How Brand Strategy Impacts Recruiting

Video Transcript

Justin: So, Cheri, there are growth metrics, there are other ways to measure the success of a rebrand and the results to expect. But we’ve really seen in the last couple of years how important recruitment is, both from an employee standpoint and also on a member side as well. We’re in the middle of a rebrand with a large construction company. Talk about how our focus with them really is on recruiting new employees, new staff, and how we’ve helped them. 

Cheri: Sure. I know it’s a hot topic right now, too, the idea of finding team members and retaining team members in this environment and in the culture and society that we’re in right now. And rebranding and bringing your authenticity and your brand to life are important. Helping not just an ideal member or an ideal client align with your service or your product. But having an ideal recruit, an ideal team member, align with your company is just as important, and it’s part of the same work. It’s part of really diving into your brand strategy and bringing that to the surface. Because in the same way that an ideal prospect, an ideal client, has more information about you now before they ever meet you or talk to anyone on your team, they can find out more information about you now than they ever could in the past.

The same thing is true of a potential teammate, somebody that you want to bring on. So to have that alignment happen faster, with more clarity and more alignment, is really important now more than ever.

Justin: So this is where that consistency also is so important, because your social channels – your website, print collateral, how you answer the phone – all these different things all add up. And the consumer is very savvy, and they can pick up on “Oh, that’s not true. What they’re saying isn’t really what I’m actually hearing.” So it’s important that and that’s where branding comes in, is for that consistency. So a potential employee can latch on and understand, like, “I get this company, and I want to be part of that.” 

And this group that we’re just working with, they know who that person is and they know the growth plan for that person. So it’s a long-term employee that they’re looking for. And we’re sharing that. 

Cheri: Yes. And they’re a great example because they are a privately held company, a family-owned company that’s been in business for four generations. So some of this history and thinking has evolved over time, too. They have built on their success. They really started with innovation and started in construction but in a smaller way. And think about how, over the past 100 years, our society and our culture have changed. They have changed along with it. And now their brand is matching that as well and is evolving to meet that and bring those messages to life so that they don’t look like an old, stale, 100-year-old company, but really bringing the evolution that has happened within their company and the forward-thinking that they have, bringing that to life so that not only their clients can see that, but their future team members can align with that, too.

Justin: And working internally with the team. So they know who they should be going after because they have almost 100 employees, so that’s 100 people times their network that can be reaching out to find that ideal next teammate that they want to be working with.

Cheri: Exactly. An ideal audience can mean a lot of different things. And that’s what we dive into with strategy first. It’s so important to be talking to that person, creating that avatar through research and through discovery. And that can mean a lot of things. Just as we’ve talked about today, that can mean clients and prospective clients, in terms of revenue or retaining revenue. That can mean recruits, in terms of bringing on new team members to grow your business. That can mean ideal members for an Association retaining or gaining new members.

But also, we had an Association client that we just talked to where that ideal is about: what’s the ideal engagement, what does that look like? So you have your ideal member, who already is a member and has been a member for a long time, but maybe has fallen off in terms of that engagement score. And what does ideal engagement look like? And how do we speak to that? That’s part of the rebrand process, too.

Justin: And just talking about it with everybody, like, what is that ideal journey? That ideal engagement, those touchpoints? Gets everybody thinking and talking, and that’s that alignment again, that happens. So conversations, everybody. They are so important.

Cheri: And success can look like a lot of different things. Sometimes it’s metrics. Sometimes it’s about defining your ideal, and then those metrics come into play afterward. But success can mean any or all of those things.

Justin: A while back, we had a family of clinics and took them through a big rebrand. Everything was moving great. We were about to go through “How are we going to launch this into the marketplace?” And I remember sitting around their boardroom going, we don’t have enough physicians. If we grow and get the patients we’re looking for, we don’t have enough physicians to actually treat the new patients. So we sort of retooled not a process, but what we are going to prioritize. And it turned into a physician recruitment plan, which was a series of videos and a series of tools that their staff and their team could use to go out and find those doctors alongside – they had a recruitment organization that was looking and bringing in prospective physicians. So this work helps in so many ways.