Are Recruitment Marketing and Employer Branding the Same Thing? A Quick Employer Branding Exercise

Recruitment marketing and employer branding are very similar. The terms are often used interchangeably, so don’t wear yourself out trying to draw a line between the two. 

Here’s a good way to think about it:

• The goal of recruitment marketing, specifically, is to attract job applicants to your company.

• Employer branding is a holistic strategy that comprises recruiting new employees, retaining current ones, and generally improving your company’s reputation as an employer. 

But before you go . . . it is worth separating one from the other as an employer branding exercise. Employer branding can quickly become a blobby goal: Make everyone want to work for our company! With a blobby plan: Let loose with the exclamation points in our job descriptions, use pictures of happy workers, and cajole employees into reviewing the company on Glassdoor. We’re so happy here! Are you smiling yet? I said smile!

So here’s the exercise:

• Define your employer brand goal

• Summarize the three to five most important actions you’re taking to support that goal

• Define your recruitment marketing strategy

• Summarize the three to five most important actions you’re taking to support that goal

In case you haven’t already figured it out, your answers should be different, and you should be able to identify discrete supporting actions for each.

If you’re finding the exercise difficult, try these questions as a guide:

• What do you assume candidates already know about you as an employer? How can you be sure they know this? 

• Are there things you assume your employees already know about you as an employer? Why are you so sure they know?

• Would employees agree with the way you cast the company to job candidates? Where are they most likely to disagree?

Here’s an example for a company I’d like to start:

The goal of our employer brand is:

To make Tiny Teeth a place where employees are so respected, skilled, and confident that they come to the table with new ideas that make us the very best manufacturer of dog dentures.

We’ll make that happen by:

• Building inclusion metrics into manager evaluations, and tying them to promotions and pay raises; rewarding initiative and humility in all employees with promotions, pay raises, and acknowledgement in front of their colleagues

• Investing in learning and development, with curriculum guided 50% by management and 50% by employee curiosity

• Building a recruitment marketing campaign that explains how to succeed in an interview with Tiny Teeth 

• Deploying the Designed by You campaign, which profiles employees and their accomplishments at all levels of the org

  • Promoting the company’s new innovations to employees and to the public—on social channels, company blogs, etc., and giving credit to the employees, by name, who worked on the projects

  • Investing in public speaking coaching for non-executive employees who would like to participate in panels, conferences, etc., and talk about their work

The goal of our recruitment marketing is:

To make Tiny Teeth a place where open-minded people feel confident applying, where they leave feeling like they learned something, whether they get the job or not

We’ll make that happen by:

• Disclosing the interview process up front, including how candidates will be evaluated and even some of the questions they can expect, so applicants feel confident and prepared when talking to hiring managers

  • Refusing to give candidates “yes”/”no” answers in response to the hiring decision—those turned down should know exactly why, and those hired should know exactly why

• Running a social media campaign about the soft skills we look for, with specific examples of how they will be applied at work

• Building a careers page that supports our employer brand goal, written with people who are strangers to Tiny Teeth in mind

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza writes about workplace culture, DEI, and hiring. Her work has appeared in Fast Company, From Day One, and InHerSight, among others.

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