Stand Out!

Few years ago I was travelling all over Poland teaching entrepreneurs how to use social media for Employer Branding purposes. As a fan of non-standard approach to my activities (including marketing, branding – both personal and employer, etc.) I was focusing on these outstanding examples.

My opinion is that repeating the same words about how responsible our company is, how much attention our company pays to CSR, how many opportunities for development our employees have – it’s a pure waste of time and money.

However, sometimes companies have real reasons to talk to potential employees. Of course, it’s great when your company pays attention to CSR, but honestly, I don’t know one person who was convinced to work in the enterprise because of CSR. When we talk about employer branding, we think about attracting the most valuable employees, and they need a little bit different approach.

Let’s imagine that you have on your payroll one of the industry stars. Someone who can be the real inspiration for younger employees. What would you do? Will you put the information on your website, somewhere in “Work with us” section? Or maybe you will use proper tool and appropriate message?

Everyone knows that a picture is worth a thousand words, so how much video is worth?

30 seconds of video does a much better job than the best text on the corporate website. What is the message? When you work for Intel, you can meet such a person like USB co-creator on the corridor. What’s more, you can even drink coffee with him and talk. Just like that. We are not the company like others.

Now. How to show that we hire genuine people. I mean scientist, who can do better calculations that processors we produce? Again, talking about it, is utterly boring. You can also find people who would say that you’re the just braggart. Unless you do it that way:

You will say that this hermetic joke? And that’s supposed to be. And again this video shows more about Intel’s scientist then any article.

How about meetings? Oh, meetings. Is that never ending, boring, the unproductive method of wasting the time? Yes, everyone loves it. Everyone waits for that moment. Everyone… oh wait

I can bet that this video tells much more to younger employees that everything else. In fact, the slogan “Our meetings aren’t like your meetings” says you again – if you are an individual if you want to stand out, then join us.

If you ever read any job offer, you probably found the sentence about the team. The sentence that any of candidates is paying attention to. However, every employer knows that team building it’s an art and the very difficult task at the same moment.

What would you say about your company when someone asks you “Ok, but what do you do in that company?”. Reading carefully prepared marketing sentences about company’s history is not the way. So how about showing your flagship product and at the same moment emphasizing – but we have something much more advanced?

Some of the movies were created as a commercial, so their prime goal wasn’t employer branding. However, sometimes it’s very hard to separate marketing from employer branding. Intel had a perfect method to kill two birds with one stone – to do marketing and employer branding at once.

At the very beginning of the article, I wrote that I was teaching entrepreneurs how to use social media (in fact I was talking not only about SM) for Employer Branding. Anticipating the question of training participants and that article reader I can say – yes, you don’t need Intel’s marketing and Employer Branding budgets to stand out.

All you need is a good idea, non-standard way of showing your company (by the way these rules applies also to people not only to companies). Nowadays, recording promotional movie is affordable, especially if you have a nice story to tell. But this only you know. No one else knows your company as good as you.