Ruben van den Boer is a Principal Consultant at VMA GROUP focusing on interim and permanent communications, digital and marketing recruitment across mainland Europe.

Being able to attract the right talent is crucial for every single business, disregarding which sector you work in or which part of the world you come from. Especially in today’s fast changing global reality. Employer Branding helps you to build a reputation in the labour market, to engage with your target talent pool and, eventually, to attract the talent that fits the bill.  

The art of Employer Branding is multidisciplinary; involving Human Resources, Talent Acquisition, Communications and Marketing. At VMA GROUP, we speak with senior professionals and experts from all of these disciplines on a daily basis. How do they see Employer Branding now and in the (near) future?  

Work together

Employer Branding requires a close collaboration between Human Resources and Communications. We are happy to see that in most companies there is already a strong cooperation between Human Resources and Communications, especially for Employee Engagement and Employer Branding. More importantly, we see that the two functions have been growing closer together over the years. We are seeing more mutual respect for each other’s expertise and corporate value, and a better understanding that working together is much more rewarding than fighting over the same resources.

This all sounds very logical, though many Communications professionals we speak to admit that the cooperation with Human Resources is developing in a much more friendly manner than the relationship between Communications and Marketing. Employer Branding has been key in showing both Human Resources and Communications that they need each other’s expertise, and cooperation is the only road to success. 

Brand alignment

The employer brand must be aligned with the overall corporate brand, especially with the increasing transparency in today’s digital age. Like your employees, your target talent might as well be your customer, your advocate or your critic. There are e-retailers which are reluctant in publicly posting their job ads, as they are uneasy with the high number of applications, which all but one they have to “reject”. In actuality, there are already mathematical calculations out there that, quite accurately, define the correlation between a company’s recruitment activities and its sales revenue.   

Overall, we are seeing an increasing understanding that companies need to synchronise corporate and employer messaging, and should have only one integrated brand, one corporate reputation.

Work it out

The issue of development and implementation is part of the never-ending discussion around centralization vs dec