EMPLOYER BRANDING

The time has passed when you would attract new employees with your glass building in the business district of the city, a strict dress code and the big name of your international company. It used to be enough. But people are now looking for an opportunity to peer behind all the facades, asking the obvious question: “and what kind of people work there?” Our approach to Employer branding campaigns is usually to answer this question honestly and humanly.

Employer branding is a new service on the market and is at the crossroads between HR and advertising. It stands out from our other services in that we are usually not hired by someone from marketing, but by someone from the HR department. For these reasons, there are many different approaches in the market, different ambitions and different budgets.

Our approach is simple: We treat Employer Branding Communications like any other communication project. This means that we first agree with the client what they want, of the following:

Strategy

Strategy is the first document we make with a client. In it, we plan the employer branding activities for a period of usually one year.

The strategy starts from business goals, analyzes competition, analyzes possible channels, narrows the selection only to the necessary ones and makes a proposal of the necessary activities to achieve the goals. In the strategy, we also give expectations from the client in the coming period, in the form of budgets and organizational steps. We’ve written in more detail about the strategies here.

Upon the adoption of the strategy, it should be clear to everyone which of the services below will be realized:

Creative

The best way to realize creativity is to create a Creative Campaign. Every Employer branding has a goal that you want to achieve in a limited time. For example, to hire a certain number of candidates in a couple of weeks. Communicationally, we solve such projects with campaigns.

The campaign mainly consists of hero content and accompanying posts. For example, the hero content of the campaign we did for the Infostud Group was a video ad, the first honest job advertisement in Serbia:

This video led to the Landing page where the ad text directly and honestly presented the offer of the Infostud Group. However, the campaign lasted several months. Depending on the stage, the campaign was followed by various posts.

Video production

When you have a strategy, you know what you need to do. When you have creativity, you know what you want to say. So you don’t have anything yet. It is necessary to produce the content of your Employer branding campaign.

First of all, it can be video content. For example, as part of the Employer Branding project for Morph Networks, we worked on a series of video profiles of their employees:

However, video is not always the best way to explain exactly what your employees are doing. Sometimes it is better to do a classic interview, as we did for Ubisoft:

…or Zuhlke:

Photo production

Using stock visuals in Employer branding is devastating. Everyone can recognize a stock photo and you automatically communicate to potential candidates that you’re not authentic, or worse – that you’re hiding something. That is why we often carry out photographing of employees and the atmosphere in the office. All we can do is come into the office one day and bug people to pose and steal their stuff off the prop table, like we used to steal from AppCrafters:

And we can turn this photo shoot into a complete photo production, with location scouting, planning and buying props and costume guidelines. Yeah, yeah, when we were taking photos for Morph Networks our producer’s day started by going to the Chinese stores and buying a piñata:

Design

Internal initiatives, such as employment packages or benefits you offer to candidates, are a huge advantage in the labour market. Whether you want to introduce them to an existing team or to new people, the way you communicate them is crucial. That’s why we like to do internal initiative branding projects. The name, visual identity and tone of communication are the main elements of this service.

Zühlke Serbia is an international IT company that has developed employment packages for the Serbian market. These are not just some benefits – these are practical, flexible working regimes that significantly expand the number of potential future employees. And these packages are not novelties at the world level that have only been implemented in Serbia. No, they were developed here and from the point of view of visual identity and tone of communication no one really knew what they were supposed to look like.

Of course they called us for help, and we naturally embraced the possibility of doing something new because – employer branding now had its own specific product, aimed at future employees.

Management and Advertising

These two things are difficult to present in the portfolio, but they are key to the success of any Employer branding project.