Employer branding is changing significantly and has been for some time now. Long gone are the days where a company can simply craft a consistent message – an employer value proposition – as it’s often called, and assume that will be enough. The prevalence of digital technologies and social media means that today’s employees can readily speak their minds and refer one another to jobs. As such, it is my belief that we have reached a point where we need to set employer branding free.
By this, I mean that in order to demonstrate the value of working for a company like Novo Nordisk, we must make a shift from telling to exemplifying, from speaking on behalf of our employees, to actually allowing them to be co-creators in our communication. A senior executive at Novo Nordisk once said, “Novo Nordisk is its people.” If our goal is to demonstrate the value of working for our company, then why not showcase these people? Effective employer branding requires a shift from employer to employee branding.
This shift, I would argue, is necessitated and powered by the opportunities we have with social media and technology, as well as the increasing demand for transparency -employers cannot say one thing and do another. Such a shift doesn’t mean that we forgo employer branding strategies, but rather that we root them in deep authenticity and take advantage of an empowering digital reality. If we can demonstrate, channel and amplify just some of the passion I see here at Novo Nordisk every day, then I think we will be successful.
In sum, people are attracted by people and opportunities they can readily see themselves in, not by companies. At Novo Nordisk, we have a unifying purpose of ‘driving change to defeat diabetes and other serious chronic diseases’ – and I think this is a main driver for many current and prospective employees, but we’re also a company made up of a variety of different individual and professional passions. It is our job to depict all of this. We want to showcase and celebrate all the nerdy and exciting individual passions that constitute our overall value proposition of life-changing careers.
Over the last couple of years we have been pushing the digital agenda and revamped our employer brand, trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. In this digital sphere, it’s important to dive in and learn along the way. The goal is agility in an anything but linear environment, but also focusing our efforts on the things that works well. As such, we’ve zoomed in on couple of forms of social media, in particular LinkedIn and Facebook. There we’ve turned our attention to promoting and sharing thought leadership and facilitating the spread of great stories from our employees. In short, our goal is to make employees central in our communication and empower them, as ambassadors, to tell the story of Novo Nordisk. This marks a new wave of employer branding, powered by answering one simple question: what would it be like working for Novo Nordisk?