Employer branding

Employer brand was first used in the early 1990s to denote an organisation’s reputation as an employer. Since then, it has become widely adopted by the global management community. Minchington (2005) defines employer brand as “the image of your organisation as a ‘great place to work’". Employer branding is creating this image.
Just as a customer brand proposition is used to define a product or service offer, an employee value proposition (EVP) is used to define an organisation’s employment offer. Likewise the marketing disciplines associated with branding and brand management have been increasingly applied by the human resources and talent management community to attract, engage and retain talented candidates and employees, in the same way that marketing applies such tools to attracting and retaining clients, customers and consumers.


While the term ‘employer brand’ denotes what people currently associate with an organisation, employer branding has been defined as the sum of a company’s efforts to communicate to existing and prospective staff what makes it a desirable place to work, and the active management of a company’s image as seen through the eyes of its associates and potential hires.


Employer brand management expands the scope of this brand intervention beyond communication to incorporate every aspect of the employment experience, and the people management processes and practices (often referred to as ‘touch-points’) that shape the perceptions of existing and prospective employees. In other words, employer brand management addresses the reality of the employment experience and not simply its presentation. By doing so it supports both external recruitment of the right kind of talent sought by an organisation to achieve its goals, and the subsequent desire for effective employee engagement and employee retention.

As for consumer brands, most employer brand practitioners and authors argue that effective employer branding and brand management requires a clear Employer Brand proposition, or Employee value proposition (EVP). This serves to: define what the organisation would most like to be associated with as an employer; highlight the attributes that differentiate the organisation from other employers; and clarify the ‘give and get’ of the employment deal (balancing the value that employees are expected to contribute with the value from employment that they can expect in return). This latter aspect of the employer brand proposition is often referred to in the HR literature as the ‘psychological contract’.




Internal marketing focuses on communicating the customer brand promise, and the attitudes and behaviours expected from employees to deliver on that promise. While it is clearly beneficial to the organisation for employees to understand their role in delivering the customer brand promise, the effectiveness of internal marketing activities can often be short-lived if the brand values on which the service experience is founded are not experienced by the employees in their interactions with the organisation. This is the gap that employer brand thinking and practice seeks to address with a more mutually beneficial employment deal / Psychological contract.