Cliquify: Employer branding must be a seamless experience for all
Cliquify co-founder Amit Parmar drops by before UNLEASH America to talk about his research into employer branding sentiment.
Why You Should Care
You often can't rely on interoperability, which makes many organizations' HR tech stacks look increasingly precarious. What's the solution?
Cliquify's Amit Parmar gives us the lowdown on their recent research into employer branding. Don't miss out!
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UNLEASH editor Jon Kennard sits down with Amit Parmar, CEO of employer branding experts Cliquify and former leader of the Forbes HR council, to talk research results, employer branding best practice and of course, UNLEASH America.
We join the conversation as Parmar explains seeing a gap in the discourse around employer branding…
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Amit Parmar: There’s a lot of literature and a lot of great research about what drives candidate experience and candidate behavior in terms of employer branding, the value propositions. But nobody really writes about how the function is doing in terms of budgets, priorities, and so on.
So, in December we launched a study. We reached out to 600+ talent branding, talent acquisition and talent professionals. And many of them responded to a quick survey. And when I say quick, it was about about 12 questions – very pointed questions – about what their priorities are heading into 2023. How their budgets are shaping up heading into the year, what tool sets they use, their happiness with the tools, and some qualitative data in terms of what their biggest challenges are.
And there’s some really interesting insights that we have out there in the report, but happy to jump into more details here.
Jon Kennard: Yeah, that’s gonna be my first question. So at the highest level, in terms of pulling out themes and trends, what did you find were the top priorities for HR teams when it comes to employer branding in 2023?
AP: Because we had, essentially the whole world responding to the survey…we did look at regional nuances but the themes we actually came up with are what we’re finding across the board regardless of the region of the world you live in, or where your remit is, from an employer branding perspective. And the top three themes that really came up – the first is around making sure that the internal employee experience is taken care of first, because that actually yields how you actually attract candidates through employee advocacy programs.
So a lot of talent branding professionals are quickly being pulled into – especially if you’re rebranding – understanding their employee value proposition, really understanding what are the levers that are driving the employee experience. Because it’s an inside out point of view when candidate outreach is done, in terms of what it might be like to work at the organization.
So that’s number one. Number two is a little more tactical. It’s around maintaining social media presence and career site revamps; we actually saw a large portion of responses indicating they’re really looking at their career sites and making sure that they are resonating with what’s reality inside the organization.
And then the third theme, which cuts across both one and two, is how organizations are starting to look at their content and making sure that it is broad enough, as well as detailed enough, to attract diverse candidate slates. So diversity, equity and transparency are huge topics from that perspective. Those are the three.
JK: Yeah, definitely. My next question is around what people aren’t happy with. It’s great to give people the tips and the advice, but obviously people have different organizations, different tech stacks and use different tools. You found that a lot of companies weren’t really happy with their technology – can you give us an insight as to why?
AP: Absolutely, Jon. That was a very particular question that we asked, which is; how happy are you with your tech stack or the tools that you use today to do your jobs effectively? 52% of the respondents came back [saying] they felt mediocre about the tools that they had. And we’ll get into some of the details around why.
The other stat is the number of tools they’re using. Because another question we asked is, how many tools do you need to use today in order to do your jobs effectively? And that was surprising to us – there are on average about five tools that employer branding people are using today to actually do their jobs. There’s a tool they use for content designing, there’s a separate tool for employee advocacy programs, they’re using yet another tool to actually capture videos from employees, in terms of content. And then they’re also managing, trying to figure out how do you measure the ROI of all of this, right, and so there’s another reporting tool associated with it. The fragmentation is huge.
And that’s what we believe is driving the unhappiness. It’s the tools, because they just are using too many, and playing in too many different sandboxes to enable a seamless experience back to their employees. So if they’re using three to five different tools, on average, you can only wonder how many tools the employees are actually touching, because we’re just one function. They’re probably touching time and attendance tools and all these other tools as well.
So it all ties back to the employee experience, overall…
Listen to the interview beneath.
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Editorial content manager
Jon has 20 years' experience in digital journalism and more than a decade in L&D and HR publishing.
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