“Branding is a promise to your customer. Employer Branding is a promise to your current and future employees” – Kathryn Minshew
In a space where startups are booming and every company is on the look-out for the best talent, there has become a significant need for each company to construct its own brand. This is where employer brand comes into place. Employer branding is a term that has significantly caught on and has been the “it” subject in the industry for the last ten years. It is essentially an umbrella term that showcases an organization’s culture, values and most essentially, its people.
Attract the best talent the industry has to offer:
Why is it so essential to create an employer brand? When you have most of your potential hires on social media, why not leverage it? Employees are now on the lookout for something more than just great benefits or a great compensation, they are looking for the right culture fit.
When you call out your culture and your values, showcase what you stand for and primarily what your employees feel, you are immediately attracting the right kind of genius for your culture.
InMobi’s boot strapped Employer branding journey:
At InMobi, we believe that a strong employer brand is a powerful business tool that enables us to link InMobi’s culture, values, philosophy and people practices to our overall corporate brand. InMobi is widely appreciated for its disruptive people practices and innovation, but what lies at our core is our people, InMobians are always first.
The very first thing we did to build our brand from scratch is to move the accountability of Employer Branding from the marketing department to HR.
We also aimed at taking a fresh approach when it comes to conveying what makes InMobi different. To target this goal differently, we got on board the team – two interns! With their diverse and fresh perspective of the company, we started putting out content that attracted our target audience of candidates we were on the look-out for.
The first step was to build out career handles on Facebook and Twitter. We started posting blogs that revolved around all things InMobi. We created fresh content in terms of quirky, gender neutral job description posters, blogs about the culture, showcasing the InMobi mafia (InMobians who launched successful startups) and pictures and videos of a regular day at InMobi.
Audience on social media tend to scroll through their feed very quickly and tend to skip heavy worded content. By making our material snackable, we were able to create a massive impact. InMobi is now known for our stellar achievement in creating a powerful employer brand.
Meet our 900+ talent scouts:
The culture at InMobi revolves around our people. We make sure that they are given the right kind of environment that enables them to perform the 10x they are capable of. So, when it comes to talking about our philosophy and culture, why not get InMobians on board with us!
All the content that goes up on our page features more than 20% of our workforce.
Rather than just getting our recruitment team to share content on our culture, we leveraged our people to be our talent scouts. When an employee shares content related to their company, it shows that our people vouch for the practices we talk about. This in turn directly attracts talent in their network to come work for us.
The success of the employer brand we have been able to create was possible due to our employees becoming advocates for the company.
Go-to tools:
There are many tools available in abundance to help take your employer brand to greater heights.
1. Design buddies
With various content available on social media, you need to be able to create posts that can grab attention. Another important factor to keep in mind while running an employer brand is- create relevant and timely content. This is where we bring in our quick design buddies. Although we use Photoshop for our heavy duty designing, tools like Canva and Pablo by buffer help us create quick posters and collages that can be edited in less than 15 minutes, up and ready to go on your pages.
2. Referral 3.0
When you want to get your employees to bring in the right kind of talent, you need to be able to keep them engaged with the right programs. Making sure you have a great referral program is essential. InMobi teamed up with Ripple Hire, a platform that gamifies employee referrals, to reconstruct a stellar referral program for InMobians.
The benefits are- InMobians can now directly share open positions on their social media handles through our career pages and can choose the kind of reward they want!
3. Share share share
With various social media handles for InMobi, InMobians needed a one stop platform where they could connect all their profiles and share posts accordingly. We were in dire need of a user-friendly platform that could enable them to access a bucket of posts that were easily available and that was just a click away to make them InMobi’s advocates!
This can be achieved through employee advocacy platforms like Hootsuite or Smarp. We decided to get some of the best minds to start using their grey cells and created our own inhouse platform- Truesharer. With features like a leaderboard and a user-friendly interface, we were able to gamify advocacy.
4. Webpage for all things InMobi
We created our talent branding page- startup.inmobi.com, a one stop platform where we put together blogs and videos on our culture and practices. This becomes extremely useful when you want to give current and future employees a glimpse of what we do at InMobi.
Boost in social recruitment:
Inmobi’s recruitment team consists of 8 stellar performers who hire for the company globally! Social recruitment is a factor that has helped them massively. As our employer brand caught on, our recruitment team was directly approached by candidates for job opportunities. It enabled a company such as ours which is completely B2B, to be known as an organization that is a Great Place to Work. Candidates that interviewed with us had a better understanding of the business, their role and the culture at InMobi. We
got an immediate 2X surge in the number of applications that came in through our careers page. Most importantly InMobians internally were pumped to talk about our culture.
Our success in creating an employer brand didn’t go unnoticed. Awards from People matters, Asia Recruitment Awards and Nasscom cemented our position as a top-notch employer brand that helps in hiring the right fit for our culture.
If you believe you have the best culture the industry has to offer, a culture where your employees can grow, with the right tools and a good dose of creativity, you can create a great employer brand.
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Namita Vyas is Head of Talent Acquisition & HR Business partner for InMobi India Sales org and has previously worked with companies like Yahoo, Sapient and Randstad. With 12 years of Industry experience, an accomplished HR Leader with an eye to build top-tier product, design, Engineering/technical & Sales/BD teams for leading, high-growth product companies and employs current human capital practices that attract & retain high potential talent. A proud Diversity & Inclusion Leader who is responsible for bringing a workforce diversity balance & inclusion on the floor.
Namita has been Recognized as one of the India’s top 10 social Recruiters by LinkedIn and a winner of –
- Asia Recruitment Awards 2016 – Best in Employer Brand Development ,
- People-matters TA Legaue Awards – Best in Social Hiring
- Asia Recruitment Awards 2017– Best In-house Talent Acquisition team
She is also a recipient of ” Women Super Achiever” Award by World HRD congress and ” Circle of excellence award” by PeepalConsulting for being one of the Top 25 Women who ” made a difference” in TA in India.
Maithreyi is Talent Branding Associate at InMobi for the past two years. A graduate in Communication & Media studies, she is a key member of InMobi talent branding team, she had contributed towards various articles and managed the talent branding from content to presentation on various platforms efficiently