The 2023 RAD Awards will take place in January, celebrating the best of the best in the recruitment advertising industry. Here we profile the employers and agencies shortlisted for the Employer Brand (International) Award.
AB InBev: Cheers to Dreaming Big – MSL UKÂ
Brewing company AB InBev’s existing employer brand ‘Challenge Accepted’, had begun to feel to masculine. MSL wanted to create an employer value proposition that held true to the needs of 170,000 employees in the new, post-pandemic world.
Using its BeliefStack technology and looking at previous campaigns and focus groups, MSL identified the primary beliefs of its three key audiences: students, factory workers and specialists. It discovered that they were motivated by supportive and inclusive values.
Cheers to Dreaming Big brings together the company’s ambitious culture but also the notion of doing things together as a team. The launch involved daily ‘activations’ such as encouraging employees to send a colleague a digital ‘cheers’, sharing playlists or getting together for a photo for the virtual photo wall. A launch toolkit included downloadable assets for employees to share.
Almost 3,500 graduates and undergraduates visited the company at the Bright Network Festival, with 51% of them female and 20% from black and ethnic minority backgrounds. Month-on-month statistics showed a 152% increase in the level of engagement and creations using the new branding. There was a 69% increase in job applications the month after launch, resulting in more than 2,500 applications.
Diageo – Comprend
Drinks giant Diageo wanted to engage candidates in new and innovative ways, making itself approachable and relatable while highlighting the strengths of its diverse and supportive culture.
Comprend worked with Diageo to look at its previous EVP, audit competitor content, launch an employee survey and review external research on the talent landscape. It discovered that its brand ‘character is everything’ did not translate well across markets and languages. The new brand needed to reflect that people value work-life balance, are from diverse backgrounds and see wellbeing as a priority.
Book a table at the RADs
Winners will be announced on 26 January at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London.
The new EVP, ‘Celebrating You’, focuses on the human side of the business, putting the candidate at the heart. It combines energetic photos of Diageo people, playful typography and positive colours with a warm tone of voice. Training was rolled out on visual identity and tone of voice and a resource toolkit was made available. There were also scheduled Q&A sessions.
The most recent HR employee survey shows that 84% find the new global employer brand easy to adapt to their local market. The same proportion think it is approachable and inclusive so appealing to diverse talent, and 68% feel they have the tools and support they need to apply the brand to their market or role.
Fidelity International – SMRS
Investment company Fidelity International wanted to develop an employer brand that would attract and retain talent in global markets, help it to become a great place to work, support growth and help it to deliver on its purpose. Through a global survey and discussions with 44 leaders, it came up with the concept of ‘Feel Fidelity’.
SMRS worked with Fidelity to create an on-brand yet distinctive look and messaging style, developing a global ambassador community to reflect the diversity of the business. It created guidelines outlining purpose, values, associated behaviours, the employee experience and its culture.
On launch, the message and imagery was broadcast widely in global offices, including videos, digital screens and interactive PDFs. The careers site and Glassdoor pages were updated to reflect the new branding. The core branding has since been tailored to specific regions so colleagues can share stories and user-generated content.
There have been 1,404 views of Fidelity’s launch article on its intranet and 107 comments on the CEO’s launch announcement. More than two-thirds of employees viewed the launch email and more than 12,000 have viewed brand-related topics on Yammer. Ambassadors’ posts receive significantly more likes on social media than other corporate posts.
Haleon: For Health. With Humanity – Havas People
In 2020, GSK decided to spin off its consumer healthcare division and create a new brand. This was the challenge for Havas People: to build an employer brand for a company that technically did not exist. It was also a unique opportunity to develop and define a brand shaped by the wants and needs of employees.
The campaign started with a discovery phase with stakeholders. This included an online community; aspirational interviews with leaders; an external survey of global professionals; a study of Gen Z motivations; workshops and knowledge sharing sessions.
The company was named as Haleon in February 2022 and Havas set about creating The Haleon Experience, a blueprint for the intended lived colleague experience. This included an ‘experience playbook’, video training modules and a launch communications guide. There were internal and external launch events with ready-made social assets. New joiners receive onboarding ‘animations’ to show they have just started.
The launch was successful both internally and externally, with 312 #HelloHaleon posts by colleagues on social channels and almost 23,500 visits to its careers site. There have been 1,267 applications made since the company launched and 519 views from external candidates collected.
Sanofi Play to Win – Symphony Talent
Global healthcare company Sanofi needed an employer brand that aligned with its new ‘Play to Win’ strategy, demonstrating its commitment to continuous improvement and positive change. Symphony Talent needed to incorporate Sanofi’s valued behaviours and align the new EVP to create a consistent internal and external experience.
Through research with 408 employees, external talent interviews, competitor research, discussions with senior leaders and an external survey, Symphony built an EVP that connects corporate and business brands with people at the centre. It needed to persuade people that healthcare would be an exciting change of career and convince those already in the sector to choose Sanofi over competitors.
It built the brand around four pillars: explore more, chase change, do right and make miracles. It developed a long-term training programme to help comms and engagement teams to embrace the tone of the new brand, supplemented with a new creative asset portal and visual identity.
It is still early days, but the new employer brand has been launched in 77 countries. More than 600 people have been trained in the brand, including in-depth sessions with 35 people on the engagement team.
SAP – Havas People
With 110,000 people across 140 locations, SAP aims to fill 20,000 roles annually. In 2020 it conducted research with a view to refreshing its EVP. Previous iterations had been communicated via standalone campaigns with little alignment to the candidate journey or local needs.
Adoption of the previous EVP had been in decline, leading to a new strategy for 2021/22 that would embed the brand across the candidate journey and still allow HR to promote it locally.
Sign up to our weekly round-up of HR news and guidance
Receive the Personnel Today Direct e-newsletter every Wednesday
The first step was to create a fresh visual identity, conveying what it means to ‘build breakthroughs’ at the company. Different talent groups in different countries want varying priorities from an employer, so an in-house team created 30 templates for different social media channels and audiences. There are now 98 global assets, and 32 countries have localised assets.
There have been 237 posts across 20 SAP employer accounts, with the best performing bringing SAP to life through videos and humorous storytelling. Eighteen employee stories have been added to the employee advocacy platform with a reach of 3,337,983. LifeAtSAP accounts for 16% of traffic to jobs and 37% of applications. A campaign to launch the new brand to critical talent groups drove 1,108,393 impressions and 5,476 applications. 58% of this audience were net new to SAP and by end of July 58 had been hired. Job boards now account for just 13% of qualified candidates, showing the impact of the EVP content on attracting talent.
