Getting Employer Branding right in China – 5 tips

Attracting and retaining talent in China is one of the biggest challenges here. Anyone in HR or recruiting is well used to receiving resumes where the candidate has spent exactly 1 year at each company, rotating and changing jobs every season.

Multinationals know that a strong Employer Value Proposition (EVP) and Employer Branding will help their company stand out and attract talent. Here are a few things to watch out for from our experience on making Employer Branding succeed in China: 

1. Make sure your EVP actually matches what you have to offer, and is not just a fancy sentence or meaningless poster. If it mentions “for the glory of the people” that is a hint you might want to rethink it.
2. Was your EVP truly localized with China in mind or is it just a global translation? Does it resonate locally? You should test this thoroughly and work on it with input from all stakeholders: managers, HR, communications, employees and job seekers.
3. Are the employer values communicated throughout the organization? In a recent study more than half of the CEOs across a broad reach of industries did not know that their own company had an EVP. We call this kind of alignment Strategy Fluency TM . Is there a program setup to teach the EVP and cascade the information to different departments?
4. Is there a set of templates and rules to follow for internal communications materials? We’ve seen a lot of “freestyling” here in China with every department developing their own newsletters, posters and WeChat social media accounts – all with different styles, fonts, graphics and images. It makes for a confusing mess.
5. EVPs benefit the bottom line. Companies without a strong EVP are more likely to have to pay a premium to attract talent. You can make this case when the financial controllers start to question the worthiness of the program. This is especially true in China where we often see HR departments starved of funding that is outside of pure channel recruitment.

The best way to succeed with your EVP is to develop a strong local version that actually means something – without losing all of the advantages you have built from the global headquarters.

At the end of the day all of this should make your company sound like a great place to work, and truly attract the types of people that will thrive in your organization and help it succeed.

Contact Brandigo to find out more about how we help organizations develop EVP and internal communication programs through our proven methodology and talented team!New Paragraph