How to
Build A Magnetic Employer Brand™ - Part II
by David Lee
originally published in ERExchange.com
In the first part of this series,
we discussed five principles and practices involved in building a compelling
employer brand:
1. Put Together a Team That Understands,
Influences, and Experiences All Facets of Employer Branding and Your Employer
Brand
2. Involve Employees In Every Facet of the
Process
3. Become an Expert on Your Target Market
4. Find Out If You Deliver What Employees Want
5. Think “Experience”
In Part II of
this four part series, we will discuss the process of identifying your “default
employer brand”.
For Better or For Worse, You Already Have an Employer Brand
The process of
building a powerful employer brand starts with identifying your default
employer brand – the perception people already have of your organization as an
employer. “Many companies start the Employer Branding process thinking ‘Since
we don’t have an employer brand and we’re starting from scratch, we can mold
and shape ours to be whatever we want it to be,” says Chris Johnson, Director
of Employee Communications Services at Shaker Recruitment Advertising &
Communications.
What they don’t
realize is that they already have an employer brand – for better or for worse.
The myriad of encounters their organization has had with employees, customers,
and their community has left an impression.
Thus, the first
step in building a compelling employer brand is to identify what that
impression is. Discovering how you’re perceived as an employer will show you
both what to accentuate and what to fix. This discovery process will help you
identify your organization’s unique positive qualities – the building blocks to
be used in constructing your desired employer brand. It will also help you
identify negative perceptions people have of your organization as an employer,
and the practices that have created these perceptions. Later in the process,
this information will be used to make changes that will strengthen your
employer brand. In the rest of this article, we will focus on how to gather the
information necessary for identifying these perceptions.
Find Out What Mental
and Emotional Associations Have Already Been Created
A brand
comprises the thoughts, emotions, and images customers associate with a
particular product, service, or company. These associations are created through
a customer’s interactions with that product, service, or company. When
customers think about the product or service, hear or see a marketing message
about that product or service, or prepare to interact with that company, these
associations are automatically triggered.
Thus, when
strategizing on how to strengthen a brand, marketing experts first seek to
identify what associations consumers currently have to that brand. Similarly,
you will want to identify what associations people
have made to your organization as an employer. To identify these associations,
you will want to interview:
·
current employees
·
former employees
·
people who have turned down job offers with your company
·
people in your industry – your vendors, competitors &
industry associations
·
people who represent the various job disciplines and levels
for which you continuously hire externally and/or promote from within
·
managers from all levels within your company
·
the community in which you reside
·
colleges that you may recruit from
Find out what
people have heard about your organization as an employer. Find out whether your
company is seen as a “first choice” or an “if nothing better comes along”
employment prospect. Ask them about what
words and phrases come to mind when they think about your company. Do you hear
phrases like “sweat shop,” “They have great ads about being a wonderful place
to work, but in real life it’s nothing like that” or do you hear comments like
“top shelf,” “fun place to work,” ”They care about their people,” and “They
expect a lot, but they give a lot”?
From your
employees, ask for words and phrases that capture the essence of their work
experience and your organization as an employer. The responses you get from
your employees and people outside your organization will give you a glimpse
into the mental and emotional associations that have inadvertently been created
in the minds of employees and job seekers. Later in this series, we’ll explore
how to manage your employer brand so that every interaction your company has
with employees, job seekers, customers, and the public builds positive
associations that strengthen your employer brand.
Collect Stories That Capture The Essence
of Your Organization
Ask employees
and managers at all levels to share stories that, in their opinion, define what
it’s like working in your organization. To help trigger their recall, offer a
list of employee/employer moments of truth – interactions that impact and shape
an employee’s perception of their employer. These include such perception
defining moments as how they experienced your hiring process, orientation, and
first sixty days on the job. Other
critical moments of truth include how your company deals with difficult news
and uncomfortable changes, whether their supervisor shows appreciation, whether
they feel their requests for adequate resources are ignored or heard, and
whether or not management solicits employee input on changes that affect their
jobs. With the help of your Employee Advisory Council, create a list of the
critical moments of truth that shape an employee’s perception of their employer
and use this to help interviewees recall brand-defining stories.
Such stories
don’t have to be dramatic or long drawn out epics to be powerful and telling.
They can be as simple as the following: at Lincoln Financial Group of
At a seminar I
was leading a couple of years ago, I had a supervisor from MBNA, a perennial
member of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work
For list, tell the group a story about a moment of truth he had with
his employer. He had been wondering if working in this particular division of
the company was right for him and whether he even wanted to work in a call
center at all. When he experienced the following moment of truth, he realized
he was in the right place: an elderly gentleman called to thank MBNA for extending
his wife and him credit. He told the customer service representative that his
wife, in her late 70’s, had always dreamed of getting her college degree and
had used their credit card to help finance this endeavor. She would be
graduating that spring. The customer service representative who took the call
relayed it to the supervisor. The supervisor went out and purchased a
graduation card, everyone on the team signed it, and
sent it to the new graduate.
By gathering
these kinds of stories, especially those around critical moments of truth, your
employer branding team will be able to assess your organization’s strengths and
weaknesses as an employer, gain diagnostic clues about your default employer
brand, and gather the building blocks for creating your desired employer brand,
a step that will come later. These stories will also become an integral part of
communicating your employer brand both internally and externally.
Identify Your Organization’s Personality
Just like
people, every organization has a unique constellation of attributes, talents,
shortcomings, charming qualities, and quirks. Getting clear about your
organization’s personality is a prerequisite to communicating your uniqueness
as an employer. Having a clear sense of your organization’s personality also
improves your hiring process. “The more clear you are about what your company
is about, the better you’ll be at getting the right people.” notes Scott Helbing, VP of Global Brand Strategy at Dell Computers Just
as in dating, the more you know about yourself and the more you know what
you’re looking for, the fewer frogs you end up kissing.
Because Dell’s
management is clear about who they are – a company
whose phenomenal success has been built upon operational excellence – they both
attract and actively screen for individuals who share that passion for action.
Contrast Dell’s corporate personality with another famous technology company,
Apple. Apple’s iconoclastic, visionary corporate personality and its focus on
leading edge product development offers a work
experience different from Dell’s. By knowing clearly who they are, both Dell
and Apple can articulate their unique work experience offerings and more
effectively attract and recruit people who can contribute to their success.
When it comes to employer branding, it pays to “know thyself”.
Strive For Unflinching Honesty
Just as “knowing
thyself” in the personal realm isn’t always easy or necessarily pleasant,
asking for feedback about your organization’s personality will bring you a mixture
of good news and bad news. Avoid the tendency to believe your own press and to
deny the validity of perceptions that don’t fit your views, especially if the feedback contradicts your published
materials.
How your
employer branding team responds to unflattering perceptions, especially those
expressed by employees, will be a critical moment of
truth. Will you write them off as inaccurate and uninformed or will you take
them seriously? Remember that to the perceiver, perception is reality. Whether
the perception is real or not in actuality, the consequences of a person’s
perceptions are very real. Likewise,
when looking at your employer brand, consequences of employee perceptions hold
very real consequences for your ability to be viewed as their employer of
choice.
One
common example of the very real effect of employee perceptions – whether
they’re accurate or not – comes from the call center industry. A frequent
lament among customer service representatives (CSRs)
working in call centers is that management cares more about quantity than
quality. They feel they are judged more by how many calls they can take, rather
than how well they serve their customers. This perception has significant
employee satisfaction implications which translate to serious employer branding
implications. Now, depending upon the company, this perception ranges from very
accurate to inaccurate.
For companies
where CSR perceptions are accurate – management doesn’t value quality as much
as quantity – the understandable consequences is diminished “company pride” and
job satisfaction. However, for companies where management truly does value
quality as much as quantity – and therefore CSR perceptions are inaccurate –
the consequence is still the same: diminished corporate pride and job
satisfaction.
In the latter
case, the moment of truth becomes whether management dismisses CSR perceptions
(“They simply don’t get it, no matter what we say”) or whether they take it
seriously, even if they disagree vehemently with that perception. Taking it
seriously would mean adding to the organizational improvement action list the
following: “Find out what we’re doing
that sends out the wrong message” and “What can we do to both communicate how
strongly we value quality and to reinforce it by our processes?” This list will
be addressed later in the employer branding process.
As you work on
this step of the process, remember that identifying your default employer brand
is different from building your desired employer brand. It isn’t about how you
want things to be, it’s about what is.
Get Ready For Phase Two
By doing the
research described above, you will have identified your default employer brand.
You will have a mosaic of attributes and emotions associated with your
organization as an employer. You will have a library of stories that add depth
and nuance to your employer brand analysis and – when it comes time to tell
your story – will bring your employer brand to life. With the guidance of the
branding expert(s) on your employer branding team, these attributes, emotions,
and stories will coalesce into an image of your default employer brand. This
will be the foundation upon which you will build your desired employer brand.
At this point,
you will also have a list of organizational and supervisory practices and
processes that need to be improved upon for you to deliver on your employer
brand promise. In the next segment of this series, we’ll explore how to define
what that promise will be.
Special thanks to Christine Johnson, Director of Employee
Communications Services, Shaker Recruitment
Advertising & Communications for both her conceptual and stylistic
contribution to this article.
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About the
Author: David Lee is a consultant, speaker, and executive coach.
The founder of HumanNature@Work, he has worked with
organizations and presented at conferences throughout
For More Information:
David Lee, President
HumanNature@Work
P.O. Box 430
Bar Mills, Maine 04004
Tel: 207-929-3344
E-mail: info@HumanNatureAtWork.com