Before you roll your eyes and remember how someone on LinkedIn wrote that employer branding is just another way to deceive employees, let’s try to break that stigma together and agree on what employer branding actually is. And perhaps more importantly for you – what employer branding is in gaming and how it works in practice.
To make it easier for you to believe me, it’s polite to get to know each other first, isn’t it? I’m Iva, a Senior Employer Branding Specialist at Smallpdf Company, but also a loyal member, friend and author of the Empple portal, which focuses on the development and education of the employer branding community in Serbia.
“An employer branding team is the one that forces you to go on team building weekends so that nice photos can be taken to attract new employees who will also be forced to go on team building weekends.”
Yes and no, to be fair. Yes, we’re the team that thinks about how to better connect the team, but no, if we’re doing our job well, we’re not the team that forces people to spend their free time socializing with the people they work with. Unless they really insist on it, then we help them out.
The essence of our job is completely different – our goal is to support the employer to have a motivated team at all times, with whom they will share values and common goals, for that team to be happy in their workplace, which means they don’t have to worry about anything other than their job and goals, but also to help that image go beyond the company’s framework and draw the attention of someone who is looking for a job that there are good places to work and that this might be the one that will help them develop in the direction they want.
I know, I know, it sounds like a fairy tale. But nobody said this job is easy. Daily, we collaborate with human resources experts who provide us with significant insights into the demands and interests of candidates, whether our employees are satisfied, motivated and engaged in their workplace, and we help them examine that in detail. Then, with colleagues from Marketing, we create a strategy for internal and external communication that will help our message primarily be understood and then accepted by all relevant target groups – in this case, our employees, but also our candidates.
The third team we are constantly in touch with is Management – because everything falls apart if Team Managers, as well as their Managers, are not sending the same message as we are and create an organizational culture that supports it.
Often much more creative than in any other, believe me. Why? Because gaming requires creativity – from Managers, employees, and certainly from us – the Employer Branding team.
The principle is more or less the same, but the finesse is what makes it different. The first steps in setting up the strategy always start with defining the target group. So, we’ll first explore who we’re talking to, based on which we’ll decide what tone of communication to choose and how to approach that group of people. Also, after understanding the audience, we’ll be able to conclude where they “hang out,” or on which channels we can contact them. For example, we’ll look for Engineers on GitHub, but gamers and their audience are much more often on Discord.
After that, we’ll explore the culture of our organization and the values we have, making it easier for us to reach candidates who share those values with us.
What follows is EVP, measuring eNPS and cNPS, and many other abbreviations that I won’t bother you with now, but we can talk about it if you want!
To talk to people. The essence of everything in our job is that it can be very simple, only if we listen to the data that comes to us from people, their feedback, needs, comments and suggestions. Of course, we won’t adopt every suggestion – in that case, we would all work from home, have a team of masseurs visiting us daily, a chef coming to our home address during breaks and that famous “big slide with a small slide at the end leading into a pool full of chocolate.” We listen to meaningful suggestions that we can apply and that are in line with the established values.
If we complicate things, copy recipes from other companies and try to solve motivation problems by introducing table football – that job becomes much harder because there is no universal solution for every company.
It’s great if you have marketing experience because you’ll be able to implement some ideas, concepts and formats that should resonate with your audience more easily. But it’s not terrible if you don’t because you’ll collaborate a lot with Marketing to align the company’s and employer’s brand.
It’s also great if you have HR experience because you’ll better understand metrics, know the weaknesses of the HR team and have a better idea of how to support them, but again – no problem if you don’t because you’ll collaborate with them a lot, so you’ll quickly learn their language.
I won’t show you pictures because, contrary to the famous saying, they don’t tell a thousand words like a good initiative can. So I’ll share one with you that we’re particularly proud of.
Last year, we introduced 16 weeks of paid leave for all new dads on our team. That’s four months! Why? Because we have many Engineers who are at the age when they become parents and it doesn’t benefit them or us if they burn out both at work and at home, worried whether the new mom has her hands full, or on the other hand, whether their team can achieve all the planned goals.
So – we listened to our people and implemented a policy to help them fulfill their full roles in the time provided – both the role of a dad and the role of a colleague.
This is a wonderful job if you do it from the heart!
I hope I’ve encouraged you to consider a career in employer branding. You’ll learn a lot, love people, become an Ambassador for your company and, more importantly – for the culture you’ve built. And in the gaming world, that actually means a lot of creativity and daily enjoyment. You can do it!
