CareerBuilder, the online recruitment platform, has found an edge in purpose-driven marketing, even if this mission isn’t always expressly stated in its marketing.

Amy Heidersbach, CareerBuilder’s chief marketing officer, discussed this subject at Incite Group’s 2019 Brand Marketing Summit in San Francisco.

“Purpose matters because businesses benefit from it in lots of ways … [But] it’s not a marketing campaign. It’s not a story. I think brand purpose starts at a much deeper level,” she said. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: CareerBuilder’s brand purpose drives internal change and external impact.)

A year ago, CareerBuilder underwent a process of self-evaluation to answer its own series of “why” questions following its acquisition by a private equity firm.

“We had a stated mission of ‘empowering employment,’” Heidersbach said, “but that’s not really why we exist uniquely in the world.”

With a process that included input from employees across the company, she said, CareerBuilder concluded that the ways people integrate work into their lives is changing rapidly – including a breakdown of the wall between home and work.

The brand’s new-found purpose in response to that shift: help people successfully navigate this changing landscape. “We really wanted to view our technology and tools as something more than just getting the next job,” said Heidersbach.

“To us, when we really stopped and talked to each other about it”, the CareerBuilder workforce landed on the same goal: using the company’s job-hunting tools to help candidates and employers build a life that works for both parties.

CareerBuilder’s resultant “Build a Life That Works” purpose-driven initiative started internally, as the company extensively remodeled its headquarters in Chicago, Illinois to make its home base more employee-friendly.

In its marketing, she added, the company’s purpose is reflected in the tone of a ‘Work Can Work’ campaign that emphasises finding the right job fit.

“We don’t overtly state our purpose in our advertising,” Heidersbach admitted. “Sometimes, customer-facing, overt-purpose statements work. But I shy away from attaching them to paid messages because it just feels inauthentic then.

It’s different, she added, when a message of purpose is “carried by a human. If many of you work in B2B situations, your salespeople – if they truly connect with it – can be great carriers of that message.”

Sourced from WARC