If people are a company's key to gaining competitive advantage, then this is the area where an employer brand strategy should be looking to generate the most traction.

To place the sole responsibility for your employer brand strategy with one department, be that HR or Marketing makes no sense at all. This is a shared responsibility and so needs a shared involvement. How many CFO's or COO do you know that have involvement in their company's employer brand strategy? Then ask why it is so difficult to place the employer brand at the top of the budget list?

From a 2011 study conducted by EBI; when asked which department (s) is currently responsible for managing your employer brand? As I guess you might expect, `31% responded that only HR are involved. 18% of companies who only use Marketing for the task and what is at least a start 15% responded stating is was the job of the Executive Team. We get down to 11% before we see HR, Marketing & Communications working together on this and yet still no one from Finance or Operations!

As we can assess from the stats above, there are too many businesses that see the employer brand as an additional responsibility of the HR department and not a dedicated function in its own right. Granted the UK and USA do lead in the creation and use of senior roles focused on employer brand leadership. If you dig deeper and look at both the backgrounds of the incumbents and the duties / responsibilities they actually have, they are some big differences between them and I am guessing in the effectiveness of the roles for the task at hand. I am sure if you ask everyone with an employer brand role, they would all want to see a defined structure for an employer brand department with board level influence.

For the full study, see the paper from EBI "The rise of Employer Brand Leadership" by Brett Minchington

Author: Martin Shaw

Please contact martin by email or call him on 07791 673 715.

About RecruitSmart Technology

Founded by Martin in 2012, RecruitSmart is a company focused on applying any combination of technology, on and off line marketing and communications and all their years of recruitment industry expertise to support a company's talent attraction, acquisition and management strategies.