Earlier this year, John Sullivan wrote a great piece on employment branding that I thought I would bring back to life. In it, he describes some great steps to creating a brand as well as advertising that brand once developed. I’d like to highlight just a couple of points here and then send you along to read the rest of his article.
(#4) Take a market-segmented approach. An employment brand promise must fit the “job switch” criteria and retention criteria of each of the major groups of applicants/employees you’re trying to attract/retain. While the core components of the employment brand must remain consistent, a portion of the brand experience and brand communications must flex to fit the needs of any unique job family, business unit, or geographic region. As a brand manager, manage different brands for geographic regions and job classifications like engineers, administrative help, and hourly employees. ((Sullivan, Sullivan. February 5, 2007. “Don’t Be Fooled by Employment Branding: What it Is and What it Is Not!” Retrieved from http://www.ere.net/articles on September 14, 2007.))
Clearly if you are Boeing or JPL, you have vastly differing talent needs in your multiple business channels. In some places you’re looking for senior practitioners (in this case, literally rocket scientists with lots of senior experience). However, you may also have some segments where you are simply looking for well qualified manufacturing engineers and technicians. How you design your brand is brought into light in the next point of Dr. Sullivan’s.
(#5) Have clear brand pillars. No firm can be all things to all people, so identify your specific brand attributes early on. These brand pillars might include opportunities to innovate, rapid internal movement, family friendly, or benefit rich. In most cases, pillars should align with elements required to win “good place to work” awards and the key job-switch criteria of your target audience. ((Ibid))
The market segment approach clearly means that you want your different brand elements to be highlighted in different places. For your senior rocket scientists (in the prior example), you’re probably looking at slightly older, more experienced people who have already determined a career path, and may have existing families. Here, your brand might be more weighted towards the family friendly and benefit rich type of brands. On the other hand, where you have lower level engineers in the production environments, you might be looking for brands that reflect upward mobility and learning opportunities.
This certainly does not mean that you don’t also have a global brand. However, the brand should be targeted to whatever talent needs you have in any specific location or business. Take a look at Sullivan’s article and read the rest of it including how to advertise the brand once you have it.
2 responses to “Creating the Employment Brand”
Way back when I was (a) still in recruitment (b) writing my blog I wrote quite a lot about that. For segmentation try: http://resourcingstrategies.com/2005/07/12/the-two-dimensions-of-segmentation/
We’ve done quite a lot of analysis on this over the last few years & I’ve been fortunate enough to have big enough data sets at my disposal to ask some interesting questions. The main points that come through are as follows:
* The corporate brand is far more important for recruitment than anything recruitment related
* The employment brand becomes more important for retention than recruitment.
* Differences in recruitment needs are most likely to differ by geographic location rather than department
Where it really starts to make a difference is to understand the segments to such a level that you can redesign the product – eg structure non-salary benefits to appeal to various segments. Only if you are offering a better, differentiated, employment offer will you attract great people and keep the ones you want.
We’ve done some interesting stuff using conjoint analysis – looking at different elements of the employment proposition and what appealed most to the talent pool. What was interesting, however, was using the data to segment not on demographics, but on motivators. Only one group in four identified really seemed to be aligned with where the corporate strategy was heading, which was interesting and led to changes in talent ID and recruitment.