One of the biggest employer brand challenges is in getting recruiting teams to help carry the brand message out to candidates. They might complain about it being "idea of the month" or not understand how building a strong brand makes their lives easier. All they see is change. Firefish has a nice intro on how to work with getting recruiters on your side. Aside from flattery and giving them a strong sales pitch, I suggest the biggest impact comes from giving them something for free. Find one pain point they have that you can "own" under the banner of employer branding (job postings, social content, videos, a library of outreach InMails, etc). Pick your favorite recruiters and give your gift away for free. Then let those recruiters tell the other recruiters how effective the new thing was. Those recruiters will ask for your help, and once you've given them a few gifts, they will be willing to play your game with a far more open mind.

Need to ask for budget? Right now, many companies are shutting down anything without a clear ROI (meaning: brand marketing is going dark to make room for more "butts in seats" pushes). So here's some data that shows that consumers still want brand marketing to help answer their "bigger" questions. It's an easy leap to say that candidates already know how to find the jobs, but they will likely have "bigger" questions around the brand they need answered before they will ever think of applying.

Employer brand is still seen purely through the lens of "filling the funnel" at too many companies. And while EB should be showing it own impact across every aspect of what the business does, it will always need to remember that until it fills the funnel, other things can't get done. To that end, here's a great white paper ATAP put together on creating, executing and managing a talent attraction strategy.

If you are looking for ideas on how to improve your employer brand marketing, here is a laundry list of great projects to consider. Allow me to point out that they list "improving your search rankings" and that isn't a project I hear EB'ers talk about much. Do you spend any thought/time at all to making your job postings pop up higher on job boards and Google? Maybe you should.

How to run a grassroots marketing campaign. Good EB is very much a grassroots marketing problem.