What is an HR brand and how to form it, why some companies have a stable team, while others have constant staff turnover, how to attract the best specialist without offering him a salary increase, the HR Brand Award consultant told Kommersant in an interview. Nina Osovitskaya.

— The concept of HR branding came to us relatively recently; ten years ago, few people had heard of it. What are the specifics of this direction?

— An HR brand is essentially one of the sides of a company’s corporate brand. It is necessary to separate the company brand and the product brand. The product brand is designed for the consumer. But if we talk about an employer brand, an HR brand, then we mean one of the facets of the company’s corporate brand. It is aimed both at employees who already work in the company, and at the labor market, at potential candidates. The main specificity of building an HR brand is the transmission of the advantages of a particular company as a place of work.

For example, now, in addition to students, with whom many companies traditionally work in the labor market, some organizations are building an employer brand, focusing on the audience of schoolchildren. This may encourage school graduates to choose the right professions and the right educational institutions in order to subsequently come to work for this particular company.

— How relevant is it to work on an employer brand during an economic crisis? After all, it is at this time, as many say, that the job seeker’s market turns into an employer’s market, and the latter can easily choose workers from the many candidates left without work.

— The opinion about the so-called “employer market” is a common stereotype, which is not always true. For some positions, some areas, this is indeed the case. The number of vacancies has decreased, there have been large layoffs at enterprises, and a large number of different specialists have entered the market. But this applies either to massive vacancies, for which there are always many applicants, or to not very effective professionals. Whether we talk about professionals with work experience or even students with a good education and high potential, there is still intense competition for them. And most recruiters - and we communicate very actively with them - note that many vacancies during a crisis are by no means easier to fill than during periods of stability or growth. The flow of applications for vacancies may increase, but, unfortunately, among them there are very few specialists with the level of qualifications that companies really need. If we evaluate the current state of the labor market, there are now many people on it who are not in very high demand. And at the same time, even during the crisis, the demand for qualified, effective specialists and talented, well-educated youth continues to grow.

— And yet, how profitable is it for a company to work on its brand, trying to attract the best? Isn't it easier to find an employee by trial and error?

— When a company determines its employer branding strategy, it also evaluates the economic impact of these initiatives. Indeed, there are some business models (not in all areas of work) where human resources are easily replaceable and trial and error and high turnover are economically justified. But these are rather exceptions in the market. For most businesses, high staff turnover is associated with additional costs. If you count the costs of recruiting the next new employee, his introductory training, and adaptation, they may turn out to be much higher than investments in building a brand. At a minimum, it is more profitable for the company to retain people. And when it comes to attracting new employees from the labor market, it is much cheaper to have an already built brand so that the right specialists come to vacant positions.

In addition, the brand allows you not to overpay the right employee or buy him from a competitor with a large salary increase. Before the crisis, there were such salary races when outbids with a salary increase of 50% or even more were commonplace. Today, salaries for specialists of the same profile are approximately the same for most employers, and therefore competition for an effective employee occurs at the brand level. An employee chooses working conditions, opportunities for professional and career growth, and the microclimate in the team. The parameter of the company’s social responsibility and social guarantees has become significant.

— What steps should a company take to begin building its brand?

— We need to start with internal work. It’s like with a product brand - you cannot create a successful product brand if you only work on packaging, if there is no quality product or service inside that package. It won't be a strong brand, no matter how well the marketers do it.

Nothing will work if we conduct research only in the applicant audience and try to build an HR brand on this platform. Such research will help identify benefits that are interesting to those we want in our company. At the same time, it is necessary to conduct surveys of employees within the company: how they evaluate working conditions, opportunities, management, etc. This will ensure that the enterprise can provide the benefits that the HR brand conveys, not only in words, but also in deeds.

It will be problematic to create a strong HR brand if we are talking about the possibility of career growth, but in fact we are attracting people from outside to fill the vacancies of middle and senior management. Or if the company presents itself as open and democratic, but in fact the bosses discuss all issues in their offices behind closed doors and you can’t get through to them with any idea.

This strategy won't work. A certain stream of candidates will apply for beautifully packaged vacancies and a beautiful corporate website, but then layoffs will begin during the probationary period, because the probationary period exists not only for the employee. The company is also going through it.

— How do the corporate code and corporate values of companies fit into the work on a brand?

— As for working with corporate ideology, with corporate values, this is a difficult question. Indeed, at the heart of the brand are the very advantages that a platform should have - corporate values. Another thing is that often the formation of corporate values is even more painstaking and complex work than building a corporate brand.

It often happens that the corporate code is some kind of bible, a huge volume that none of the employees have ever seen. It is intended mainly for the “external” reader. And if you conduct a survey among top managers, even they may not name these values. Not to mention the cases when some formal things that have nothing to do with real life are declared as values.

On the other hand, there are already many successful examples on the market when corporate values correspond to the personal values of the company's owners and shareholders. Moreover, top managers share them and successfully broadcast them to employees. There were also cases when ordinary employees also took part in developing values (of course, the main ideas come from management, but all company employees are involved in choosing wording and determining details). Then, as a rule, it really works and helps create an employer brand. Because there is a holistic picture, there is a common understanding of what kind of company we are, and based on this picture it is much easier to differentiate ourselves from competitors, to really stand out, to be remembered and to maintain the unique advantages of the employer.

— What if the formation of corporate values was approached formally or if they were not formed at all? Then it is impossible to create an employer brand?

— If such work was not done efficiently and truly, if we understand that it was done “for show,” we can either re-launch the project to create corporate values, or immediately start working with the employer brand, even without having a corporate code. Because an HR brand is a simple and pragmatic thing that is built on the specific advantages of the company as an employer. You can start by focusing on simple things that the company has and actually work.

— Is it possible to somehow assess the quality of an employer’s brand from the outside so that this assessment is more or less objective?

— It is possible, and quite objectively. The HeadHunter company, for example, makes a rating of Russian employers. These studies provide an integrated, comprehensive assessment of the employer brand. The first study is a survey of applicants. It shows how well-known and attractive the company is in the labor market. In this case, companies are selected from an industry list, because a person is unlikely to choose an employer from absolutely any field. Each applicant identifies an employer of interest to him in his professional field.

The second is a study of employee engagement within the company, this is precisely an assessment of the internal HR brand. It talks about how much people enjoy working for the company and how willing they are to recommend it as a good place to work. About the extent to which they really have opportunities for development, independent decision-making, how much initiative is welcomed, etc. And, of course, how willing they are to make extra efforts to make the company prosper. Of course, the company should somehow encourage the employee’s caring attitude towards work. This, unfortunately, is a rare phenomenon on the Russian labor market.

Well, the third study is an HR questionnaire, which is filled out by a representative of the HR department. It shows the maturity, degree of development of the HR function, the role of the HR service in the company: is it strategic or more servicing. To what extent does the HR department use advanced technologies that have already proven their effectiveness on the market today? Is HR not working on “manual control”.

Thus, we obtain an objective assessment of the employer brand.

— Does the size of a company affect the quality of its employer brand?

— The size of a company certainly has an impact on its brand. And if you take its components, the internal brand and the external one, the influence here is exactly the opposite. In small companies it is easier to build a good internal brand. If this company is still young, employees and management build it together. This model helps the enterprise to be perceived as a single whole. Everyone understands what they do, and it is absolutely transparent to the manager who is doing what. If a company has 100 employees, it is much easier to achieve high engagement rates than if there are tens of thousands of employees. By the way, it is very important, as the number of personnel grows, to switch to formalized management methods, but to maintain this atmosphere. However, the popularity of such small companies in the labor market among job seekers is much less.

Large companies have a more developed external brand, they are better known in the market, they are more widely known. But in a large enterprise, some kind of bureaucratization is already inevitable, more formal procedures, less contact between each employee and management. Therefore, special technologies and working methods are needed to maintain a certain mood within the company, so that the internal component of the brand matches the external one.

— HeadHunter has been evaluating HR brands for ten years. How are the award nominees selected?

— The competition is held between companies that already have an established employer brand. This is a slightly different form of assessment than employer rating. The rating is compiled based on research, and the “HR Brand Award” is a competition of projects. There is no research part here, this is an expert assessment. The jury selects the best initiatives, which in turn strengthen the company's image as an employer of choice. There are leading companies with interesting, effective practices; it is important to disseminate them in the professional community. The HR Brand Award allows you to identify the best projects, give them recognition, and disseminate best practices among employers.

— We are used to the fact that any quality product is expensive. How much does it cost a company to create a quality employer brand?

— Both internal and external PR of a brand can be done without any special expenses from the budget. If what you declare, what is written on the company’s website about working conditions, corresponds to reality, the main work will be taken on by the employees themselves, and completely free of charge. They will tell each other and their acquaintances outside the enterprise about the advantages of their place of work simply in everyday communication. It is possible to attract an employee with promises, but it is unlikely to be possible to keep him in the company in the absence of everything promised. It is better to promise less, but clearly fulfill all your obligations. Creating an employer brand is not just an advertising campaign with an allocated budget. This is painstaking work, systematic work to improve all processes and tools for working with people. And most importantly, having decided on a strategy, it is important to consistently implement it in practice and regularly evaluate the effectiveness of your work.

Larisa Nikitina

“In the labor market, it is not wages that compete, but employer brands”