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An employment branding initiative will help perpetuate the right image
around your employment experience and engage the talent necessary to
accomplish key business objectives in the future. Elevating the
exposure of your organization as an employer of choice is necessary to
succeed in an environment that is increasingly more employee
favorable — where A players are coveted, gainfully employed, and have
multiple opportunities should they desire a change.
Wherever your organization is on the continuum of brand development,
implementation, and strategy, the following eight concepts will help
guide your efforts in branding your organization as an employer of
choice:
- Understand your business objectives. What is
leadership's vision for the future direction of your organization? What
is the commitment to growth, new markets, and business development? To
the extent that it is possible, you need to engage C-level leadership
in supporting the employment branding initiative and encourage dialogue
to help close any knowledge gaps with respect to near- and long-term
organizational objectives. The more top-down buy-in you can achieve at
the onset of your employment brand development, the more likely you are
to succeed.
- Identify your talent needs.
Determine the talent needed to accomplish key business objectives in
the future. Engage in workforce planning to clearly define the strategy
necessary to align the needs for talent acquisition with the future
direction of the business. Determine which skills are most critical to
support the evolution of your organization, and assess where gaps exist
among the present workforce. You'll need to have a firm grasp of these
key steps, and you'll need to present a talent acquisition plan, in
real numbers, based on current trends with respect to openings,
attrition, growth/transition projections, the percentage of the
workforce trending toward retirement, and new critical skills required
by the organization. A well-organized talent acquisition plan is
essential for achieving consensus buy in and the appropriate financial
support.
- Determine the employment brand attributes.
Determine those key attributes that define the employment experience
with the organization. Take into consideration the things that shape
your organization, like mission, vision, and values. Consider the role
of the brand as a promise to candidates about the employment experience
you offer, and make certain that the messaging is indeed accurate. At
this stage in the process, it's often useful to conduct employee
population focus groups to best ascertain what attributes are
legitimate and resonate most powerfully with your contributing talent.
There are tools available to obtain feedback online, or you can hold
moderated roundtable sessions to encourage open dialogue around the
employment experience among quality performers. Both are very useful in
developing an accurate understanding of the employment experience. As a
benchmark, encourage the participation of leadership in a related
survey mechanism. Additional interviews with leadership around the
employment offering will help you develop a gap analysis, which will
allow you to determine whether the leadership perception of the quality
of the employment experience is consistent with reality. Creating the
awareness and working toward bridging any existing gaps are truly
important steps in the effort to brand your organization as a true
employer of choice.
- Look for synergy with the corporate brand.
Many organizations have made great efforts to perpetuate an image of
the product or service offerings that define their brand. It is
important to consider how to best incorporate this messaging into the
context of recruitment communications. The role of marketing and
corporate communications is often essential in the employment brand
development process, to the point where we now see hybrid HR/marketing
roles emerging within leading organizations (with job titles like
"employment brand manager" or "employment marketing manager").
Regardless of whether the hybrid role exists at you organization, you
need to be certain to interface with a liaison from marketing or
corporate communications as part of the process, in order to understand
your current brand positioning and how to best leverage the existing
concepts to fit the purposes of talent engagement. Consistency in all
external communications can be achieved by working cooperatively with
marketing, and the advantage is that much of the heavy lifting will
often have already been accomplished.
- Develop a communications plan.
This outlines the talent engagement strategy and defines important
considerations like budget, timing, markets, media, and project
priority. Do some competitive intelligence gathering to benchmark your
organization against leading firms and industry best practices. Based
on your own internal due diligence, determine what high impact areas
need to be addressed first. Is the candidate interface on your website
compelling? Does your firm have enough name recognition in the local
marketplace? What percentage of hires are generated through internal
referrals? What is your commitment to attracting diverse candidates?
What is the perception among leading candidates about your firm as a
potential employer? Make a case for the appropriate investment
allocation and, through planning, shape your efforts and timeline
toward process improvement.
- Develop the messaging and creative content.
A strong employment brand is synthesized through a theme designed to
resonate with the target hiring demographic. The strongest themes
introduce the organization and allow for the opportunity to develop
messaging that will engage the right candidates. Extend the messaging
to focus on what you offer that is unique, different, or better in the
context of your career opportunities. Strive to achieve consistency in
communication through all external channels and consider focus group
testing (internally and externally) prior to execution to ensure the
message is on target and the brand achieves the desired impact. The
ongoing interface with your marketing liaison will ensure synergy with
corporate communications while achieving the ultimate objective of
presenting your employment experience in the most compelling way.
Achieve consensus buy in on the theme and its accompanying visuals.
- Establish metrics.
The adage that you cannot improve what you don't measure certainly
applies here. At the onset, metrics based on desired outcomes should be
established. Determinations based on your own unique challenges will
guide your objectives, and it's likely that you are already measuring
efforts to favorably impact cost, quality, and speed. A well-developed
employment branding strategy will contribute to gains in each important
area and deliver improved quality lead generation as the marketplace
grows increasingly more competitive. Employment branding is as much an
internal process as it is an external one. That's why it's important to
carry the "brand" experience beyond engagement, through onboarding, and
ultimately into support of your retention initiatives. To determine if
you are living the "brand" as an employer, solicit feedback from recent
hires and those employees whose contributions you want to replicate.
Equally important is obtaining feedback from those desired candidates
who turned down an offer of employment and developing improvements to
address those issues.
- Execute and evaluate.
Once you are ready for marketplace execution, you need to develop a
platform of internal communications with a target launch date for the
new employment brand. Give employees multiple touch points with the new
brand by leveraging technology and appropriate internal communication
channels. Unveil the new theme, visuals, and supporting strategy to
engage new talent. This will create the necessary awareness and support
among key employee stakeholders, who can leverage the new brand
strategy to further perpetuate the right image around your organization
as an employer of choice. Engaged employees, who are resolved to share
in the challenge of attracting more like-minded talent to an
organization where they believe one can exceed one's own potential, are
the pinnacle achievement of any employment brand.
Keep in mind that employment branding is an ongoing process.
Evaluate your success regularly, and don't be afraid to update, adjust,
and change direction as your needs dictate. Committing to the process
and investing in the tools to deliver the brand messaging in a
meaningful way will help define your unique employment value
proposition in the minds of your target audience. The differentiation
established through branding will improve your opportunity to engage
the RIGHT talent in even the most competitive labor market.
The
best part of a successful employment branding initiative is that your
talent will increasingly prove to be your organization's most distinct
competitive business advantage!
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