“If a candidate comes into your organization and asks three different people, ‘What is your employee value proposition?’ every one of those people should be able to provide a similar answer,” says Rosemary Haefner, on what it means to have a clearly defined employment brand.

As vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder, Haefner recently spearheaded the initiative to define CareerBuilder’s own employment brand.

“Your brand is basically your commercial,” Haefner explains. “It’s what should come to people’s mind when they hear your company’s name.”  While CareerBuilder has always enjoyed a reputation as a great place to work, Haefner wanted to clearly define what CareerBuilder stood for as an employer and what the company offers its employees.

“If you’re not specific about who you are as an employer, you can’t as easily determine which candidates will be successful in your organization or if employees are fulfilling their potential, and you won’t know what investments you need to be making in your organization.”

The problem some companies encounter, however, is that who they think they are as an employer and how others actually perceive them don’t always align. “You might think your brand is one thing, but then your employees might have an entirely different opinion. It’s almost as if you need a mirror to tell you who you are,” Haefner says.

Not wanting to fall into this trap, Haefner and her team sought objective feedback from current employees and prospective candidates. “We interviewed people both in and outside the organization, basically just asking them, ‘When you think about CareerBuilder, what rises to top?’” Haefner says. After a while, a similar theme began to surface from the survey results: “The answers were all about different ways to learn – both personally and professionally.” The surveys provided a foundation on which CareerBuilder could then build its employment brand strategy.

Finally, after an intense several months of interviews, surveys and discussion around “where we want to be as an organization and what we have to do to get there,” CareerBuilder was ready to begin promoting its new “Growth through Learning” employment brand.  “This brand captures the idea that, if you’re open to learning, and if you’re game to be challenged, this is the place for you,” Haefner says.

Looking back now, “Growth through Learning” seems like an obvious description of CareerBuilder’s employment brand. After all, education and learning have always been integral to the culture at CareerBuilder. In addition to the company’s generous tuition reimbursement program, employees have access to a wealth of free career-related courses through CBLearn, its internal training portal, and in 2006, CareerBuilder launched the Leadership Development Series. The invitation-only, MBA-style program is taught by business school professors and designed to prepare high potential employees for higher levels of responsibility.

But educational opportunities go beyond classes and coursework at CareerBuilder. “We believe that learning isn’t just about sitting in a classroom. We’re always looking for ways to expose employees to new opportunities to learn,” Haefner says. Those opportunities come in nearly any form conceivable – from exposure to the influential leaders who come to speak at the company’s annual kickoff event (past speakers have included Bill Clinton, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright and Jack Welch) to work exchange programs with the company’s international offices, to community outreach and company-administered volunteer events.  Understanding that competition and innovation are also key to learning, CareerBuilder encourages employees to come up with business plans for its annual Ideas from Everywhere contest and holds regular Hack Days.

While these initiatives would likely exist in some form or another without having gone through the exercise of creating a defined employment brand, chances are they would have taken much longer to execute. With “Growth through Learning” as the framework on which all company initiatives are based, Haefner says, “It’s easier to make decisions now on where to invest our time, effort and money, because we already know that, in the end, everything should come back to growth through learning.”