Oh, really?
With some little job-ads you always find the best people, when you have vacancies in your team? Your consumer brand does all the magic HR-tricks for you, right? Hmm, we don't think so!
Imagine the following scenario: you are the CEO of a fashion company for sketeboarders and you need to hire product-designers and SAP-experts (for your back office).
Your key target customer group is male, between 14 and 27 years old, and has a middle class family-background etc. Your brand stands for values like masculinity, power, extroversion etc. The psychology behind your business model aims at attracting the egocentric sides of your buyer personas.
Let's shed some light now on recruiting processes. Emphasized egocentricity as company culture? Not what most people desire as an ideal work atmosphere... But ok, different professions attract different personalties and mindsets. Not only well known clichés, also valid diagnostic systems agree here.
Most people would assume that it's easier to hire product-designers than IT-specialists for a fashion brand. Maybe. Maybe not. It's not the point. The challenge for each position is to find the best talents available - in terms of hard skills, soft skills and compatibility with the company culture. While consumer brands tend to be homogeneous and simplified, the personality of human beings is multi-faceted. A consumer brand can never cover the complex nature of human personality in its entirety!
There may be excellent designers and SAP-specialists, who wear your clothes and follow a prototypical skater-lifestyle in their leisure time. When it comes to work, the same people might prefer a different set of values though. You must not forget: Branding works in unconscious ways and prominent values are easily transferred from one area to another (here: from the consumer to the employer brand).
A good employer brand acts as a careful mediator between the corporate (consumer) brand and the mindsets of the company's talents. It shows why these mindsets are essential for turning values into (product) realities!
Professional Employer Branding makes the specific connections visible on various levels: designers, IT-experts etc. Through this, you give people a good idea about the culture of the company. If a talent then says "yes, I wanna be part of it!", then you have probably found the ideal candidate! For these scenarios you need Employer Branding!