Peter Weddle has been writing columns for his own newsletter and for the Interactive Edition of The Wall Street Journal since 1999. The following column has been drawn from that work and updated for 2006. For a complete collection of Peter's writing, please see our book Postcards From Space.Brand, Brand on the Wall, What Will Attract the Best of All?
Let's begin with a rash statement: You can't win the War for the Best Talent with the highest quality candidates. That's right; simply going out and recruiting the best and brightest in each career field is not likely to get the performance gains your customers-those pesky hiring managers-really want. Why not? Because only the right quality hires will actually work well in your organization. In other words, the goal of your efforts should be to find and hire the best and brightest who exactly fit both the specifications of your openings and the culture of your organization. They must not only be at the top of their field, but they must be challenged by the work that needs to be done and fit in with the team, department and company where they will do it.
While assessment enables you to make such distinctions among candidates once they have applied, it is your employment brand that ensures you have the right quality candidates to evaluate, in the first place. In other words, assessment is useful only if your organization can (1) attract the top talent who will fit in and (2) persuade them to apply. Fail at those two tasks, and assessment is a waste of your time and effort. You are simply picking the best credentialed person who likely won't perform as required or stay around very long.
How does an employment brand accomplish those tasks? It must address the issues that matter most to the people you most want to hire. It must focus on the key motivators for the unique cohort of the workforce that is right for your organization. In essence, it must answer two questions:
What will induce the right talent to leave whatever they are doing and accept employment with your organization? Top talent is almost always employed someplace else. Therefore, the outward facing aspect of your brand's value proposition must be so compelling that it will overcome the inertia of staying where they are and induce them to take on the risk of moving to a new organization-yours.
What will incent them to resist offers from other organizations and continue their employment with yours? The top talent of your organization is almost always being recruited by your competitors. For that reason, the inward facing aspect of your brand's value proposition must be so powerful that it will blunt the (often formidable) inducements offered by other employers and encourage your best and brightest to stay right where they are.
Answering both of those questions is central to an effective employment brand. However, if you don't get the second one right, working on the first is an exercise in futility.To put it another way, recruiting and retention are inextricably linked through the operation of your employment brand. The external facing aspect of the brand is the promise your organization offers to the right talent during the recruiting process; the internal facing aspect of the brand is how well the organization delivers on that promise. In other words, how much of your employment brand message actually comes true on the shop floor and among the office cubicles? And, how much of it is hype or wishful thinking? Sure, there are other issues that impact on retention, but the alignment between what you say about your organization in your brand and what is real on-the-job and in-the-culture is the key to winning the War for the Best Talent. It sets the tone, or more precisely, becomes the lens through which all other factors (e.g., an employee's relationship with their supervisor, a revision to the benefits program) are viewed.
This alignment is accomplished by ensuring that your employment brand has four key attributes:
Articulate meaningful norms The brand must describe the norms of employment-the workplace values-that are most important to the right quality talent for your organization.
Hype free The brand must be accurate, free of jargon and precisely describe what's important to the organization as an employer, rather than what it takes to sell it to prospects.
Honest The brand must be a true expression of the organization's value proposition for right quality talent.
Appeal to all The brand must engage and resonate with the right quality talent among all cohorts of the organization's workforce, not just to those in a specific career field or to managers and executives.
Build a brand with those 4 attributes, and you'll elicit exactly the response you want from the talent you most want to hire ... AH HA. How can you create such a brand? I suggest you use the following 4-step methodology:
Step 1: Ask the experts. Conduct a series of focus groups with the best performers in your organization in each of the career fields for which you recruit. To the greatest extent possible, these sessions should be candid, uninhibited and unconstrained. If necessary, have a third party conduct the meetings. The goal is to get highly precise answers to those two key questions I noted above: Why did your organization's best employees decide to join the organization and what keeps them there? Capture the exact words and phrases they use as well as their caveats and reservations.
Step 2: Describe what you heard. Using the insights captured in Step 1, draft several versions of your brand message. It's fine to use outside help in this creative effort, but the themes should be based, as closely as possible, on the key ideas expressed by the focus groups. The goal is to leverage their views into no more than two or three key employment values that will resonate with your target demographics. To do that, look for words and phrases that "have legs" (i.e., they have meaning and impact across the spectrum of high performing employees) and avoid the issues that may create dissonance (i.e., they were identified as one of their caveats or reservations).
Step 3: Test your drafts and select the best. Reconvene the focus groups and ask them to evaluate the various drafts. If possible, pick a consensus winner (i.e., one that is compelling to all). Don't force fit a choice, however; if none of the drafts attracts general support among the group participants, repeat Step 2 and try again. Continue the creative effort until you find a message that produces an AH HA among your best and brightest in every career field for which you recruit.
Step 4: Use the message everywhere. All too often, employers go to great effort to devise an employment brand message and then use it only sporadically in their recruiting or not at all. To avoid this mistake, make your organization's brand a mandatory component of every job posting and every classified ad. In addition, make sure that the content in the career area of your organization's Web-site highlights the brand message. In other words, that message should determine what topics are included and which are not and how each topic is addressed on the site. Similarly, the brand should shape the content of any sites you operate for your employee referral and alumni programs as well as for employee communications and your internal mobility system (to address the internal facing aspect of the brand).
Employment brands are often misunderstood. They are not a public relations strategy or solely a communications initiative. They are, instead, an exercise in asset formation. Indeed, a powerful employment brand is as important to an organization as capital and good will, for it alone enables that organization to attract the top talent that's right for its workforce.
Thanks for reading,
Peter
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