5 Ways Groupon Took Employer Branding to the Next Level

Employer branding is like an art, and just like an artist, it takes some work to master your craft. Recently, Groupon decided to dust off its paintbrushes and get to work, painting the picture of its vivid company culture to job seekers. The Story Behind Groupon You’ve most likely used Groupon. Groupon is based in Chicago and has over 5,000 employees. It provides a marketplace of unbeatable deals you can buy any place, anytime, all over the world. Helping merchants and consumers alike, shoppers can seek out the best a city has to offer on the web or on their mobile device. Consumers can discover vacations and find a curated selection of electronics, fashion, home furnishings and more. While Groupon excelled with brand awareness, they needed some extra help attracting and retaining top talent – and this is where the ever-important topic of employer branding came into play. Here are the five steps Groupon took to strengthen its employer brand and take recruiting to the next level. 1. Differentiate Your Corporate Brand From Your Employer Brand Without employer branding, candidates will assume your corporate brand and employer brand are one in the same. What’s the difference? Corporate brand: how people recognize your product through the consumer’s eyes through marketing your services Employer brand: what it’s like to work at your company in the form of culture, benefits, interview process, reviews, photos etc. If job seekers think your corporate brand and employer brand are the same thing, applicants could apply to a job without knowing all the facts about a company’s culture.; this results in buyer’s remorse. According to DDI’s Global Selection Forecast, 51% of new employees experience buyer’s remorse because the employer failed to paint a realistic or accurate picture of the job. Groupon, like many other organizations, had trouble differentiating its employer brand from its corporate brand in the eyes of job seekers. It wasn’t recognized as a technology company, which made recruiting qualified technical talent a challenge. To fix this problem, Groupon created and pushed out cultural content in the form of videos, a people blog, and customized “Why Work for Us” messaging to show it is not only a great place to work but also a great place for technical talent to thrive. 2. Focus on Quality Over Quantity Groupon, like other well-known companies, has no trouble receiving piles upon piles of résumés every month. However, Dustin Carper, employment brand strategist at Groupon, found himself doggie paddling in an attempt to stay above water in an ocean of unqualified candidates. After pushing out its customized career messaging and establishing itself as a thriving technology company, Groupon achieved double the amount of qualified applicants. Their branded Enhanced Profile allowed candidates to self-qualify, which influenced 61 new hires. 3. Create Customized Messaging for Job Seekers Dustin was able to fully customize Groupon’s Glassdoor profile to showcase the rich company culture through targeted diversity messaging and university hiring initiatives. After utilizing Glassdoor’s resources, Groupon doubled the quality of applicants and lowered cost-per-applicant to just $13. 4. Monitor Your Reputation With a great reputation comes great responsibility – and a great deal of people talking about your company. It’s important to analyze several key areas and monitor changes over fixed periods of time. This allows you to prioritize areas that need to be worked on and helps to show upper management key improvements over time. Groupon set out to recruit qualified candidates and amplify the employer brand – all without breaking the bank. Using the analytics tools on their Enhanced Profile, they could see the increase in user generated content and credit that back to Groupon’s efforts in employer branding. 5. Engage Current Employees The candidates who take the time to leave feedback on Glassdoor want to be engaged. Responding to reviews, interviews and candidate opinions shows them that you care and that you are an employer who embraces transparency and open dialogue. Groupon encourages current employees to leave honest and valuable feedback about the quality of life at the company. This helps job seekers tremendously when doing their research and deciding where to apply. Dustin Carper of Groupon speaks more about the importance of Employer Branding. See his interview here: