The Employer Brand: Bringing the Best of Brand Management to People at Work

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Birth of an Idea

When I first thought of the idea of the Employer Brand it struck me as utterly obvious. There I was in a new HR-facing job and searching for the templates that had helped me to be a consumer goods brand manager and then CEO of an advertising agency in London. Good ideas often strike their creators as obvious probably because there is an urgent need to go about doing something in a better way.

In this case it was my arrival as CEO of a personnel business. In those days it was known as Charles Barker Human Resources, and it was part of the same group as the advertising agency I’d been running, which had recently been sold to our US partners NWAyer. I found myself in charge of an efficient factory producing 100,000 job ads a year, working for over 2000 clients and producing 5 million copies of house newspapers, dozens of graduate recruitment brochures and internal communications artefacts. Demand was driven by HR people within client organisations who themselves were under pressure from line managers seeking to fill jobs fast. Where, I wondered, was the agency planning and the research necessary to create a strategy that could pull together the organisation’s efforts and guide not only the creative work but also the overall approach to the employment experience? If this was a consumer brand you wouldn’t run it this way, but of course it isn’t one, it’s something else: it’s an Employer Brand. That was the moment I saw things differently and have been trying to apply ...