Why Employer Branding Belongs To HR

// September 21st, 2009 // Employment Branding

At some point, the decision is made – Marketing or HR?
Whenever I’ve worked on an employer brand project for a company, including the company I work for now, the same question comes up. Employment belongs to HR/People, and brand management belongs to marketing. So who should be in charge of the employer brand?
I firmly believe the brand needs to be owned by HR, and consulted on by Marketing.
Marketing is responsible for selling the thing that keeps you in business. They are paid to make you money by selling to your market. It’s likely that your marketing team only know Employment from their personal experience of looking for a job. Selling the experience of working for a company is selling one of the most intense and longest-term commitments a potential consumer is likely to make. It requires strategy, psychology, and a live-and-breathe understanding of subject, market, triggers and media. This is HR’s space.
If HR is responsible for delivering the experience which is behind the EVP and your employer brand, it’s HR’s responsibility to direct the brand. Marketing’s involvement is in ensuring the product brand and the employer brand have a synergy. Your agency (and if you don’t have an agency, you’re doing this the HARD way) knows how to communicate to your audience. The three parts need to work in harmony. The ownership, however, must stand, and end, with HR.
I am an Employer Brand Manager in an engineering firm. I work for HR. I am their marketing arm. The communications I am responsible for relate to the experience of being employed. I’m one of very few full time employer brand managers in Australia. Ideally, a company whose employer brand is large enough to have developed an equity and real impact in market has someone whose job it is, full time, to ensure that your employer brand is intact and performing.
Ultimately though, the responsibility for telling the world who you are as an employer and what you stand for belongs to the people who will deliver the daily experience of being an employee. That’s not marketing. It’s HR.