Thursday, October 25, 2007

“EMPLOYER BRAND: BECOMING AN EMPLOYER OF CHOICE”

A “good place to work” tag is critical to a company’s ability to attract, motivate and retain the best and the brightest, thus gaining competitive advantage in the marketplace. Globally, those companies that are voted as ‘Best Companies to Work For’ also yield higher returns for shareholders. In the era where Talent war is in such an aggressive phase as never seen before, the question is how an organization can create a niche for itself in the industry so that people look forward to join it, and those who are a part of it right now, will think thrice before any job hopping and will give 100% at workplace. How the organization creates that magnetism for talent, how it develops brand ambassadors out of its employees, and how it becomes “The Great Place to Work For”.

Employer Branding?
A brand is a relationship. It is a process to reinforce company values, and to gain credit for all the things the corporation does right. . “Employer Branding” is the process of creating an identity and managing the company’s image in its role as an employer. As organizations are complex, open systems, single interventions are not enough. The employer brand has to be aligned and congruent with what the company delivers to the employee, customer, public and shareholder.

Employer branding is the employer’s chance to set itself apart from its competitors in the war for talent. If your brand execution is poor, your company should revisit its communications strategy to ensure it's delivering clear, consistent messages. If carried out successfully, employer branding helps employees answer the question ‘what's in it for me?' Employer branding is very much a reality for almost all successful companies today.

Making of a Brand
Gone are the days when HR used to confine itself in the cozy corners of the offices, keeping themselves busy enforcing the policies thrust upon them by the figureheads of the organization. Now they are into the boardrooms developing the people side of the business strategy. Corporate leaders have historically looked to other functions, such as product development, marketing, and sales, to drive corporate success, today more and more eyes are looking to HR for help.
Today’s organizations aware of the fact that the only way to communicate the corporate brand to customers is the employee and the customer experience they are capable of providing. Customer service is a factor that is largely influenced by the quality of the workforce, which in turn is largely influenced by the quality of recruiting and workforce management systems developed and maintained by HR.

Explore your Customers (internal and external):
The first step in creating or enhancing a brand identity is to determine who your customers are and what they need from the HR function. HR must also know its customers’ current perceptions of the HR department (Branding relies upon their perception, not yours). Begin this process by identifying your customers. Are your primary customers’ executive managers, line managers or the entire workforce? What products and services do they use from HR? What would they like to receive from HR?

More Things to do:

Stop execution of HR in a vacuum. Managing the most valuable corporate asset in a world-class way requires cooperation with marketing and finance.


  • Organization should measure the success of its recruiting and training initiatives based on the customer perception of the quality of its workforce; after all, it is their opinion that matters most!



  • Develop a people-program inventory that lists each of the organization's unique human resource or people programs. This list should be used as ammunition to highlight organization’s best practices in marketing pieces and in media articles.



  • Rename some of company’s successful people programs with "catchy" names that grab people’s attention.



  • Invite family and friends of employees on site to see "what it is like to work here" and the importance of employees' work so that they will help spread the word on what a great place your organization is to work.



  • Profile key employee success stories and best management practices on your corporate career web site. Periodically highlight organization’s great people practices in internal publications to remind employees of the great things you do.



  • Bolster the support of union, if the organization has one, to help spread the word about what a great place to work it is.
  • Is it paying off??

    Whether the branding is working for you or not. There is no set standard of measurements that fits every organization, nor should there be – all organizations are different. Still, some examples of metrics that will assist managers to measure their ROI on employer brand programs are as follows
    · Cost-per-hire by sourcing channel
    · Total yield by sourcing channel (quantity and quality)
    · Candidate retention by channel
    · Interview-to-offer ratio among candidates by channel
    · Offer-to-acceptance ratio among candidates by channel

    Other less traditional measures include promotion readiness rating, external v internal hire ratio, quality-hire ratio, performance ratings of newly promoted managers and manager/executive failure rate.

    The last word

    The branding process is a complex orchestration of research, planning, and implementation. It takes an integrated approach to align your corporate and employer brand communication. Your employer brand is established within and extends outward, connecting your promise with current and potential talent. Today, new products are emerging by the minute, introducing new technologies and new choices. At the same time, the Internet is diffusing and accelerating the flow of information. In this unpredictable business environment, today’s premium brand can be an anachronism tomorrow.

    Thus, HR has much greater role to perform. This role will be responsible for developing systems that identify and manage how the organization is perceived by both internal and external key talent constituencies to ensure that the organization develops and maintains a dominant position in relevant labor markets as the employer of choice.

    Contemplated & Written by: Virender Pratap Singh, MHROD (Batch of 2008), Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University

    1 comment:

    Unknown said...

    hi,

    a very good article by guruji, i must say.

    even i wrote one on the same topic and can surely say that this is the opportunity for HR we can encash in our near future because we can show our marketing skills.

    hope to have an article from your side recently on the "techniques of employer branding"