Fifty-page documents about new branding may not be as well read as the creators may hope, Matthew Hall of Lloyds Banking Group has advised his peers. So keeping messages simple is essential when rolling out a new brand into the hands of internal recruiters, hiring managers, colleagues and third parties.

Employer brand was not a priority for the UK banking giant until roughly three years ago, said Hall, recruitment branding & attraction manager at LBG, who was speaking at the Recruitment & Employment Confederation’s Good Recruitment employer brand forum on Thursday [15 August]. “We weren’t recruiting in line with the modern world with employer brand,” Hall acknowledged.

However, employer brand has since become a critical aspect of the group’s ongoing recruitment efforts, taking into account its different brands (Bank of Scotland, Halifax and Lloyds Bank, to name a few), geographies and job types, such as technology, and creating “other versions of the narrative”, Hall said. 

The small employer brand team worked to build a model for the discipline: [creating] brand identity, enabling use [by internal recruiters, hiring managers, colleagues and third parties], and embed & activate. They approached the brand with ‘product thinking’ – “Brand is a product,” Hall said – and considered how to get the brand into other people’s hands, while defining brand as what you want to say, how you say it, and how it looks and feels. 

Hall noted that the organisation had created a lengthy, “50-page” document about branding guidelines, but suggested that an A4 sheet of paper with bullet points might be more effective in communicating the requirements to the bulk of the internal audience. “Keep it simple,” urged. “Some people may not read it [the lengthy document] at all.”

The Good Recruitment event was held at the London headquarters of Springer Nature.

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