New Employer Brand Model, New Opportunities

Lovisa Öhnell - Global Director of Research and Consulting, Universum

As much as I love to immerse myself in statistics, even I admit that research data sometimes is difficult to present in an understandable manner. And let’s face it – statistics are only persuasive if people actually understand them! I am therefore very proud to introduce Universum’s new brand positioning model.

By Lovisa Öhnell

Universum evaluates employer brands using 40 attributes such as employer reputation, job characteristics, people/culture and remuneration/advancement. Whereas all 40 are important for a comprehensive overview of your employer brand, presenting the results of so many evaluation points quickly gets complicated.

To simplify matters, Universum has developed a model that uses clustering, group headlines and heat maps to illustrate the results.

Mapping Your Employer Branding Progress

One major advantage of this is that you can visualize both your own position and what students want from an employer. This can then be compared with your competitors, as well as with the industry as a whole. Thus, you can more easily determine your desired brand position. You can show – and explain to your managers – that if you reposition your employer brand, the pool of potential candidates will increase. In short, this new approach will illustrate the value of the employer branding work that you do.

Clustering your Employer Brand Attributes

First, we take the results for the 40 attributes and distribute them around a circle. The more closely related they are, the closer they are to one another. Then we group them into more easily understood categories.

For example, attributes such as Clear Path for Advancement, Leaders who Support Development and Good Possibilities for Promotion, are grouped under High Responsibility and Career Progression. Then, we use a heat map to show the distribution of the responses. With this overlay of circles, what once took a large number of graphs to show, now only takes one or two.

Out with the old, in with the new Employer Branding model

This model is just being introduced, but we can already see some interesting strategic implications. For example, we can see how closely the competitors are clustered within certain industries, and to deal with this you have two options. Either, you can embrace the similarities and aim to be the best in the industry.

Examples of companies that use this strategy are Goldman Sachs and Microsoft. They are associated with exactly the same things as other companies in their industries, and even more strongly so! If a candidate is interested in that particular sector, they will automatically consider these companies.

The other option is to break away from the pack, focusing on attributes that will differentiate you from the typical player in the industry. This approach is more difficult, but can work extremely well. Just look at Google and Apple. Apple, for example, is seen more as a marketing company than an IT company, and Google is strongly associated with employee benefits and work-life balance, which is not typical in the rest of the IT field.

Moving forward, we see great potential for using this model to understand who you really want to attract. By mapping your high performing employees, and creating a heat map of their preferences, you can understand how to position your brand to attract more of the same. There are exciting times ahead, and I hope to work with many of you, conquering new frontiers with this new model.

Universum's Brand Positioning Model - click on image to see full size

About Lovisa Öhnell

Global Director of Research and Consulting, Universum

Lovisa has a background as a management consultant with McKinsey & Co. As the global director of research and consulting, she is responsible for the 30 talent surveys conducted annually and Universum’s consulting business that serves global clients in the areas of: EVP development, employer brand strategy and communication strategy.