Employer Branding - Marketing Strategy for Hiring Employees and Cultivating Human Capital (Photo: Unsplash)
The latest annual report of the Innovation Authority states that the rate of growth in the number of high-tech employees in 2021 was 8 times higher than the growth in other sectors of the economy.
The proportion of high-tech employees out of all employees in Israel crossed the 10 percent mark for the first time and reached 10.4%.
So how did it actually happen?
The corona virus has boosted the technology companies in Israel.
Cheap money caused a lot of investment, and companies had to show growth at any cost and hire as many workers as possible.
The economy was so strong then that there were more jobs than working hands.
Anyone who knows English and has some technical or marketing sense can potentially move to high-tech, and still, it is a relatively exclusive community that is not open to everyone.
In Israel, it seems that the old dream of making an exit and being sold to a global company has been replaced by IPOs on the American stock exchange.
If once Israeli companies were purely R&D, today more and more of them are going in the direction of a multi-system corporate with marketing, HR, legal, finance, etc. departments.
Although Amazon, Google and other global companies, mainly have development personnel here, and this increases the competition for technical workers, the lack of workers is starting to be felt in non-technical professions as well.
The closures of the Corona virus and the "great resignation" in the USA led many in Israel to challenge the conventions and ask themselves, am I ready to continue working in a way that I don't have a work-life-balance? Isn't it more convenient to stay at home and make a living from the Internet? This is especially true With Generation Z, who is not willing to accept a boat from anyone. This is a generation that believes much more in entrepreneurship and multitasking than in a long-term career in one field. They want to be their own boss, decide their own time, and they certainly don't want junior jobs.
Kicks conventions and rewrites the rules.
Generation Z. (Photo: Unsplash)
The rise of employer branding as a recruitment strategy
The combination of all these trends together created an atmosphere of a shortage of workers and in 2021, we first started to see outdoor signage, television commercials, and a very large effort on social media with the best celebs, in order to recruit workers.
When the average developer suddenly receives between 7-12 LinkedIn-initiated offers every week, it's easy to understand why hiring practices are changing.
A survey conducted by the American business research company Forrester, among 153 managers and marketing VPs from various industries, revealed that the top priority of the marketing VP in 2022 is employer branding and the employee experience, while "enhancing the customer experience" was relegated to second place in the survey.
While the commercial marketing of the technology companies is mainly aimed at the international markets, employer branding is aimed at the potential employee audience, here in Israel.
"Just as in commercial marketing the goal is to highlight the advantages of your product over the competing company's product and make the customer choose your product, so the goal in employer branding is to highlight your advantages as a workplace and make the potential employee prefer you over the other job offers he receives," she explains Lehi
Gerty
, Vice President of Marketing at CodeValue.
"In recent years, against the background of the tremendous demand for high-quality employees among high-tech companies, and due to the enormous importance of high-quality employees for the future growth of any technology company, the field of employer branding has become a real industry, generating hundreds of millions of shekels .
The employer's branding focused mainly on marketing the company as a fun and luxurious place to work."
"In order to attract employees to them, the high-tech companies showered their employees with all the best, from furnishing the office with all the signs of comfort and prestige, to classes for employees, pampering vacations, and also closed concerts by the best artists such as Nega Erez and Omar Adam, until the workplace was visible, at least through For posts on LinkedIn and Instagram, more like a country club than a workplace."
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Leahy Gerty, VP of Marketing at CodeValue (Photo: CodeValue)
Were you happy too soon on the way to the kitchenette?
At the beginning of 2022, against the background of the war in Ukraine and rising inflation, the trend reversed.
Suddenly, a situation arose where it was necessary to show profitability and not necessarily growth, and those companies that until yesterday had invested huge capital in massive recruitments suddenly had to lay off workers.
Tali Yativ
, CEO and owner of Spirit Productions Olam, which specializes in incentive trips and productions for high-tech companies, says that despite the reports in the media about a high-tech crisis and mass layoffs, there is no significant decrease in orders from high-tech companies, and according to her, the reason is that "employee treats" are still An important incentive for attracting talent and retaining existing employees, and companies fear that competitors will steal their high-quality employees. "The only thing that has really changed is the response that companies give to this in the media and social networks, since today talk about high-tech celebrations is perceived in a less positive light," explains Yativ.
However, some of the high-tech workers who have been used to fighting over them like hot cakes in a bakery in the last two years are feeling the change in the atmosphere.
An interesting survey published recently provided a glimpse of the feelings among high-tech workers in Israel in the face of the crisis.
According to the survey, conducted by the consulting firm Tefen among 2,500 hi-tech workers, 74% of hi-tech workers report a slowdown or halt in hiring new employees in their organization, 50% of workers feel that the atmosphere in the offices has changed since the beginning of the crisis, and 71% feel a change in the nature and scope of the events held by the company .
Shlomi Lahanna
, senior consultant and leader of the field of marketing, customer clubs and strategy at "Holy Raz Consultants Ltd": "The employer branding process, similar to any other marketing process, deals with identifying the needs of the employee and developing a response to them in a way that will not only make them present their candidacy but also retain them in the company.
A constant shortage of workers creates a situation where every candidate has demands, desires and requests that were not there before.
The process of finding out and searching for the employees about the company is longer and more in-depth, and it has yielded websites that allow past, present and future employees the opportunity to leave an opinion about the employer that potential candidates are influenced by (such as Glassdoor, which leads this trend), which obliges the organizations to make changes in relation to employees and as a result in employer branding ."
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How do you do employer branding in all this chaos?
One of the biggest challenges in the marketing world is how to adapt the marketing strategy and message to a changing reality.
In the last three years, marketing people have had to deal with a global epidemic, which has changed our lifestyles, a gradual return to normality, and now the deterioration of the global economic situation, which is manifested both in inflation and in the fear of a recession and a slowdown in growth, as a result of which we hear about startups being closed and hundreds of employees being laid off in high-tech.
"Many companies seek to build an attractive employer branding for themselves, one that will be able to attract talented and talented candidates," says
Dr. Tali Thani-Harari
, PhD in branding as her professional website announces, "however, a very attractive employer branding creates very high expectations for the company.
In many cases, these expectations are shattered and lead to great disappointment for the new employees."
"It is true, in order to generate interest among high-quality potential candidates, you need to generate high expectations, but these expectations will have to meet the test of reality and if they are not adjusted, they will harm the company. Today's data shows an increase in the number of resignations and a decrease in the feeling of being connected to the organization. Against the background of these data, for employer branding There is a critical role not only in recruiting new quality employees, but also in retaining existing employees and especially in increasing the employees' sense of organizational connectedness to the organization."
Aviv Weizman
, Head of Communications and Employer Branding at Natural Intelligence: "Employer branding is a task for times of peace as well as times of war. The job is challenging: to tell the outside world about what we do inside in order to bring them to us. It must be reliable, authentic, and at eye level . If we sell promises and false representations, the candidate will come in and see that there is a gap between the promise and reality, and this is devastating for any organization."
Cedar foundation
, Director of Employee Experience, Diversity, Inclusion and Employer Branding at Sodastream shares: "There is a kind of public relations spin around "employer branding". We see many companies in the field that try to compete with each other by imitating other companies instead of showing their truth. We have to remember that in the end a candidate will arrive or a candidate and in a short time they will see the truth. That is why it is important for us to share in an authentic and inspiring way our real strengths, what actually takes place in the field, and not what we think candidates will want to hear. The role of employer branding is to make sure that what the candidates see from their side reflects correctly what takes place in the company. If this does not happen, the candidates will form an incorrect image of the company, and this may harm not only the candidates but also the company itself."
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Keren Erez, Director of Employee Experience, Diversity and Inclusion and Employer Branding at SodaStream (Photo: SodaStream)
Miri Bar Natan,
employer branding and global internal communications at Tabula: "We started investing in employer branding in 2016. At that time, we were a well-known startup in the fields of media but less well-known in the technology, artificial intelligence, and machine learning areas on which our recommendation engine is based. After an in-depth study of how the company is perceived, we realized This is a branding problem for the technological audience that we wanted to recruit. After focused work with the technological audience in Israel and after seeing how much the investment yields results, we decided to expand the field of employer branding and internal communication to all our offices in the world."
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Miri Bar Natan, employer branding and global internal communication at Taboola (Photo: Taboola)
Gil Rosen
, VP of Marketing at Amdocs: "Employee turnover is very high in all companies.
People come to work for a year or a year and a half, and as soon as they receive a higher offer, they jump on it.
One of the goals of employer branding is to lower this rate.
You want them to stay and do great and important things - both for the company and for their careers - so one of our tasks is to talk to the existing employees.
" Whether it's Israeli companies like Check Point or international companies like Microsoft and Google.
So all together are growing, the sector is growing, and there is a lot of demand and not so much supply.
The high-tech field has become a place where you simply struggle for talent."
Gil Rosen, VP of Marketing at Amdocs. (Photo: Amdocs)
Reot Giladi
, Director of Marketing and Communications at Blender Financial Technologies: "We need to concentrate investment efforts on significant milestones for the company that are associated with the achievements and successes that the company has reached thanks to the employees and the team. The same gift, benefit or treat is important, but their timing and link to the important efforts being made are just as important. Of course, the operation and maintenance of the company's media assets, sharing of daily life, communication of business activity and its success and everything that allows employees or potential employees a true picture of the organization and being in it."
Stay tuned for the second article in the series: Who is responsible for employer branding, what is it supposed to contribute, and how much does it really cost the organization?
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