Employer branding – alive and kicking?
Thursday, 21 May 2009‘Employer branding is dead, so what now?' was the provocative title of SAS' latest breakfast seminar, held at London's Andaz Hotel on the morning of Thursday 21st September. (Maybe they were on to something - after all, two separate London conferences on the topic had both been cancelled recently.) At any event, the proposition certainly succeeded in getting bums on seats, generating a record attendance for an SAS recruitment-related event in the process.
Marketing and research director Jason Frank set the ball rolling by charting the recent evolution of the employer brand. The ‘brand mania' of the 1980s and '90s was followed by a new interest in brand engagement in the mid-late '90s. A growing focus on organisations' most valuable assets (their people) led to the rise of the employer brand in the late '90s-early noughties - and then the recession hit, with budget cuts, recruitment moratoria and... the death of employer branding?
In fact, SAS' recent survey of some 30 major employers revealed that there's still a strong business appetite for EB, although there are (unsurprisingly) real problems with levels of investment, as well as a number of operational barriers to success (such as the dreaded ‘silo mentality'). So, in effect, there's now a ‘new landscape' for employer branding - characterised, among other things, by a broader concern with reputation management, a focus on activity driven by efficiencies, and a better alignment of employee-facing communications with measurable business objectives.
Kevin Keohane, global director of brand and talent, took up the theme, quoting an array of statistics to demonstrate the clear links between levels of brand engagement and positive business performance. He noted the importance of the brand experience at all stages of the employee life-cycle (or ‘talent journey'), from initial attraction to exit. This typically involves many different touch-points from different parts of the organisation, which means there's a clear need to align all forms of internal communications - strategic, operational, marketing, HR etc - in order to engage employees more effectively.
Richard Lloyd - head of brand, people and culture at BT - then shared some of the work he's been doing based around the concept that ‘people build brand'. ("Products won't realise your vision but people will," as he put it.) With customer service levels and employee attitudes/behaviours seen as the major influences on brand perceptions, his main concern is with getting BT's own people to ‘activate' the brand. A key priority is to bridge the gap between the multiplicity of stakeholder groups ‘doing things to' (or communicating with) employees. The simple message is that they are the brand; they make the difference.
He provided various examples of work (developed by SAS) that (a) help BT employees to ‘get' the brand and then (b) realise personally how they can make a difference. And where employees had been exposed to executions of ‘The difference is you' - effectively, BT's engagement brand - there was a significant and measurable improvement in ‘right first time' operational performance.
For the final presentation, Stephen Mulvenna - talent manager, Europe group for the Coca-Cola company - explained how the business had built a consistent employer brand for Europe over the past nine months or so. Coca-Cola is not only the world's most recognised brand; it's also the world's second-most recognised word (after ‘OK'). (And with 6m hits on its careers website every month compared to some ten actual appointments, there's a clear need to maintain strong engagement levels with around 5,999,990 potential customers.)
The business objectives for building a consistent EB included recruiting and, particularly, retaining high-calibre talent; concentrating on quality rather than quantity (introducing a degree of self-selection into the process); and establishing a more productive dialogue with potential candidates. Considerable initial research was undertaken, involving 25% of the company's internal population as well as interviews with ‘hard to source' external candidates from competing FMCG firms. Interestingly, this revealed a number of significant disconnects between perceptions and realities, with factors like autonomy, innovation and flexibility scoring more highly internally than externally, but vice versa for careers. Naturally, all these issues were addressed through the subsequent brand development.
Work developed with Kevin Keohane and his SAS team included a new careers website (with multilingual capability) that talked about Coca-Cola's vision, values and culture in ways that the company hadn't done before. This represented a key shift from a previously almost secretive approach to a new confidence in selling the firm's culture overtly. There's even a dedicated section on the site for recruitment consultancies and headhunters, who currently supply some 70% of Coca-Cola's European hires (although, with a direct sourcing model due to be implemented shortly, the aim is to reduce this significantly).
Both online and offline creative executions are based around the concept of the secret formula (which incidentally happens to adapt very well to different languages and local environments). The project is expanding all the time, with further innovations such as the impending launch of a new onboarding extranet and potential extension beyond Europe in prospect. And progress is being measured by a range of metrics including engagement, reputation and cost.
Jason Frank then brought proceedings to a close by declaring that employer branding clearly isn't dead yet (which is good news for a branding consultancy, of course), although it may end up with a new name. But for now the emphasis is firmly on effectiveness and efficiencies, and on aligning brand activities to achieve this.
