UniFirst partners with CareerBuilder.com for rebranding

"Partnering with CareerBuilder.com to assist us with our employment branding and recruitment has been tremendously successful for us. Through our e-mail campaigns, we are able to push higher quality traffic to the website where candidates can learn more about UniFirst, our culture, and our opportunities."Eric Fournier, Recruiting

As the unemployment rate continues to drop across the nation, organizations face tougher challenges in the recruitment and retention of employees. To counter this challenge, some executives are looking to strengthen their company's employment brand to highlight the unseen but positive benefits of working for their organization. At UniFirst, one of the nation's leading workwear and textile services companies, management brands their organization as an "employer of choice" by implementing some of the industry's best practices. In so doing, UniFirst helps to create a more positive perception of its company and—in the process—its entire industry.

Company Background

UniFirst competes in the industrial laundry and garment rental services industry—an arena that can mistakenly be viewed as non-glamorous—particularly when it comes to a career in sales. UniFirst competes with Aramark, Cintas and G&K Services for its clients; it contends with companies like Waste Management, Paychecks, Yellowbook, Nextel, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson for its employee talent. Contrary to general belief that its industry offers less in the way of finances, training, infrastructure, and professional opportunity, UniFirst invests heavily in the career growth of all its Team Partners. In fact, this factor is largely responsible for UniFirst's ability to boast more than 70 consecutive years of revenue growth. That is an admirable feat for any type of company.

Best Practices in Employment Branding Strategy:

1. Senior Leaders should establish the employment brand and strategy:

Successful employment branding campaigns are initiated at the top. UniFirst's President and CEO Ronald Croatti explains, "A large part of our employment branding initiative deals with our familial work environment, which allows all Team Partners the opportunity to better themselves with ongoing education, training, and recognition programs." Croatti adds, "At the same time, we foster an environment where everyone innately treats each other as they would like to be treated—all of which, in turn, ultimately helps to ensure that our customers always receive the best quality services possible."

2. Promote the brand internally:

After senior leadership has established the message, organizations should broadcast that brand internally. As part of UniFirst's branding efforts, its employees (called Team Partners) are asked to continually keep the company's founding "family-like" values in mind. All of which are reaffirmed each year at company-wide "Founders Day" celebrations—a North American tradition held on or around July 12, the date in 1936 when UniFirst began its business.

3. Ensure that the employment brand supports the consumer brand:

Another element organizations should consider in establishing the message is the employment brand should support the consumer-targeted brand. To compete effectively in today's increasing competition for talent, organizations must get their internal cultural branding messages out as effectively as they do their overall business branding messages. UniFirst leads its competition in this arena by incorporating a focused "great place to work" message within its comprehensive branding strategy. For UniFirst, this process involved the re-branding of its organization's image from one that appeared product driven to one that is now more service focused. Prior to this effort, much of the public knew the name "U1st," but not "UniFirst" which diluted the overall brand identity. The company outlined in detail how the more clearly defined name would be incorporated within all its employment and recruitment efforts.

4. Disseminate the brand externally:

Once the employment brand is established organizations should invest in the external branding strategy. Part of UniFirst's overall strategy involves building on their long and successful partnership with CareerBuilder.com.

UniFirst realized the bottom line value of CareerBuilder.com and has taken its program from the core product usage of job postings and resume database to branding tools like in the weeks following each e-mail program. It's important to note that UniFirst's e-mail campaigns were particularly successful because they were launched in conjunction with the company's job posting strategies. Combined, these two initiatives had a positive impact on job seekers searching the internet. (See graphs)
UniFirst also invested in Job Branding with CareerBuilder.com. It worked to ensure each of its postings on CareerBuilder.com effectively portrayed the culture of UniFirst. UniFirst saw a 15% increase in applicant flow immediately after this tool launched.

Along with investments in internet partners like CareerBuilder.com, UniFirst also relies on college recruiting visits, employee and customer referrals, and constant networking by its Team Partners. Through a solid workforce management strategy, UniFirst will accomplish their stretch goal to enlighten the public-at-large that UniFirst and the industrial laundry industry are indeed a "glamorous arena" in which to pursue a satisfying and rewarding career.