Let’s Raise the Bar on Employer Branding: Now Hiring (Actually, Though)

Employer branding is a funny thing.

It’s part marketing, part recruiting. It’s what you find when you google your company. It’s how you would describe where you work to a complete stranger. It’s the ratings and reviews on your Glassdoor page. It’s the photos on your jobs website.

A company’s employer brand is all of those things. But more importantly, it’s the sum of them. Someone much smarter than me said it best:

“Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.” — Jeff Bezos

As HubSpot’s Employer Brand Manager, I think about this a lot. How can my team help build a strong employer brand story that people truly love to tell?

For me, it comes down to two key ingredients:

1. Investing in Culture Internally: We’ve all heard someone tell a bad story; it drags on without ever giving you a reason to care. In the same way, if a company doesn’t care about culture internally, like really care, then it doesn’t matter how you talk about it externally — no one will care. That’s why before you can even think about your employer branding strategy, your company needs to make culture a business priority, not just an HR priority. At HubSpot, we made the decision to invest time, energy, resources, and care into culture a long time ago. The HubSpot Culture Code was published five years ago and has over four million views today. But more importantly, it’s a testament to how we work, what we value, and who we aspire to be. And, it keeps us honest on our commitment to those values. When you have a truly strong culture, people organically want to talk about it. Employees will talk to their friends and families about it. Candidates will talk about it in interviews. But that won’t happen if we don’t walk the walk on culture internally first.
2. Creatively Marketing That Culture Externally: Even the most amazing products need great marketing. An amazing culture isn’t all that different; you need great employer branding to give top candidates a reason to get on the phone with you and to help employees become culture ambassadors. I think a lot of companies are checking the box on this part. Employee profiles and Q&As are baseline. So are website photos of employees laughing. To earn the attention of candidates today, you have to think like a modern marketer. You have to experiment. You have to think outside the blog. You have to be inclusive and put yourself in every candidate’s shoes. You have to be authentic. And you have to give your toughest critics, your employees, a reason to care about your employer brand. They built the product after all.

I get asked a lot, “Who do you think does employer branding really well?” A few campaigns come to mind from companies like Pinterest, Etsy, and Atlassian. There’s lots of good stuff happening in employer brand.

But I don’t think any one company has set the bar yet. Including HubSpot.

That’s what makes me excited to come into work every day. I know our product, HubSpot’s culture, is world-class. That gives us a real opportunity to raise the bar on how companies tell stories about work, culture, and people externally. Luckily, I have a great and growing team to help us make an impact on that challenge.

We’re looking for new ideas, different perspectives, and a diversity of thought that will make our team even better. Because we’ve really only just started to scratch the surface on telling a culture story people love to talk about.

Did I say employer branding was a funny thing? Sorry, I meant a huge-opportunity-for-growth-and-innovation kind of thing.

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