Building an Employer Brand from Scratch

Employer branding helps attract the right talent and reduce employee turnover. Managing employer brands of well-known entities is work but building a brand from scratch—and for a company that is unknown to most—is a special kind of challenge.

That’s what Bari Polay, the head of employer brand at MarketAxess, a growing digital financial trading platform in New York City, set out to do in the spring of 2021. Over two years later, Polay successfully launched her first end-to-end employer brand, which she describes as motivating, differentiated, and authentic.

Polay discussed the experience with SHRM Online, including how to get started, the major steps of a brand build and how to activate the launch of the finished product.

SHRM Online: How did you get started on the project?

Polay: When I joined MarketAxess, it was a complete blank slate from an employer brand standpoint. We didn’t have much of a digital footprint and had very little general and employer brand awareness. We are a B2B company in the fixed income space, sitting at the cross section of finance and technology—our product is our technology, but our clients are in finance.

So, most candidates we reach out to have never heard of us before unless they’ve worked in the industry, and we have the added challenge of needing to educate them about what we do.

The employer brand role sits within marketing, which was a very intentional decision. All my previous roles had fallen under the recruiting and talent umbrella, and to me, reporting to marketing was a signal that MarketAxess truly believed in building a brand first, as opposed to focusing primarily on recruitment marketing, which is what I experienced in the past.

SHRM Online: What is essential to begin an employment brand build?

Polay: After spending a few months acclimating to the company, becoming immersed in the MarketAxess culture, understanding the gaps, and beginning to get our name out there on social media platforms, I made the case to our CMO to start focusing on the foundation of our employer brand strategy—our narrative around who we are as an employer.

But we needed outside help to really get it right. I had vetted and worked with employer brand agencies in the past. Exaqueo [an employer brand consulting and service firm based in Charleston, S.C.] is expert in taking a research-based approach to crafting an employer brand narrative. I appreciate their focus on the entire employment lifecycle, as opposed to just talent attraction, which was very much in line with our employer branding approach. We also liked their openness and flexibility to not necessarily following a cookie cutter plan to build the brand.

In the Spring of 2021, it was the right time to get started. Our new CHRO had joined at the start of the year, and we wanted to ensure she was aligned with the approach and part of the process, being that HR would be our most important stakeholder.

SHRM Online: Can you outline the steps of your employer brand build?

Polay: In order to build an authentic employer brand, it has to be grounded in research, to truly reflect the realities of the employment experience. We are a global company, and we knew we needed to capture what the MarketAxess experience feels like, whether you work in New York or Hong Kong. Not to mention the key functional areas of the company that we needed specific insights for so we could develop targeted talent attraction strategies. We knew we couldn’t take a one-size-fits all approach to develop targeted talent attraction strategies.

While we had already done quite a bit of research with employees to develop our culture principles, we knew it wasn’t sufficient for developing a robust employer brand strategy, and we needed to build on it. And we needed experts to help us do it. exaqueo helped us capture comprehensive insights from employees ranging across functions, levels, and locations, and even from past employees who left on good terms, and candidates who interviewed with us but didn’t join.

We started this process in April 2021, and it took exactly two years to launch, which was much longer than we anticipated. The research process went quickly during the spring and summer of 2021, we received the insights report and high-level research themes by the fall, but things slowed down when it came time to develop the tagline. We really felt it was important to have something that was differentiated and bold while still staying true to who we are, so it took a few rounds with exaqueo to land on the right one. But once we arrived at “Take Us There”, we knew we had nailed it. We did a bit of socializing internally with stakeholders in HR and even our CEO, and the consensus was that everyone loved it, which gave us the confidence to proceed.

We spent quite a while on the overarching message map framework after the start of the new year in January 2022, which corresponded to the different stages of the employment lifecycle. Given the amount of messaging that was being developed, we wanted to ensure we made every word count, and that it was aligned with our tone of voice, something that’s quite unique and bold, given the industry we are in.

At this point, we brought in an additional agency partner—a boutique ad agency called darling—that has worked with us for years on our corporate brand and advertising campaigns and is known for pushing the boundaries when it comes to creative ideas and bold messaging. They also were responsible for writing our culture principles and in general, are deeply familiar with MarketAxess, so we knew they were the right partner to take our messaging and creative to the next level. Simultaneously, exaqueo was working on an activation plan for us, which is essentially a menu of options of tactics we could leverage for launching the brand internally and externally.

We were nearing the point of developing the visual identity for the brand in June 2022, when I had my second child and left for 6 months of maternity leave. I was very fortunate to have an amazing maternity leave cover, Stephanie Marum, keep things in motion in my absence.

The creative concepting process took longer than expected before we landed in a place where we were confident moving forward, so much to my surprise, I came back from maternity leave the first week of January 2023 and was pretty much able to pick up where I left off.

From there, it was an intense few months gearing up for a splashy internal launch in April, which coincided with our 23rd anniversary as a company and our first-ever CEO transition.

SHRM Online: What were the biggest challenges you faced and how did you overcome them?

Polay: There were a few challenges. The tone of voice that we use at MarketAxess, particularly when we aren’t speaking to clients, is difficult to grasp. It’s bold, pithy and edgy, and unexpected in our industry. It took years of work with darling for them to really be able to nail it, which is why we ultimately brought them in to help shape our messaging, but it still took some time to finesse. Same goes with our creative concept. Initially our visual identity focused on employee photos with our brand mark overlaid in bold colors. To be honest, that isn’t all that differentiated from what other companies do in their employer branding efforts. The visual approach evolved over time, as darling presented the concept of bringing in an illustrator who would use drawings to depict our values and the elements of our employer brand strategy. Initially, we only planned to use the illustrations in what we called our “Little Blue Book,” a physical guidebook into the MarketAxess experience and where we are headed, that all employees receive. We ended up gravitating towards this style, and these illustrations then became the foundation of our visual identity.

There were also some delays in the process and things took longer than expected. As someone who appreciates a sense of urgency, this was also challenging to deal with, but was largely out of my control. There were personnel shifts within the recruiting team, and we took the time to get every word of our messaging right, making sure we were educating our senior leaders at the right time, and conducting creative testing with employees.

SHRM Online: What is one of the most memorable moments of the project?

Polay: I will never forget the day that I walked into our office as our NYC office takeover was in the process of being installed. It was a Saturday, and I arrived midway through the installation process. As I waited for the elevator in my building lobby, my heart started racing and I felt a nervous excitement that I can’t recall having felt in the longest time. As the elevator doors opened on my floor, I had the biggest smile on my face as I saw Take Us There all over. Employees walked in that morning and were a mix of confused by what they saw and also blown away. The two years of work I had put in finally felt real, and I couldn’t believe we had reached this point that we were ready to launch.

SHRM Online: How did you activate the finished brand?

Polay: We felt it was key to have an internal launch first to familiarize our employees with it and ensure they could stand behind it. I had this completely unfounded fear that employees would roll their eyes at the work and think of it as just a superficial project the marketing team worked on. So we were very intentional about how we rolled it out. It started with the office takeover in our NYC office, which is our headquarters. And when I say takeover, I mean that the windows, walls, floors, doors, tables and more were plastered with the Take Us There headline, messaging, and supporting creative. We even installed a permanent Take Us There LED sign in our pool table area. We designed a “journey” that took employees throughout our three floors, which are connected by glass staircases, in which they were able to read through blocks of our messaging on our walls. Each block of messaging and headline corresponded to a different stage of the employee lifecycle. We also included QR codes throughout the office which link to a different part of our digital Little Blue Book.

We quickly followed this up with a global town hall the following morning, where our CXO and brand-new CEO explained our employer brand and the supporting strategy.

Over the course of the month, we held lunch and learn sessions for those who wanted to learn more about employer brand, we expanded our office takeovers to our London, Hong Kong and Singapore offices, we had Take Us There branded cupcakes on our actual anniversary, and the month culminated with celebrations in our major offices.

All employees received Take Us There and MarketAxess branded hoodies—which was a very big deal for us, considering hoodies used to violate our dress code—we took new headshots for employees to use on LinkedIn and created new employer brand LinkedIn profile cover photos for them to use. In NYC and London, we did an interactive art installation on our walls, where each employee contributed a dot of paint in our employer brand color palette within the “open” part of our brand mark, which is tied to the concept that each employee is essential. Once the hard cover Little Blue Book was ready, we distributed these to employees globally.

This surround sound approach really drove the employer brand home for employees and made them feel connected to it before we started to share it with the outside world. We have spent the last few months updating our digital presence with our new branding and messaging, we’ve updated our candidate communications, and are gearing up to launch our new careers site. We’ll also be working on elevating our onboarding experience and infusing the employer brand into it, as well as designing a rewards and recognition program—two projects I’ve never worked on before, but I’m excited to have the opportunity to tackle.