Employment Branding – Putting Yourself on the Shopping List of Top Talent
By Mark Rouse
As recruiters we are often asked this question by our clients; “How can I attract the best talent and avoid having to pay recruiter fees?” You might think we’d be reluctant to answer, but we’re not because the answer is simple. Create a powerful Employment Brand.
The answers to the questions that inevitably follow are not quite as simple, but here they are:
- What is an Employment Brand?
- Why do I want one?
- If I don't already have one, how do I get one?
What is an Employment Brand?
An Employment Brand is a carefully created and diligently maintained image of your company as a great place to work. It is widely known and understood by your target pool of talent and by your current employees. An employment brand creates an image that makes people want to work for your company because it is a well managed firm where workers can constantly learn and grow.
Like any great brand, it lives in every aspect of your company; corporate values, marketing, management practices, talent selection criteria, the reality of your everyday working environment, and employee retention strategies. A great many companies successfully brand their products. The same principles and diligence apply to create a great employment brand.
Why do I want one?
For several years now, surveys of CEO’s across North America have indicated that attracting and keeping top talent is one of their chief concerns for the future of their business. It’s no secret that there’s a talent crunch happening and that it is only going to get worse. Employee turnover averages between 15% - 20% and can be much higher in industries like Marketing Services. And to 75% of all recruitment activity is to replace employees who are leaving the firm (vs. promotions or growth).
A great employment brand attracts the best talent to your company, regardless of whether you’re currently hiring or not. And a strong employment brand also reduces employee turnover and improves employee productivity and satisfaction. Who among us doesn’t know of someone who beams with pride announcing their new job at a well-recognized employer? And when current employees see top talent attracted to their firm – they imbue it with additional respect themselves.
Think of the success of companies like Google, Apple, Nike and RIM. Sure, their employment brand is a reflection of their product’s success – but it’s also a reflection of their corporate culture. And they have no lack of applicants when they have job openings in their companies. In short, a strong employment brand gives you genuine competitive advantage.
Can't I just advertise to attract top talent?
Sure. But consider the following. The majority of people that will be reached by employment advertising are unemployed or unhappy or unsuccessful in their current roles. Are these the future stars you are looking for? Also, this is reactive behaviour versus proactive. And the time it takes to replace a key team member using this method adds to downtime and the overall cost of replacing an employee.
How do I get one? (A great employment brand)
Like any branding effort, an employment brand requires planning, consistent effort over time and ongoing measurement and improvement.
You need to understand where you are now, so assess your current employment image among your existing employees, applicants and if possible the general public.
Develop a description of what you’d like your employment image to become.
Create a strategy and a plan to achieve your target. Your strategy must be aligned with your overall corporate objectives. If your company’s mission is to create the world’s most innovative and advanced smart phones, then your employment strategy should probably be to attract engineers who dream about changing the world through technology.
Here are some suggestions to help build your employment brand
- Identify the target market (candidates) for your branding efforts – who they are, where they are, what their values are
- Understand the key factors that most attract your target employee to a workplace
- Have a process for matching your firm’s strengths with the key decision factors of potential applicants. Then focus image-building efforts on those targeted factors
- Obtain public recognition; get your company on great-place-to-work lists and/or get involved with the community
- Develop lists of the criteria used by leading publications to identify "great places to work" and consider them as the criteria for your branding effort. Every year, The Financial Post publishes a list of the 10 Best Companies to Work For: http://www.canadastop100.com/fp10/ Every winner has something special that they talk about. Do you, and if not, why not? The 2009 winners are to be announced in October of 2009
- Get talked about. Getting talked about can happen a few ways; managers can speak and write about their management practices in highly visible ways, or your company can be written up in the business press. Use your PR agency to promote your company as a way to grow your employment brand.
- Get your employees on board; positive talk from employees inside your company builds pride, productivity and retention. Positive talk from employees outside the company increases positive awareness, interest and applications.
- Have an internal referral program. Your best (and least expensive) source of great talent is the great talent you already have. With a great employment brand in place, your target should be to have 40% of your hires come from internal referrals
- Reward your employees handsomely for successful referrals. If you would pay thousands of dollars for recruitment advertising, or tens of thousands in recruiter fees, why would you only pay your own employee $100.00?
- Minimize recruitment advertising. It can add value but it does not constitute employment branding. If you “pay” to get your branding message out, it’s not as credible. The best employment branding messages are spread virally.
- Make the most of your corporate website’s Careers Section. Every potential applicant will visit your website as a mechanism for validating whether what they’ve heard about your company is really true. Your website should directly reflect your hiring strategy and hence your employment brand.
- Put a picture or story or positive testimonial from a current employee in this section of your website. It’s poor employment branding when the section of a corporation’s website that has the absolute most to do with people, has no people.
- Measure, measure, measure. You can’t improve what you don’t measure. What you measure, talk about, and publicly reward positive results. This sends a clear message to everyone in the company about what’s really important.
A strong employment brand offers a genuine competitive advantage in your contest to attract and retain top talent to your company. It improves employee satisfaction and productivity and reduces the cost of replacing employees. And of course, it helps you avoid those pesky recruiter fees.
-
As Director of IQ PARTNERS' Marketing Services practice, Mark Rouse works in partnership with some of the brightest minds in the marketing communications and advertising industries.
[Full bio]
|
IQ
Insight is published by IQ
PARTNERS Inc.
IQ
PARTNERS helps intelligent companies hire better,
hire less and retain more. Our services include
Executive Search & Recruitment, Qualification
& Assessment, Employee Retention, Career
Management and Contract HR Services. We specialize
in Marketing, Communications, Media, Technology,
and Financial Services, and operate at
the mid-to-senior management level. IQ PARTNERS' head office is in Toronto with partner offices across Canada, and internationally
via the Aravati
Global Search Network.
|
