How Microsoft overhauled its employer brand quickly

Employer branding is a core pillar of culture — it’s how communicators can tell current and prospective employees why an organization is a great place to work. But what if you need to build it in a short amount of time?

At Ragan’s Future of Communications Conference earlier this year, Jen Crum, director of marketing and communications for HR programs at Microsoft, gave details on how she helped revamp Microsoft’s employer brand in just 12 weeks. She said that eliminating silos was critical.

“People always ask, who do you put in the room?” Crum said. “In the past, HR would go off in a silo to create the employer brand — that didn’t work. This time we had corporate comms, HR comms, marketing and cross-company comms leaders — all accountable and meeting every day.”

She also said that her team’s approach to the employer branding reset started by looking at the metrics.

“We began with our internal data — employee signals, thriving metrics, energized-at-work scores, culture, exit surveys, new joiner surveys and intern surveys,” Crum told the audience. “We said, ‘Let the data speak first.’”

She added that her team also took the aforementioned internal data and put it into Copilot to draw patterns from the raw figures.