Four cases of the HR brand solving real business problems

Nikita Guk is the founder of GIMZ.

Working with an HR brand is not about creating an abstract identity, logo, or beautiful social media pages.

First and foremost, this is the solution to specific business problems like retaining key employees, attracting experienced specialists, finding partners, or exploring new directions for portfolio diversification.

This is where business owners usually ask the same question: how can an HR brand help the company, especially since branding agencies rarely give clear deadlines or criteria?

To answer this, we’ll take a look at several real cases where companies managed to meet their needs as a result of working on the brand.

Case #1. Staffing issues due to negative reviews

A tech company has experienced rapid growth - the list of projects expanded, and so did the team and brand awareness, but staff turnover has increased.

The number of negative reviews on the Internet increased, and employees stopped feeling engaged.

At first glance, there was a competitive salary (in USD, which was also a plus), a pleasant benefits package, and a flexible work schedule that didn’t require the employees to work at a specific location. The people, however, were still unhappy.

It was necessary to analyse EVP and internal communications, interview employees in different positions, and find the problem.

The issue turned out to be quite simple - the team lacked feedback from department heads and the company's management. The 1:1 syncs and weekly team meetings weren’t enough to solve the problem.

People had a lot of overarching questions that no one answered: where is the company heading, what are its priorities, prospects for the future, and simply how valuable is the work and personal contribution of each team member? In general, it felt like they were working in a bunker.

Solution

First of all, we organised internal quarterly presentations where company managers spoke in detail about the strategy, noted successes and milestones, shared the roadmap status, analysed successful cases, announced new projects, and spotlighted the merits of the teams.

To make presentations effective, we separately worked out the process of preparing speakers.

At this training, managers were comprehensively taught public speaking - what to say and how to say it (sometimes down to the wording if the topic is very delicate), how to highlight the key points of the report and have the audience’s full attention, how to answer tricky questions, work with negative feedback, and so on.

All this laid the foundation for presentations and subsequently came in handy for speaking at external specialised conferences.

We also launched a monthly internal newsletter with regular columns. It focused on projects, workflows, and information that didn’t fit into the timing of the quarterly presentation. Its main (but not the only) purpose was to keep employees up to date with what was happening in the company in terms of business and work processes.

In addition, the newsletter introduced the team to new employees and announced benefits, work schedules for the holidays, and much more. In fact, it has become a regular internal magazine. 

As a result, employees began to more specifically understand how their work affects the success of the company and its products. It also became an additional motivational tool.To make the onboarding experience more comfortable for new team members, we structured all information about the company and put it into a single internal knowledge base.

We rewrote and added dozens of guides and articles for employees: how to get sick leave, take a vacation when salary is paid, how to use benefits and much more.

As a result, the employees got their own Wikipedia with answers to almost any questions about the company, from its history to an archive with video recordings of previous presentations.

The database was constantly updated with fresh information that could be useful for preparing a report or meeting with partners - product metrics, links to company projects, addresses and contacts, and so on. Among other things, it contained detailed workflows and training guides for each department of the company.

Tip: Don't make your presentation and newsletter look like a financial report - no one likes bureaucracy, templates, and cookie-cutter replies. Structure the information, highlight the main points, focus on what’s important, and back everything up with facts. Successfully launched a project? Insert graphs with metrics. Started working on a new prototype? Share concepts or a roadmap. Invested in a new team? Show the cool things it does.

In addition to keeping your staff informed, you can increase loyalty with simpler and more fun things - host an esports tournament, arrange a movie night in the office, or start a tradition of ordering pizza once a month on Thursdays. It works.

The second stage was to build the external brand so that anyone who googled the name could learn about the company’s life, internal processes, technology stack, and expertise. To do this, we have:

• Set up a regular release of useful articles on behalf of the company employees and assembled an internal editorial staff of more than 10 authors who had never written before. All from scratch;

• Held a large-scale online hackathon for the target audience with cash prizes. The numbers are as follows: 5 million people total coverage, 450+ submitted projects, and 300+ user-generated posts and articles;

• Completely relaunched the company website and social media pages with a new design to match the trends and tailored the content to the specifics of the target audience.

Results

Internal comms have become more transparent. Management started to speak openly with the team, share the plans, celebrate project successes and sort out mistakes. About 90% of employees consistently attended quarterly presentations, and 75% read every newsletter.

Externally, the situation has also improved. Any point of introduction to the company created a good impression for the candidates, both visually and in terms of the good that it brings to the industry.

Within a few months, people started saying they “learned about the company because of the content it shares” during the interviews.

Case #2. Candidates are ignoring recruiters because the company is unknown

Here’s what we had: a little-known startup, a project with a lot of money invested in it, and the problem with hiring specialists for the team to develop the said project.

Even though the working conditions were excellent, the few candidates the company had treated it with distrust. It’s understandable - the company seemed to appear out of nowhere, offering a high salary, and an office in the city center, but didn’t share a single thing about its background. It looked suspicious.

So, our main goal was to increase brand awareness.

Solution

Comprehensive work has begun. The company started traveling to specialised conferences, round tables, and developer meetups. First as participants, then with their own booth, sponsorships, and presentations.

We launched a corporate blog where employees shared their experiences, case studies, and useful industry guides. It went on to become one of the biggest blogs about development, with job seekers coming in for interviews because they liked the products, the methods used, the technology, and the workflow within the team.

Sometimes, you didn’t have to tell anything about the company at all - the candidates already knew everything from the blog posts.

Later, the goals and methods for working with the brand changed. The problem with hiring has become irrelevant a long time ago, the company got famous and didn’t need active promotion. It gave us space to safely experiment with new ideas:

• The company hosted several meetups for hundreds of developers;

• Employees spoke at many conferences around the world: in the USA, Europe, and Asia;

• We launched a special training project for developers with a total coverage of 3.5 million people;

• The company launched a podcast that gained 300,000 listens in the first year;

• And other activities.

Results

The company now has an HR brand that is widely known among industry experts. Even after all activities end, it will be able to exist autonomously for several years thanks to positive feedback from current and former employees.

Case #3. The company’s non-serious reputation

Another situation: a large tech company uses a data-driven approach, machine learning, neural networks, and a generally strong technical base for its product, but cool experienced specialists decline the interviews.

It turned out that the candidates were put off by the company's entertainment products - from the outside perspective it seemed like there were no interesting technologies behind them and there was nothing to do on the backend at all, which actually wasn’t the case.

Solution

We needed to change the positioning, as the product was really cool and interesting, and tell the industry about it. Naturally, it led to another problem - the company was sure that they had nothing to share externally, since all serious articles had already been written, and there were no uncharted topics. One could call it a classic case of denial, which is easily solvable.

And here's what we did: we singled out key employees, conducted several informal calls, and discussed interesting cases and difficult tasks encountered by the staff (any company has those). Based on this, we wrote articles, placed focal points, structured everything, encouraged people to openly admit mistakes, and so on.

Tip: take the load off the employee as much as possible. Don’t bombard them with requests to write an article. Most likely they’ve never written something like this before and don’t know where to start. Ideally, you should find an experienced editor who will help turn the expertise into an article useful for the industry.

Results

The company stopped positioning itself as a creator of entertainment products - the focus shifted to technology, architecture, and tools, leaving out the final product, which was really awesome.

As a result, even the most skeptical applicants changed their minds after learning the development details and looking at the project from a different angle.

After a year of working with an external brand, caustic and incredulous comments have virtually disappeared, and the list of potential candidates grew with strong specialists who have changed their minds thanks to the company's guides and technical materials.

Case #4. Finding partners for cooperation and investment

An international company was looking for teams to invest in and diversify its portfolio. It offered experience, resources, and money and asked partners to bring their fresh ideas and vision to the board.

The problem is that small teams are sceptical about this kind of partnership - there’s a long-standing fear that a large company will impose its vision onto them or, even worse, cheat and steal ideas.

The task was to break stereotypes and destroy myths about working with an investor.

Solution

Together with teams that have long and successfully collaborated with the company, we released a series of materials for various business media outlets such as VentureBeat, Forbes, PocketGamer.biz, and others

We described real first-hand experiences of working with an investor in detail and showed iterative improvements of products with all metrics. Clear and to the point. Thanks to the stories of real people, we managed to tell more about the nuances of partnership and remove potential fears.

Tip: You don’t need to invent stuff to sugarcoat the terms of the partnership. In most cases, talking with colleagues and partners is enough. They can help you see the benefits you didn’t even think about. Different points of view are cool.

To search for new talent and teams, we organised an online hackathon with cash prizes. It was done properly, with a period allocated to warming up the target audience, media support, and an emphasis on the company that organised the event. Here's what we did:

• Developed the overall visual style and landing page for the event, which was visited more than 50 thousand times;

• Wrote original articles to help prepare and involve potential participants, which were viewed more than 100 thousand times in total;

• Held a QA session with industry experts and the hackathon jury, and gave feedback on the participants' projects;

• Final numbers: 4 million people total coverage, 300 submitted projects, and 70 user-generated posts and articles.

Results

The stories about the experience of working with an investor shared by real people made it possible to shed more light on the nuances of partnership and remove potential fears.

Thanks to the hackathon, the company raised brand awareness and made the HR contact list longer, and found developers to invest in.

Final thoughts

Companies often have similar problems, and the solutions may seem similar too. But only at first. When working with an HR brand, you’ll have to forget about standard solutions.

Two articles on a similar topic will end up being different depending on the input - the situation on the market, the habits of the audience of a particular site, business goals, and so on. This will affect the style, focal points, and wording.

At the same time, you need to calculate the risks a few steps ahead in any situation and be ready to work with negative feedback if something suddenly goes wrong. The likelihood of failure will decrease if you remember that the content is not a promotional brochure and should be interesting to the target audience.

With hackathons or other special projects, the story is similar. Keep in mind that not every participant necessarily wants to win: some came for the experience, and some hoped to get feedback or get a job.

Any target audience is worth working with. After all, even the people who lost can speak positively about the project. All you need to do is stay in touch and share useful content with the participants during the event and give everyone your attention and feedback when it ends.