Nov 06
27
Employee branding (ERE Conference day 1)
The best speaker of the day was in my opinion Keith Robinson from Engage. He talked about what we called arbeidsmarketing. In his opinion recruitment isn’t HR, it’s either marketing or a stand alone function. Never looked at it that way, but can he be right? Well, he is right about one thing: a job seeker is a consumer. You need to treat him with the same respect and a bad experience will cost you dearly. He had a great research: did you know that a bad recruitment experience will make it a lot less likely for a job seeker to buy something from you? And that he will tall many others about his bad experience? For me this was an eye opener. Not that it happens, but this means marketing should get involved in the streamlining of the recruitment process. Since losing customers gives them a reason too.
Other good point he made are that talent pools don’t exist, at least, not if you consider them to be a database. In order to have a talent pool, you need to become a publisher and give them relevant content in relevant times. And relevant doesn’t mean ‘what are we doing as a company shit’ but truly stuff you would like to read professionally.
In his opinion there needs to be alignment between HR / Recruitment, Marketing and Corporate affairs. You need to have one voice, one brand. Everybody remembers what the CEO said, and if that’s good for shareholders, but bad from employees, it will become bad for shareholders because you don’t get any new employees.
Another speaker on this subject was Degussa from Germany. This session I needed to separate content from presentation. Because although the presentation skills were pretty bad, the (first part of the) story was actually nice. They decided to build a global employee brand and make some critical decisions in this:
- Most important stakeholder are the employees (not the potential employees)
- Competitors on the employment market can differ from the competitors in the commercial market
- The corporate brand (and it’s values) need to be the starting point for an employee brand.
I think it’s good to make these decisions and make them clear when you start thinking about: How do I want to position myself on the employee market?
Degussa, a company made out of many mergers, found itself without an employee brand. The employees, being merged 4 or 5 times in 10 years time, lost all connection with the company. So by setting up a new brand, not only did they recruit new people, they also managed to retain a lot of people who are now proud to work for the company (again).
