Starting a new business during a pandemic year: The Employer Brand Shop story
By: Kaitlyn Holbein, Founder & Principal Consultant, The Employer Brand Shop
As many of you may have noticed from our giveaway post last week (which you can still enter here until Wednesday, end of day, by the way!), this month marks our one year anniversary at The Employer Brand Shop. One year may not seem like a whole lot of time, but it’s been one crazy year, so I wanted to share a little bit about our journey to date.
Here’s what our experience has looked like starting up during a pandemic year, what I’ve learned to date, and a few thoughts on what’s to come in the next few months.
Starting a new business
Prior to launching The Employer Brand Shop in September 2019, I already had my own business for close to two years. I had launched Kaitlyn Holbein Consulting in November 2017, where I worked as a solo consultant delivering on employer brand strategy and executing on recruitment marketing content.
However, for close to a year before launching The Employer Brand Shop, I knew I needed to transition to a new brand name and start to build more of a team model. The demand for the work we did was outpacing my capacity to take it all on, and when you operate under your own name (“Kaitlyn Holbein Consulting”) people anticipate that it’s you and only you delivering on the work.
I wanted to start to build a fun, captivating brand that was bigger than just me. I also wanted it to be clear from the get-go to any prospective clients that it wasn’t just Kaitlyn who would be approaching the work, but Kaitlyn and team (and what an amazing team of in-house practitioners, contractors, and experienced freelancers we now have!).
Thus, The Employer Brand Shop was born!
Well, kind of… in reality, I sat around for six months flip-flopping back and forth on elements of our brand identity. What should our logo look like, what colours and fonts should be in our brand kit? What do we really want to communicate to people at first glance? Not to mention naming the company — picking a business name might be the hardest part of starting up a new venture!
On top of that, I had a lot of client work to balance so working on the new brand and website always seemed to fall at the bottom of my weekly to-do list.
However, I finally forced myself to put everything aside and focus on The Employer Brand Shop exclusively for a week in early August 2019 and made some serious progress.
After finishing our site, I headed out on a much needed three-week vacation, and launched two days after we returned (pro tip learned here: don’t launch a new company while trying to play vacation catch-up, it’s not a good idea!).
The launch and first six months of business
When we launched, I published a LinkedIn announcement post that went semi-viral. It got about 75,000 views and resulted in a ton of reach outs! Here’s the post on the right
In all transparency, however, we didn’t land a lot of those initial leads. We were a very new company and still figuring out our processes, proposal approach, and the best way to close clients.
However, a few months in we really got into the swing of things and business started booming. January 2020 was a really productive time for us and I had super high hopes about what this calendar year had in store for our growing team.
In February 2020, we went on our first company remote work trip to Portugal. The change of scene and creative co-working spaces resulted in a big influx of inspiration. We came back buzzing with energy and ready to produce some never-before-seen in recruitment marketing calibre of content for our customers.
And then the pandemic hit.
Operating a small business during COVID-19
Full disclosure: this part of our story isn’t as fun to share. March and April 2020 were scary times.
We had been on the verge of hiring our next team member and closing a range of clients we were really excited to work with. We had big projects on the horizon that we couldn’t wait to roll up our sleeves and tackle.
And then everything disappeared in a poof of smoke. All of the projects we had been about to sign evaporated. Many of our current retainer clients had to pause or stop their contracts with us due to the economic uncertainties they were facing.
Hiring was paused for many organizations. In fact, things were moving in the opposite direction and mass layoffs were becoming the norm for many companies.
I started wondering, what does this all mean for the work that our team does? With way less hiring activity, were our services now obsolete?
Adjusting our approach and how employer branding changed after COVID-19
Luckily, since our in-house team was still so small, we were able to stay agile and adapt to remain afloat.
We started to notice some new trends happening in employer branding. Employer branding wasn’t going away, but the areas that we focused on were just changing.
Prior to the pandemic, many of our clients had been exclusively focused on activating their employer brands externally — for talent attraction purposes. However, now more companies were focused on their internal audiences.
They were focused on activating their employer brands with their employee base to provide a positive experience during the pandemic. Because companies were realizing in a big way for the first time how much of an impact their employer brands have on their consumer brands. You can learn more about my thoughts here in this video:
In short, companies were realizing they needed to prioritize their people first and focus on their culture more than ever to make it through these dark times.
Finally employer brands were being used in the right way! Rather than “putting lipstick on a pig” and stating “our culture is the best, join our team now,” companies were actually focused on making sure their positive brands were being fostered and developed from within before being communicated externally.
In other words, rather than diminishing the importance of employer branding, the pandemic had served to increase the significance of our space and move employer branding into the mainstream in a new way.
Market recovery and what’s next
Finally things began to turn around again. In May 2020 we started getting more inbound reach outs. In June, we started closing new projects again. And in July, as people started to get more accustomed to the new normal and gained confidence in the market’s recovery, we began to see a much bigger influx of demand for the work we do.
Now, moving into the fall of 2020, we’re super excited about a number of new clients and projects on the horizon, and are poised and hoping to grow our team more in the upcoming year.
We’re also planning to expand our reach and share more of our knowledge with practitioners around the globe by launching a few new initiatives very soon. In fact, we have a big announcement to make next week — so make sure to give us a follow across our social accounts if you want to hear more from us and join us for the next chapter of our story. (You can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube).
So, in short, while the past year has come with a number of significant challenges — and I expect there will be many more surprises and obstacles for us ahead — it’s also been one of the most meaningful experiences of my life to date. The struggle we faced at the six-month mark has only heightened my resolve to find ways to adapt, adjust, and make our mark in the talent acquisition world.
I truly believe that our team has the resolve, creativity, and capabilities to execute on a calibre of work that has never been seen before in this space, and I look forward to sharing what we learn along the way with as many people as possible. I want to move this discipline forward together!
Lastly, to finish up, I’d like to thank all our wonderful clients and our amazing team of employees, contractors, and freelancers! The people are what make a company special and without all of you this professional adventure wouldn’t have been possible.
About The Employer Brand Shop
The Employer Brand Shop is a boutique recruitment marketing and employer brand agency located in Kitchener, Canada. Our team helps organizations around the world attract and engage talent using creative marketing strategies.