#OneWinWednesday: employer brand, and hiring to it
You: Why should I take branding advice from a person whose Wednesday post has an acronym that spells OWW?
Me: OWW-CH. Point taken. But please read on.
An employer brand tells your story to potential candidates. The enclosed Harvard Business Review article points out that the employer brand has three components: Reputation, Employee Value Proposition (EVP), and Experience.
Maybe you already have a general sense of why associates hire on and stay working there and why many potential applicants don’t.
If your reputation is poor and/or you can’t attract enough candidates, then work to change things. But certainly, do not try to shoehorn a candidate in if they aren’t excited by your current EVP and current employee experience. As the article points out, that incongruency leads to an unhappy employee. As we all know, unhappiness spreads like cancer and will worsen your reputation.
My advice:
Take an honest, comprehensive look under the hood at what your company, your culture, and your employee value proposition IS and what it IS NOT. In the short term, lean into what you are and hire for that. Simultaneously, work on changing what you don’t like about your firm. But don’t try to hire based on what you want the company to be. Unless you are hiring half of the workforce at once, don’t try to change the culture one person at a time. The person will be frustrated and leave.
