Employer and Talent Branding: What’s The Difference And How to Align Them

There are several different subgenres of a company’s overall brand. For example, organizations across the country are now spending time honing their online brand (how the company presents itself via its website, social media, and blog), executive brand (the public image of the C-suite), and product branding (when marketers introduce a product to the public with its own unique identity) to name a few. 

All these varied faces of branding exist largely because every company has multiple audiences––from customers to employees to candidates to investors to journalists and beyond. The project of “branding,” then, is all about narrowing the identity of your overall company brand to speak to a specific audience, an audience that is key to the success of your business. 

Perhaps the most critical audience for employers in this day and age is talent (employees past and present throughout the employee lifecycle, candidates, and potential candidates) since, in this post-pandemic, pre-recession world, quality talent is harder than ever to find and keep, and the cost of losing talent is higher than ever before. 

That’s why organizations are investing heavily in their employer brands––because a quality employer brand can reduce turnover by 28% and cost per hire by 50%. 

However, the issue is many companies are moving quickly to invest in their employer brand without looking into (or even knowing about) their existing talent brand to inform a successful path forward. And in doing so, they are creating, what Forbes Human Resources Council calls, “a dissonance disaster.” 

But, what exactly is a talent brand? And, how does it differ from your employer brand?

Employer Brand Vs. Talent Brand 

While both focus on talent attraction, communication, and recruitment, your employer brand is who you say you are (and ultimately want to be). 

It’s about storytelling around what it’s like to work at your organization and sharing your value proposition with talent at every step of the hiring process. It’s about articulating your mission, values, culture, and personality to connect with skilled candidates who share your vision. All of this intentional storytelling totals up to form a positive perception of your organization from the outside. 

Your talent brand, on the other hand, is who you actually are, or how employees authentically experience your organization. While your employer brand is a story told by you, your talent brand comes from the voice of employees and candidates (past and present) that actually power your organization. It’s the highly social, totally public version of your employer brand that incorporates what talent thinks, feels, and shares about your company as a place to work.

Your talent brand is an “earned” image; it comes from providing employees and candidates with an experience they connect with and get value from, and then pulling from that organic, positive experience when telling the story of who you are as a company. Most employer brands, however, are more of a projection of what a company wants to be––an idealized version of its current reality. 

This is where many companies get it wrong; they lead with their employer brand to attract the kind of talent they want (talent that will push them in the direction of becoming that idealized version) rather than building an employer brand off of the positive, authentic realities of their current culture. 

And, candidates and employees alike notice that incongruity. For example, if you share via your employer brand that you are a “highly flexible” place to work (because you think that’s what top talent wants to hear), but in reality require employees to work in-person five days a week with limited PTO or work-from-home options, then employees are going to notice and talk about it. 

They might share their discontent via Glassdoor reviews, social media, or word of mouth, ultimately affecting your overall reputation and making it harder for you to attract the candidates you want in your talent pipeline. This obvious dissonance will also negatively affect retention because employees will eventually realize they are not getting what they signed up for. 

How to Align Your Talent Brand with Your Employer Brand

Instead, companies should lead with their talent brand to build an effective employer brand. Not only will this help you create a more authentic-feeling employer brand with more powerful storytelling based on real social proof, but it will also help improve key talent metrics, such as retention, when candidates realize they are getting exactly what they signed up for!  

Building a quality talent brand forces you to take a closer look at what your top, ideal talent really wants—to take stock of what’s working and what’s not when it comes to human capital management—so that you can move in a direction that organically improves your reputation and image. 

To do this work, you can conduct employee surveys (i.e. eNPS) or manager interviews to figure out what employees love about your company and what’s missing for them. 

You can even take a closer look at company data, such as participation and productivity numbers around certain company programs. For example, if you have high participation numbers in employee resource groups that set and reach DEI goals on a regular basis, then that’s a key feature of your talent brand to highlight in your employer brand. 

If, through this internal assessment, you find areas where your company is lacking, like low employee satisfaction with professional development opportunities, then that’s a clear signal to leave learning and development out of your employer brand––and a clear signal to work on your mentorship and training programs to improve your talent brand. 

Aligning your talent brand with your employer brand is all about honesty––becoming more honest with yourself about who your talent is, what they really want, and how you’re serving them. When aligned, however, a strong talent and employer brand combined can help you streamline the hiring process to attract the right candidates, increase retention, and turn employees into company advocates. 

For more tips and tricks for hiring the right people and improving key company metrics, tune in now for another episode of America Back to Work: Expert Interview Series. We’re sitting down with Hilani Ellis, founder of Exceptional Admins—a boutique-style placement and consulting firm located in Colorado—to get her expert insights into attracting and retaining top talent. 

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