The employer brand, the most powerful lever of engagement for companies

Under increasing pressure and obligation, employer and corporate brands have become increasingly compartmentalized. On the one hand, the corporate brand is built around a raison d’être, promoting its mission and evidence. On the other, the employer brand is often seen as a separate entity, dedicated to recruitment.

Yet treating them separately undermines their coherence and effectiveness. 67% of young graduates indicate that the raison d’être could be a lever for engagement. This testifies to talent’s interest in corporate strategy and identity, both in the recruitment phase and in day-to-day corporate culture.

Employer branding is all too often reduced to a recruitment or internal communications lever.

Yet it feeds corporate ambition and performance through talent loyalty and commitment. But what do we mean by “quality of engagement”? We have identified three types of commitment:

• Human commitment through alignment with values and raison d’être. The company emotionally involves its employees, projecting them in their contribution to society. They become ambassadors, contributing to the company’s reputation.
• Commitment to expertise by projecting prospects for development and learning… Promoting the company’s business lines enables other stakeholders to appreciate the breadth of the Group’s expertise.
• Moral commitment by actively contributing to social and environmental causes. The Group must provide its teams with concrete solutions that enable them to get involved.

Two cases caught our attention:

The first is that of the BNP Paribas Group, which is rehumanizing the banking institution in an image and recruitment campaign called #unexpectedjobs. In the campaign’s visuals, the Group shows a different job on each one, explained in simple words. These visuals show the breadth of the missions of the banking professions, which go beyond the “simple banker”. This deconstructs the cold, simplistic image of banking and its professions.

The second is the Veolia Group, which has federated its employees into a committed community, whose members are called “ressourceurs”. See here

These teams embody and convey the Group’s mission to meet the challenges of ecological transformation. Each team member explains how his or her job and personality enable him or her to contribute to this global mission.

At Dusens, our ambition is to make the employer brand a lever of commitment for the company. To achieve this, we need to unite talents by demonstrating their positive contributions to the company and to society. The quality of a talent’s commitment to a company depends on explaining the objective usefulness of each person’s mission, at every level of the chain, showing that each link is essential.