Employer branding: pulling the levers for talent attraction

From the Silicon Valley to the factory shop-floors, it's all about people; their talent, innovation, ingenuity and capabilities. The simple yet profound truth is that it's the ‘human capital factor' that drives commerce. The engines of business will stop turning if the human capital factor is removed from the equation of business.

The pursuit of talent

In today's rapidly changing business environment, it's no surprise that organisations find themselves in a stampede to get the best talent on the job market. This pursuit for talent is to ensure that organisations build sustainable talent and skill pipelines critical to consolidate their competitive posture in the market. Interestingly, talent markets are also rapidly evolving in terms of their profiles, demographics and general dynamics. In some cases, talent shortage has meant that talent markets become a job-seeker's market leading to high premiums in salary packages to attract or retain key talent.

The Y-generation or ‘digital natives' with their free-spiritedness and radical set of values, that go at a tangent to generation-X, are changing the landscape of talent markets. They can't be ignored and organisations must evolve to create engaging employment experiences for them. Employer branding therefore presents an excellent platform for an organisation to leverage its efforts in attracting, engaging and retaining talent.

Defining employer branding

“An employer brand is a set of attributes and qualities - often intangible - that makes an organisation distinctive, promises a particular kind of employment experience, and appeals to those people who will thrive and perform to their best in its culture”. CIPD Oracle's legendary founder and CEO, Larry Ellison, is on record as saying, "Your brand is what people say about you when you've left the room."

“A brand is the DNA that separates a product from a commodity.” - David Michaelson

Encouragingly, every organisation has a unique employment experience. It is this unique and differentiating employment experience that an organisation must carefully package and brandish to the full view of its employees and prospective employees. Knowingly or unknowingly, your employer brand gets talked about on the golf course, at the club, over lunch or over drinks at the waterhole. It's these social conversations that influence your ability as an organisation to attract or retain talent. The strong business case for employer branding is that it generates these social conversations in the job market resulting in an organisation being put in good stead in its talent management efforts.
I would imagine that every IT geek would want to work for Google or Microsoft. Google in its ‘Life at Google' videos projects an unapologetic message that it's a creative nest, a place where fun and work can be mixed with amazing results. Google attracts 777,000 applicants a year. It's fitting to call it being spoilt for talent choice with such large volumes of applications, unsolicited for that matter. Who wouldn't want to work at a place with an on-site doctor, dentist, masseur and yes where you can take your dog to work? One of the top ten reasons to work at Google is “We love our employees, and we want them to know it”, this is the essence of employer branding.

Engaging in community evangelism

It's about making it known to your current and prospective employees that you are committed to offering them the best employment experience they can find on the job market. This is what beckons talent to come to you and want to stay with you. LinkedIn has a role for a ‘Community Evangelist', while the focus of this role is to engage in community evangelism, it also has a huge spin off of preaching the gospel of LinkedIn's employer brand to various talent markets. The talent search game has forever changed. Its companies that know how to overhaul their employer brands that'll win in this game. It will not be won through glossy magazines or funky talent campaigns but through authentic introspection on how an organisation intends to offer a unique employment experience. This calls for sleeve-rolling, nail-biting, head-scratching and lots of ink on flip charts in the boardroom.

Guess where this is at? Yes, you are right, it's Google. If a picture says a thousand words, you'll agree these communicate a million words. You feel the vibrancy, the geekness, the fun, the intellect and the creativity. There is a glaring absence of pin-striped suits yet this is one of the massive giants in the Silicon Valley and houses some of the best brains in business.

Understanding your niche talent markets

Successful marketing initiatives don't put their customers in a wholesale market; rather they segment their markets and target their communication to reach a specific audience. The same concept holds true in employer branding, a segmented talent market provides a good platform to deploy targeted campaigns to specific niche talent markets. There is a glaring chasm between recruiting senior executives and graduates. The approach and channels of sourcing for these two groups of talent categories are different. Appointing a headhunting specialist or an executive search consultant to source for a senior executive is appropriate. On the other hand, a funky graduate recruitment campaign will connect better with graduates. One such campaign is the “We Challenge You” British American Tobacco (BAT) Graduate Development Programme ‘designed to prepare the next generation of leaders' for the organisation and ensure a sustainable leadership pipeline in the future.

Deploying tailored-made value propositions to different talent markets is the essence of successful employer branding. It is however noteworthy that as much as talent market segmentation is crucial, there is need to ensure that there is consistency throughout the messages disseminated to the different niche markets. An intimate grasp of your talent markets becomes crucial.

The business case for employer branding

Employer branding provides a basis for driving employee loyalty as much as a compelling consumer brand can drive customer loyalty. There is massive loyalty programmes on the consumer markets, all aimed at attracting and retaining a wider customer base for sustainable business. An authentic employer brand is needed to compete in the talent market and can deliver some of the following key benefits for organisations.

Pulling the talent attraction lever

Any robust talent supply chain process begins with attracting talent. Organisations are waking up to the reality that recruiting is more than just putting an advertisement in the classified columns, hoping that suitable incumbents will respond and the best from the pack hired to start the following Monday. Recruitment is an essential process of feeding the organisational talent pipeline with competent people.

An organisation with a compelling employee value proposition is better positioned on the job market to attract talented employees. The reality of the recruitment game is that job adverts are preceded by the reputation of the organisations that post them. So whether it's a bold full page job advert or a few lines in the classified column, the discerning job seeker will want to know who is behind it all. For bad employer brands, a peep behind all this press rhetoric often reveals poor management style, low pay, poor human relations or skewed performance management systems.

Candidates go through six to twelve interviews to become a Googler - something justified strongly by Google on the basis that they recruit for success and never have to lose people: at 3% turnover in the digital sector, they seem to be getting something very right. Google itself is one of the best global brands to be reckoned with and they deploy such a rigorous approach in their talent sourcing. Undoubtedly, wisdom is shouting in the marketplace.

Talent sourcing channels and branding platforms

As mentioned earlier, recruitment is more than just posting a job advert in the press. There are many talent sourcing channels and branding platforms that can be used to communicate with targeted prospective employees. You'll agree that it's not a breaking news headline that social media has forever revolutionalised the way recruitment and employer branding is done. Those that are averse to technology wish it will one day go away. It won't, we have to adapt and evolve with the change. Who knows yet what other technology surprises are likely to emerge around the bend of technology change? The technology clock continues to evolve and tick faster. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and other online platforms have become part and parcel of our lives. To simply call them social networking platforms is an understatement, they have literally become the pulse that defines the life of business in today's environment.

Facebook provides a platform for businesses to build pages showcasing their products and services. LinkedIn has become a massive talent pond that can't be ignored if an organisation is serious about hunting for talent. Twitter with its flagship bird is enabling people globally to exchange tweets about what is happening around them. YouTube continues to show videos of events happening around our globe. Organisations have an opportunity to harness such platforms to communicate with their targeted audience. The strategy is to have a mix of talent sourcing and branding platforms suitable for each identified talent market.

Simon Barrow of People in Business in the UK, states that tomorrow's CEOs will spend more time on their organisation's reputation as an employer, than with the investment community, and fund managers will worry if they don't. The future trend is that the soundness of an employer brand will become a key indicator of an organisation's overall performance. For now, HR practitioners need to roll sleeves and keep pulling the levers for talent attraction, engagement and retention. To do that successfully and smartly, employer branding presents the mechanical advantage.