EmployerBrand

Businesses across the globe are embracing the concept of Employer Brand; they understand that communicating with candidates and employees is a very different science to communicating with their customers and many have spent a lot of money to understand and develop an Employer Brand that will work for them. The problem is that an Employer Brand is not a magic wand in itself and in fact it can be a burden because if you don’t achieve consistency with everything you do in projecting and communicating that brand to the outside world, then it will ultimately fail, particularly with the brutally brand aware Generation Y.

In this age of outsourcing, preferred supplier lists and off-shoring; there are a whole collection of partners and subsidiary businesses trusted with upholding and enhancing your reputation as an employer. Do you ever ask yourselves whether they are doing it the right way? Can you afford cost considerations alone to dilute down an Employer Brand that you spent so much to establish? I suspect that in most cases the answer to the first question is no and I know that the answer to the second must be no.

Having an all singing all dancing web-site and a great campus presence and intelligent careers fair attendance as part of cost effective recruitment strategy that includes great on-boarding is not enough if the authenticity of what you are trying to achieve is shot down in flames by a recruiter, in-house or outside, who is working under your Brand banner and who does not do what the brand promises.

If you scratch the surface of your Employer Brand anywhere along the journey that a candidate makes with you and you don’t like what you see or hear, then if you are the guardian of the Employer Brand for your business (and aren’t we all??), you must act immediately because reputations are hard earned and easily lost.

With blogs and social networking at their most effective your Employer Brand can be celebrated and become a focus of aspiration for the best candidates but equally if you don’t achieve a consistently impressive result your ability to attract, secure and retain the best talent will be severely impacted, possibly permanently.