seamless customer experience at
every contact with your brand. We’d like to say one
last thank you to World
Employer Branding Day for
a brilliant day. We learned
loads and can’t wait till
next year!
Be sure to check out
the website for all things
employer brand.

Get in touch
Gemma McGrattan
gemma@synergycreative.co.uk
+44 (0)117 962 1534
www.synergycreative.co.uk
http://www.synergycreative.co.uk/internal-comms-hub