Every company has a story to tell. Yet job-seekers don’t always know those stories. That’s why employer branding is so important: It helps companies define themselves, their voice and their mission so that candidates can get to know them and envision how they could be a part of that story too.
So, what makes a successful employer brand? Built In launched the Employer Branding Awards, our newest awards program, to find out.
The Employer Branding Awards do two things: 1. celebrate the people, companies and campaigns that take employer branding to the next level; and 2. exhibit what good employer branding looks like in the hopes that it will inspire other companies to find their forward when telling their story to job-seekers.
Our panel of judges considered individuals, companies and campaigns in four distinct categories: Best Employer Branding Campaigns, Employer Branding Champions, Employer Branding Activators and Employer Branding Influencers. All four categories recognize three honorees that we celebrate as Gold, Silver and Bronze winners.
What distinguishes the winners on this list? In a word: excellence. These winners didn’t just meet our rigorous criteria; they exceeded them. Often, winners come from and include companies that devote resources and talent specifically to employer branding. Some of them test out innovative employer branding strategies, while others have perfected tried and true techniques over time. The winners’ branding is creative, goal oriented and front and center of their recruitment strategies. The proof is in the pudding: They attract top talent by connecting candidates to their company’s story.
Please join us in celebrating our winners that are raising the bar on employer branding.
"Our Awareness campaign consisted of three main pillars: 1) an internal Glassdoor drive; 2) a first-of-its-kind sponsored LinkedIn campaign targeting US sales and commercial talent; and 3) a first-of-its-kind New York Commercial Networking Event.
"The campaign was a resounding success. During the 3 month sponsored LinkedIn campaign, we amassed: 220,401 unique sponsored LinkedIn campaign viewers; 156 leads; and 3 new hires who had direct campaign exposure. Of the 51 highly qualified guests who attended our niche networking event, an overwhelming 41% had applied for at least one opportunity with us within one month of the event date. Thanks to our Glassdoor push, we were able to give our new audience a taste of our company culture and work-life through 16 new US Glassdoor reviews."
"Not only were we able to include Inspire Love into the overall strategic plan for the year, but we were able to incorporate our branding plans into the #1 priority which was to invest in talent and build talent density.
"After two years of working remotely, living with the pandemic, ongoing sociopolitical unrest, and economic uncertainty, we knew G2ers were feeling overwhelmed. However, many employees said there was one especially bright spot throughout these challenging times—the global G2 Community. We use this term to collectively describe the social, cultural, and philanthropic side of G2 -- and it's deeply rooted in and guided by our core values of authenticity and kindness. By focusing on our G2 community and these values, we fostered a culture of love to inspire employee engagement, higher productivity, and customer satisfaction. This was how our “Inspire Love” strategy was born."
"To make incredible products, we needed incredible people. We needed to increase talent brand awareness, measured by an increase in career page traffic and overall applications. At Coinbase, our passion for the cryptoeconomy doesn’t end when we log off for the day – it’s about getting excited about NFTs and DAOs in our free time. It’s happy hours and lunches with some of the smartest people you’ve ever met. It’s wearing our Coinbase swag and hoping someone asks if you work there. You don’t just work in crypto - we live it. And from that, Live Crypto was born.
"We had lofty goals to expand hiring worldwide, and we smashed all of our goals to attract the talent we needed to join our ranks. Our talent brand campaign was such a robust, simple, and memorable tagline, that as the early summer 2022 crypto bear market came upon us, our parent brand spun it off into an ad campaign – #LiveCrypto was no longer a talent-exclusive bid for attention – it was a companywide manifesto."
Years Recruitment Strategy Included Employer Branding: 5+ Years
When Employer Branding Strategies Are Revisited: As new goals arise
"Spreetail’s Talent Brand team consists of four team members that are part of the greater Talent Acquisition team. Being on the same team allows for seamless alignment of brand and recruiting efforts. Weekly team meetings allow us to bring awareness of upcoming content for recruiters to share as well as we crown 'commenters of the week' from the team to encourage employee advocacy.
"In this competitive talent landscape, we understand time to fill is an important metric to track as candidates are craving efficient interview processes. Our goal as a team is to take an applicant from the initial stage to offer signed in 25 days or less.
“Outside of our recruiting goals, the Talent Brand team partners with our B2B Marketing team to raise awareness of Spreetail’s business model."
Years Recruitment Strategy Included Employer Branding: 5+ Years
When Employer Branding Strategies Are Revisited: Quarterly
"Employer Branding helps P&G Talent Acquisition effectively Attract, Source, Recruit-Hire, and Onboard top-quality candidates. Our global, attractive, and consistent Employment Branding was designed to address P&G’s prime prospect’s main barriers, customized with local content addressing country-specific barriers to maximize local relevancy. We meet our broader recruitment goals through a strategic attraction planning and tracking framework established to define the work to be done for attraction and sourcing based on sufficiency gaps, top schools’ targeting by country and sources’ ROI. We are intentional about the way we communicate our Employee Value Equation within our employment branding communications to transparently showcase our employee stories and impact."
Years Recruitment Strategy Included Employer Branding: 1 - 3 years
When Employer Branding Strategies Are Revisited: As new goals arise
"At Chewy, our employer branding function plays a vital role within every stage of the Talent lifecycle-- from attracting diverse talent, improving our candidate experience and onboarding journey to engaging and retaining culture champions and helping develop strong alumni networks of Chewtopians.
"Recent Chewy Employer Branding initiatives include: a new Career Site Launch, increased growth and engagement across LinkedIn, buzz building new market launches in Seattle & Minneapolis, creation of an org-wide, recruiter enablement asset library, hiring event activations, improved employer reputation management, and much, much more."
"Before Angela joined, the recruiting team did not have the bandwidth to build a strategy, set goals and manage all recruitment marketing efforts… After Angela joined, we immediately saw the difference. She was given a blank slate [... to] build it from the ground up with limited resources. Her influence and dedication has made a major impact on both the strategy and execution front managing initiatives across recruiting, marketing and communications teams to ensure we are constantly working together to build consistency across all channels. By building a holistic strategy that includes content, social media, creative, performance marketing, and capitalizing on core business moments like market launches Angela has been able to push the boundaries and build a strong foundation for future initiatives.
"With her leading the charge for little over a year, but not limited to, we’ve won 12 Best Workplace awards that amplify our brand and organization. We’ve been able to publish over 13 pieces of content including blogs and articles, produced 13 engineering focused videos with a tech team landing page as well as created over 50 new images, illustrations and videos for candidate resources and social posting. For our recruiters we now have numerous talk tracks, content and resources for them to use when engaging with candidates. Angela’s experience and ability to work across functions like communications, marketing, operations, people and recruiting means she is able to build alignment to create strategy and execute initiatives both creatively and operationally."
"With 40 years of success and an expansive product portfolio, Progress was well known within the software infrastructure space. But ask 10 people who we were as a brand—what we stood for--and you’d get ten different answers. To solve this problem and enhance Progress’ corporate and employer brand, EVP of Corporate Marketing Jennifer Ortiz led a brand refresh initiative over a two year period (for corporate and employer brand) to develop a clear, unified message for a matrixed organization with distinct product lines. Using marketplace and employee surveys, plus focus groups, Jennifer and her team centered on a single concept: Your Progress. Unlike past branding attempts imposed by outside agencies, she made sure we gave voice to who we already were. Our authentic selves.
"'Your Progress' clearly communicated our people-first, customer-first, you-centered ethos. Under Jennifer’s leadership, we developed a vision statement, refined our mission, and overhauled our values to be clear, concise--and memorable."
"Prior to Alia taking over employer branding, our external career sites were bare and the information was expired or minimal. There was no clear direction for the external career sites, but Alia saw a lot of potential and opportunity. She had updated benefits + perks to better reflect what the company is currently offering. Pictures have been updated to provide candidates a better look at our offices and warehouses. The reviews on our Glassdoor page were underwhelming and not a great reflection on the company. Alia launched an initiative to increase the volume of reviews, as well as ensuring we received more positive reviews. Since owning this, our metrics have seen significant improvement. For example, our ratings on Glassdoor went from a 3.4 to a 4.3 and increased from 55 reviews to 100 active reviews today."
"Creating a memorable candidate experience and life cycle is what makes RingCentral’s employer branding strategies unique. Our team works directly with Employee Engagement and Onboarding to deliver a branding experience that starts with talent attraction and continues on to employee retention - collaborating to convey a consistent and holistic brand story to our audience. One unique approach we have implemented are personalized and interactive candidate guides on who we are, our culture and initiatives and details and information about the specific role a candidate is applying for. The candidate guide walks through our leadership team, awards, ERGs & culture, employee and customer testimonials, key partnerships and growth over the years for them to reference and learn more throughout the interview process. These guides are customizable per region.
"Another employer brand strategy that is unique is RingSocial, a content repository aimed to give our employees employer brand and company content at their fingertips to share and promote on their personal social channels. Through the platform Dynamic Signal, employees are able to post and reshare curated and templated company content with the option to add or remove text as they please. Our employees are our most important and unique representatives, thus our goal is to give them inspiring, informative and creative content to attract talent from their direct networks. This strategy works hand in hand with our global internal referral program, RPeople, to arm our employees with the right resources and optimize our talent search and opportunities. Our approach is unique by implementing employer branding at the core of our candidate and employee journey while also highlighting the voices and network of our employees to grow our employer brand and talent attraction."
"At monday.com, our employer branding efforts aim to empower employees to share their experiences and showcase monday.com’s core values authentically. Our value-first strategy means that not only are we giving back to the community, but empower our employer brand organically. We’ve seen that our unique communications and culture employer branding approach drives recruitment organically rather than a perks and benefits approach so often synonyms with employer branding.
"By establishing monday U, employees at monday.com are dedicating their time and expertise to arm passionate and hard-working individuals, from all kinds of backgrounds, with skills specifically for hi-tech, at no cost. There have been 11 programs, 12,000 registrations, 325 students, and 230 alumni (we currently have an open program). Almost 60% of graduates that completed the program found a role in a position they were looking for, and 35 of them began at monday.com. Through building and standardizing training paths for professionals, monday U aims to give smart, talented people the opportunity to break into the multi-billion-dollar hi-tech industry based solely on their potential. From the application process through participation, monday U authentically involves participation in our culture throughout the process. This initiative is a perfect example of how giving back what we’ve learned to the community not only brings more qualified people into an ecosystem craving premium talent but also gives us a wonderful opportunity to create unique recruitment channels and ambassadors of our employer brand."
"We believe that Talent Brand is both inside out and outside in. What happens within an organization can influence not only existing employees, but also those who are considering joining. Similarly, what is said about Squarespace in the world can influence candidates as well as the morale of those who are already part of the organization. While many organizations have their Talent Brand (or Employer Brand) functions sitting within TA, Squarespace exec leadership inherently understood the importance of capitalizing on the existing strengths of strategic storytelling when deciding where to have Talent Brand sit long term. By virtue of being on the same team as internal and exec comms as well as employee engagement and events, there is collaboration and knowledge sharing that Talent Brand can tap into when co-creating, articulating, and amplifying what makes Squarespace an attractive place to work.
"In early 2022, Squarespace’s Senior Director of Internal Communications, Engagement and Talent Brand created a new role: Manager of Talent Brand & Engagement Strategy. The goal was to acknowledge the inherent connectedness about what attracts people and what then keeps them engaged. The role focuses on a passion for identifying clear success metrics for both areas, to measure the impact of our engagement and talent brand programs and help maximize the value they provide to Squarespace as well as innovate and test out methods to capture the attention of sought after job candidates and our increasingly dispersed population (at a time we are both becoming truly hybrid and growing our international footprint)."
