Employer branding plays an important role in an overarching human resources management strategy. Namely, a great employer brand should serve as the north star as the organization pursues greater efficiencies and effectiveness in employee performance.
The goal of strategic human resources management is to optimize an organization’s human capital and talent infrastructure – to motivate as much performance as possible from the company’s employees in pursuit of business targets. Because HR management rests ultimately on the effectiveness of an organization’s people, positioning the employer brand such that it motivates and informs how the organization wants to look, feel, and operate is key.
Human resources management is typically broken down into three important phases:
- The pre-hiring phase, which can be translated to the candidate experience.
- The training and development phase, which is informed by the decisions around how an organization structures its early employee experience.
- The post-hiring phase, which is the long-term aspect of the employee experience.
You’ll notice that the entirety of an employee’s perception and experience with an organization falls under human resources management, from the time the individual first interacts with the organization through its job application process through to when the individual leaves to find new employment.
Because this is the case, an organization’s employer brand, and more specifically, its employer value proposition, needs to be clear and established to ensure that everyone in the organization understands the kind of experience both candidates and employees should be exposed to. Human resources management, ideally then, becomes the responsibility of everyone at the organization – to make sure everyone is rowing in the same direction.
Human resources management taps into what is the primary purpose of employer branding, which is to provide direction and strategy for all human resources functions. Only when an employer branding KPI in place, supported by an overarching plan for what an organization wants to be perceived as by the talent marketplace, then the HR management tactics become fairly easy to see. Companies are able to pick and choose from myriad HR management choices knowing that as long as their decisions adhere to strict employer brand guidelines, they can rarely go wrong.