Responsibility for employer branding falls on multiple stakeholders
There is no clear consensus about who is ultimately responsible for the employer brand, especially the day-to-day management of it. We asked respondents who is responsible for three aspects of the employer brand:
- strategy
- design
- day-to-day management
We found that senior leaders (51%) are most likely to be responsible for strategy, the marketing department (52%) is most likely to be responsible for design, and HR (39%) is most likely to be responsible for the day-to-day management. In truth, though, the picture is much more complex in that participants often chose more than one department as being responsible for all three of these areas, and many also chose joint teams.
In short, there is no consensus in this area. Our view is that HR should be involved at every level of the process. However, given the multi-faceted nature of employer branding—involving everything from business strategy to public relations to marketing—it makes sense that employer brand management should involve other stakeholders in a collaborative effort.
When we discussed this finding with our Research Advisory Board, some members noted that this lack of a consensus about the ownership of the employer brand may be part of the problem. That is, because there is no consensus about who is responsible for the employer brand across organizations, the responsibility is shifted to and, in many cases, shared among those who may never have managed such a brand before. This prevents any given professional (or team of professionals) from developing the expertise to excel in this area.
