We’ve all heard the headlines: There’s a labor shortage in the US. Industries from health, to hospitality, to construction are struggling to find workers.

It’s an insincere way of framing what is actually a shortage of employers worth working for. The eye-opening revelations we’ve seen during the pandemic about labor – the collective power of essential workers, the possibilities of flexible working environments – combined with a stagnant federal minimum wage and rising costs of living, have employees seeking better.

So let’s say your company is well aware of this and has already done the work of addressing worker needs. You have a better than average salary. You offer work-life balance and benefits for your employees’ full range of human needs from health to education to family. Maybe you’ve even adopted “Focus Fridays” (like us) or a 4-day work week. Most importantly, you offer work with purpose. Now the question becomes, in a competitive labor market, how does a purposeful company build its brand to attract and retain talent?

From our work building employee-facing brands and purpose platforms for companies in the tech, education, retail, and transportation industries, we’ve learned that any effective talent brand should follow four principles.

4 Principles for Building a Breakthrough Employee Brand

1. Honor Human Aspirations

A job should be more than a paycheck; people want to feel like they are doing work with a purpose that aligns with their personal values and ambitions. Any solid branding exercise should reveal the company’s purpose beyond business as usual. When done right, it should mirror the human aspirations of all stakeholders and give employees something to rally around.

So when developing a brand strategy, it’s a good practice to listen to current employees along with company leadership and customers. The people within the company know it better than anyone.

When BBMG built a campaign to help the nonprofit Urban Teachers attract aspiring educators, we started by speaking with their student teachers to learn about what motivates them. These are folks who have seen or experienced racism and injustice in education and want to change a generation and challenge the system. Their stories directly inspired the campaign idea and expression (the illustrations are of real teachers in their program) which soon saw recruitment up 60% compared to the previous year.

2. Find the Common Ground

Staying “on brand” doesn’t mean saying the same thing to every audience, but there should be connective tissue. Building a strong brand strategy as the foundation for all communications will allow you to flex and adapt the brand messaging whether you’re speaking to talent, to investors, to customers, or to the general public.

The core values of the company that are codified in the brand strategy should be connected to team norms and ways of working together. When BBMG helped the education tech company Cengage reimagine their brand strategy, it was rooted in the insight that their textbook and digital learning tools help ambitious students be unstoppable in the face of systemic barriers that may work to hold them back. That unstoppable spirit also manifested in the brand work we developed to help them attract and retain tech talent – a message aimed at “trailblazers” who want to challenge the system and create what’s next. Following the rebrand, Cengage was named one of Glassdoor’s 2019 Best Places to Work.

3. Design for Emotional Connection

Compelling brands are emotional brands, and this holds true when branding for talent. Brands that translate aspirations, needs and desires into a message, image and experience make a powerful emotional connection which can help a company stand out in a tight labor market.

The trucking company aifleet is, at its core, a tech start-up with AI software that makes routes and dispatching more efficient – a win for drivers, shippers, and the environment in an industry rife with problems. When they came to BBMG they had the clean but sterile look of a tech company – cool colors and images of machinery, but no photos of people. Yet we found them to be a very caring, super-human company – a tight knit group of people who have each other’s backs. In fact the happiness of truckers is at the very heart of the company’s strategy.

We knew we needed to amp up the humanity in the brand to match the humanity of the business. So we shifted their messaging from talking about their technology to talking about what the tech makes possible for truckers. Getting to the “so what” faster makes them instantly attractive to prospective talent, and it gives their other audiences – tech talent, shipping partners, investors – something to get excited about.

The brand expression was intentionally designed to bring this to life visually — everything from the color palette, to photo style. Even the graphic language was inspired directly by the personalized routes of their drivers that always lead home. We recommended a documentary style approach to photography, one that highlights not just the drivers behind the wheel, but shows their full 360 lives – communing with other truckers on the road and enjoying their return home to family – and reflects the company’s commitment to inclusive hiring and policies.

aifleet was named one of the 2023 Best Places to Work by Built In, and now they have a new brand expression and story to help catapult their growth and reinvent their industry.

4. Design for Participation

The thing to remember when designing brand communication for employees is they will only rally behind a corporate message if there’s a clear connection to their work and their experience. It has to be actionable and align with a meaningful role employees can play.

This was an essential part of the work we did for Macy’s, Inc. to reimagine its corporate purpose platform for a new focus on bold representation for all. Built on three pillars of impact – people, communities, and planet – Mission Every One is directing $5 billion by 2025 to diverse partners, products, people, and programs that help create a more equitable and sustainable future.

The people pillar is where Macy’s, Inc recognizes and rewards their diverse community of colleagues and partners to fuel mutual growth, innovation and impact. That means everything from teaming up with underrepresented designers to diversifying their leadership to providing education benefits and raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Real actions that benefit employees across the enterprise.

And when employees are positively impacted by the mission of the organization, they can stand behind it. To help launch Mission Every One, BBMG recruited real Macy’s colleagues from every level of the organization to appear in an anthem video about the corporate purpose. Their participation in the storytelling worked because the platform was designed with and for them.

Branding for Talent

Building a brand to engage and retain employees and attract talent is a unique branding challenge that must marry the unique needs and experience of the people within the company with the personality and purpose of the brand itself.

And it’s a uniquely challenging thing to develop a brand for talent because choosing to commit yourself to a job is one of the biggest decisions we make in our lives. It’s an exciting but vulnerable moment for the employee, but also for the brand to put its insides on the outside, so to speak. But with these four branding principles in mind, letting your people and your authenticity lead the way, you’ll be sure to find the right story and expression.