The eleventh edition of WEDDLE’s Guide to Employment Sites on the Internet – the book the American Staffing Association called the “Zagat” of the online employment services field – is now available at Amazon.com.
This edition is completely updated, so if you have the 2011/12 Guide or an even earlier edition, you need this all-new classic right now!
The book features:
Click here to get your copy of Weddle’s Guide to Employment Sites on the Internet today.
The Employment Brand That’s No Brand At All
Employment branding gets a lot of coverage both at recruiting conferences and in recruiting publications. Despite the interest, however, most employers don’t have an employment brand. They either can’t be bothered or the brand they do create doesn’t say anything memorable. As a result, they are a faceless organization, and that vacant expression becomes their image in the job market.
A strong employment brand is essential to success in the War for the Best Talent. Top performers have choices. They are almost always employed so they can stay with their current employer or they can consider a new one from among the numerous inquiries they receive on a regular basis. And, the single most important input to their assessment of the alternatives is each organization’s employment brand.
Why, then, do so many organizations either lack an employment brand altogether or develop one that makes them invisible to top talent? Not surprisingly, each situation has a different cause.
The Case of the Missing Brand
Despite the constant battle for top performers in recruiting today, many employers never get around to developing a brand that will attract and engage these individuals. And yet, many of those that lack such a brand actually think they have one. They believe their organization’s consumer brand is their employment brand.
Consumer brands, however, only work because buyers already know something about a product. They have experience with cars or computers or television sets, so the brand can leverage that knowledge and take shortcuts – in the form of a short phrase or tag line – to communicate an image or sense of the organization and/or its product.
Candidates, on the other hand, aren’t shopping for an organization’s products but rather for its employment opportunity. They’ve had no experience with the organization so know little or nothing about what it’s like to work there. For that reason, an employment brand must be more comprehensive – in the form of a brief but descriptive statement – and communicate what the organization stands for as an employer.
Think of the difference this way: a consumer brand only has to entice a buyer, while an employment brand must educate as well as attract a prospective new hire. That’s why using a consumer brand as an employment brand is the functional equivalent of not having an employment brand at all.
The Case of the Say Nothing Brand
Other employers think that they have branded themselves with the content on the career or employment page of their corporate Web-site. They believe that by describing the organization’s benefits, facilities and corporate track record, they’ve established an employment brand that matters to top talent. They haven’t.
An employment brand is not a description of the organization, but rather a window on what it’s like to work for and in the organization. It is based on culture and values, to be sure, but it translates those organizational attributes into a signature statement about the unique experience it offers to the individuals who are employed there.
Why is developing such an experiential brand so important? Because research has shown that the nature of work in the organization is the #1 trigger for top talent. Sure, they want to know what the requirements and responsibilities of a job are, but whether or not they will choose to do the work will be based on the environment in which it is performed.
Top performers want to stay top performers so they look for organizations that establish the right conditions for their success. They look for an employer that provides the support, leadership, camaraderie and ethos they need to do their best work, and the first judgment they make about those conditions is based on its employment brand.
With too many open reqs to fill and too many applicants to screen, it’s easy to put an employment brand on the back burner. In a highly competitive labor market, however, that brand is the single best way to reach and engage those top performers who will best contribute to an organization’s success.
Thanks for reading,
Peter
Visit me at Weddles.com
You Pick the Winners
The recruiting field is awash in self-appointed pundits who opine that this site or that one is the best for acquiring top talent. But, they aren’t the people who know best. You are.
That’s why we at WEDDLE’s hold the User’s Choice Awards every year. They are the only awards in the online employment services industry in which actual users – employers and recruiters, job seekers and career activists – get to pick the winners.
So, let your voice be heard. The ballot necessarily lists only a small subset of the 100,000+ job boards and career portals now operating on the Web. You can pick some of them and/or nominate others … but the choice is yours.
Please click here and cast your vote today.
The Best Online Recruitment Tool Ever
WEDDLE’s Directory of Employment Web Sites is a one-of-a-kind database of job boards, social media sites, career portals, aggregators, employment-related search engines, job ad distribution companies, recruitment blogs and other recruiter resources. Its 9,000+ entries are organized by occupational field, industry, geographic focus and other specializations (e.g., diversity, veterans).
If you want to:
then the WEDDLE’s Directory is for you!
The database is delivered to users online and is both internally searchable and suitable for downloading into a CRM system.
Click here to order your copy or contact WEDDLE’s at 203-964-1888 for additional information.
Recruiters Have Careers Too
Recruiters have careers too. And, in today’s economy, they need to protect them! Even the best of recruiters have found themselves laid off by their employer or at a dead end in their organization.
How can you protect yourself?
Get Peter Weddle’s new guide, The Career Fitness Workbook. It’s available at Amazon.com.
The book has a number of special features:
So, get your career in shape. Get The Career Fitness Workbook today!