By now you know the tremendous impact that good Employer branding can have on a company’s engagement, recruitment, retention and more.
The truth is, even with the best intentions, if you lack the right knowledge, experience and frameworks to set things up and keep them moving, you won’t get the return on investment you need.
There are so few companies that actually know what Employer Branding is about. They tend to think it is a matter of tactics, like setting up a social media post, organizing an event or producing swag with the company logo. So, agency work is undervalued and misunderstood. – Fernanda Fumagalli, Strategy and Research Consultant at Ph. Creative.
Here are the top benefits of working with an external partner for your EB as outlined by our resident Ph. experts.
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Reasons to work with an Employer Brand Agency
1. Work with the best
The list of skills and responsibilities involved in great employer branding strategy is never-ending.
You work with an agency because this is all they do. Their breadth of experience, focus, and use of data to fuel insights means that you're going to get more of the right information played back to you and an employer brand framework that is honest, unique, and compelling. – Abby Feinberg, Senior Strategist.
2. Reduce costs
Working with an agency on a project-by-project basis can limit ongoing costs.
With Employer Branding in particular, you need people who understand marketing, creative, recruitment and employee engagement. It’s a diverse skillset not often found within an HR department. When you take all this into consideration, it can be cheaper to use an agency with the capabilities you lack, versus hiring employees who can fill those gaps. – Simon Booth-Lucking, Senior Brand Strategist.
3. Get efficient
Working efficiently and keeping the pace is crucial to any successful EB project.
Often there’s a lot of value to be leveraged from past experience. It’s a good way of upskilling and compressing timelines. Agencies understand ways of working; they understand how to activate and other processes which reduce the learning curve. When it comes to market view specifically, we have data on personas and types of audiences that we can add to the project scope so it doesn’t need to be researched from scratch. – Bryan Adams, CEO.
4. Boost resources
Learning employer branding from scratch is a time-consuming process, and you still lack the benefit of experience.
Although it is starting to change, EB is still largely seen as the poor cousin of consumer or B2B marketing, so companies often don’t have the internal resource required to support on-going, quality EB work. By working with an agency, you get to utilise the expertise of full teams of dedicated EB professionals rather than trying to educate internal teams like marketing and tech, who will have other work on and not have the in-depth understanding of Employer Branding. – Melanie Silverman, Account Director.
5. Gain perspective
Getting to the truth of an organisations ethics values requires the ability to zoom out.
You can't read the wine label from inside the bottle. Every company knows so much about themselves, but when it comes to how to package that up and present it to the outside world, it's really hard to do when you're in it. Expertise from the outside can look at things through fresh, impartial eyes, ask all the right questions, and help you create a label that will tell the world exactly what's inside, and why someone should (or shouldn't) want it in their lives. – Helen Towers, Content Strategist.
6. Earn leadership's confidence
To keep momentum in a project, it’s vital that your leaders are confident and on board.
Politically, it’s helpful to use an agency as a third-party sounding board. It’s a voice of authority and confidence that will keep things moving. Employer Brand tends to be taken a bit more seriously by leaders when there’s an external partner involved because there’s budget assigned and deadlines to keep to which help to sustain the cadence of the project. - Bryan Adams, CEO.
Before you go...
With the right resources, you can make headway with your employer brand internally, but if you want to take your research, strategy, and activation, and most importantly, results to the next level, getting an industry-leading agency involved may be right move.
