By Roger Philby, founder and chief executive of The Chemistry Group in Recruitment
Article was first published on HRZone
A couple of years ago, we asked a number of FTSE 250 HR directors the question: “Given the option, would you rehire your workforce or would you start again?”
While the response to the survey wasn’t huge, it was sufficient to draw a few conclusions – not least because a huge 68% of respondents said they would choose not to take on their existing personnel again.
But I wasn’t as shocked by this finding as you might think. Once upon a time, I asked a chief executive client which members of his sales force he would hire again based on what he knew now. In addition, I said that, if he could name more than 25 out of 100 of them, I would give him an eye-watering discount. He got as far as 17. Read the rest of this entry »
By Daniel Wägerth and Joao Araujo
Joao Araujo
Daniel Wägerth
2012 is here and after over 20,000 meetings with companies held by Universum’s team throughout 2011, we’ve had interesting discussions about what to expect this year. The first impression is that our colleagues in Africa, Asia and US are feeling that the competition for talent is getting fiercer, while the European colleagues see a market where employer brands are getting more innovative and competitive. All in all, we see seven trends that might shape 2012:
1. New players will take up the space left by those that retreat due to the uncertain market conditions.
We’re just in the second week of the year and we are already seeing new companies jumping into the world of employer branding. But would this represent a fiercer competition in the talent market? In the stock market there’s a term dubbed “shake out weak hands” which happens when oscillations in the markets make those that don’t truly believe in an investment to get rid of it. 2012 might be the “shake out weak hands” for employer branding and talent attraction: those companies that don’t yet truly believe in the benefits will withdraw and focus on short-term recruitment, while those that have defined their long-term goals will keep working strategically and aim to be the ideal employer of their talent groups. Read the rest of this entry »
By Nikki Hall, chief HR officer at SHL in Recruitment, Managing people, Business lifestyle
“Trends 2012: Talent management” was first published on HRZone
It’s been difficult for the HR industry to keep pace with the multitude of employment law changes this year – a situation compounded by the turbulent economic situation in Europe.
The UK Government’s reference to ”six years of austerity” was no empty threat and businesses are continuing to make redundancies, undertake restructuring and redeploy staff as a result. But while unemployment rates soar, talent gaps also continue to exist.
Forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility suggest that a huge 2.8 million people – many of whom are aged between 16 and 24 – will be out of work in 2012, some 200,000 more than forecast in 2011. And such a scenario is only likely to result in companies being even more inundated with job applications than they already are. Read the rest of this entry »
Print ads, brochures, Facebook, campus events. Finding the right communication channels has mainly been guesswork. Not so anymore: a new Universum survey shows just what channels grab student attention, and at what stage of the game they are most effective.
By Fred Cohn
Sometimes the medium really is the message. Corporate recruiters can’t help but understand this: any time they devise a communication strategy, they might well contemplate Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum. They have a choice of numerous channels for reaching job prospects: print and television ads, brochures, social networks, career fairs, campus presentations, job boards, and above all, company Web sites. They also know it’s important to choose the right channel. It doesn’t matter how strong the employer branding message is, unless it’s transmitted through the correct carrier it won’t reach its full effect. But until now, there has been very little reliable data to help them choose the proper pipeline. Read the rest of this entry »
By Christopher Van Mossevelde
The inside out approach
It’s important to reiterate the obvious: unhappy employees spread bad news about you as an employer; unhappy employees make for unhappy customers and spread bad PR about your company’s products and services; unhappy employees perform poorly and badmouth you as an employer scaring off potential hires or top talents. If you hear something bad about a person – would you choose to be their acquaintance? Probably not! You would most likely avoid that person altogether. The same applies to employers that have bad reputations – who enjoys being around something that smells fishy? Nobody!
All communication professional understand the principles of the ripple effect, the huge potential and huge detriment that a simple message can do: to become either a company’s dream scenario of brand idolization or a devastating earthquake of brand deterioration. Thus, it couldn’t be simpler – start with your primary asset: your employees. Adopt the inside out approach to your branding activities; ensure that you have happy employees – it will result in positive and proactive brand ambassadors; ones that believe in your company’s products and service; people who feel excited about going to work and performing their best; employees that will try to encourage their friends to join them; your top performs will know people on par to their level of expertise and professionalism, i.e. brilliant people know other brilliant people.
So what can be done? How can you be better with your internal employer brand?
1) Be honest – don’t pretend to be something you’re not! Everyone hates liars or pretentious performers.
2) Focus on your strengths instead of your weaknesses – nobody is perfect, so nobody expects you to be. But don’t be shy to talk about what’s positive about working for your company instead of another.
3) Be inspirational and aspirational – aim to set an example, be a good role model and continue to try making your company self improve. Again, nobody is perfect, but nobody likes slackers and a “I don’t care” attitude.
4) Show compassion and you’ll get loyalty. If you’re a friend who doesn’t care, you’re not a friend at all. The same applies to you as an employer – neglect your staff, treat them like machines and only think about the bottom line, and you’ll get very few people who care about you in return and who will be willing to fight for you when times get tough.
5) Communicate, interact and get feedback from your people on a daily basis via multiple channels: face-to-face, email, video, conferences, notice-boards, events, newsletters, magazines, phone calls, etc. It’s better to over communicate than say nothing. You have to work on your friendship with your employees – if you don’t talk and listen to them, they’ll become distant and reserved and will decide to befriend somebody else.
I would like to wish everyone a good start to 2012 – let’s hope we start believing in opportunities again, find solutions to problems and, more importantly, make positive changes for a better future.
Before we embark into a new year, I would like to make a quick recap of the top 5 most read articles on employer branding today, i.e. non-ranking related stories.
Talent management is about how to manage employees. Employer branding is about how to create and communicate a strong corporate culture that resonates well with your right target group. This article addresses how talent managers can incorporate employer branding activities in their work. Read more
Universum has seen a trend of employers targeting younger audiences. In this article, we highlight a few examples of companies that are thinking long-term about their talent pipeline and we go back to basics on what talent relationship management actually means. Read more
Cecilia Dahlström, Global Marketing Director and guru of personality targeting, introduces the new trend of attracting candidates based on their cultural fit rather than skill set. Having the right attitude today is more important than aptitude. Read more
Being a social network, Facebook is its people and they, in turn, are the company’s brand ambassadors. The organization is extremely flat, no hierarchy of positions or top management sitting in an ivory tower. This is the image that Facebook conveyed to Universum in an exclusive one-on-one session with Matt Millunchick, recruiting programs manager, and Orna Holland, EMEA recruiting manager, to get the inside story. Read more
It’s unquestionable that today’s employers need to embrace a diverse and globalised workforce. Aside from being obligated by law to provide equal opportunities and not to discriminate, evidence shows that diversity is beneficial in a number of aspects. However, if employers want to build a more diverse workforce, they need to be sensitive to dissimilar needs and wants. Read more
Todd Raphael, Editor-in-Chief, ERE Media
Employer Branding Today is proud to welcome guest writer Todd Raphael, Editor-in-Chief of ERE Media. In his article, Todd explains that despite your written policies, your employees still have another perception or understanding of your workplace. The question is: How can you, as an employer, identify and address all those unwritten policies that create an atmosphere of uncertainty?
By Todd Raphael, Editor-in-Chief of ERE Media
I was recently on the phone for ERE.net, talking to a company president about our website, conferences, and so on. He said it’d been an emotional day: an employee told him she was pregnant with her third child, and that she was scared.
He told me he wasn’t 100% sure why she was scared, but a small part of it, he thought – written policies or the law aside — was a fear she’d somehow lose her job or wouldn’t be wanted anymore. (“I’ve decided to keep it,” she told him – almost as if she thought he was going to tell her she shouldn’t!) Read the rest of this entry »
Anna Mindelöf, Universum´s Talent Strategy Director, reports on the progress of her work on the company´s internal employer brand. Among many things, it´s about making a revision in the company´s Talent Management process, changes that simultaneously enrich HR.
Since my last blog post, I’ve launched a new Talent Management process. Earlier we’ve measured performance and attitude on a six-degree scale. Now I’ve added a dimension I call “potential”. I think we need to work on identifying our super talents at Universum and help them to maximize their potential. It´s at Universum we should find our future management team and middle managers. Read the rest of this entry »
Fig 1. Business Plan
Universum has been doing research on the employer branding (EB) industry for the last 20 years. We have seen EB start from being a new buzzword to being an active component of a company’s corporate strategy. There is proof of companies being successful due to their recruitment and retention of the right talent and their strategic work with EB to achieve it. The magic formulae: they have buy-in from top management, have a clear vision of where the company would like to be, and set goals and objective to reach that sweet spot, their ultimate employer brand position. This strategy is today more and more often linked to the business plan.
Every company has a business plan, which includes a workforce plan. In order to be successful with the latter, Universum recommends having a strong employer branding strategy, as it’s that which will ultimately make you more successful with your recruitment and retention of top talent.
The workforce plan involves deciding how many people you need to recruit and retain, and what education and skills they should have. It’s a concrete plan that is typically based on one to three years. It’s important to focus on the critical target groups that are the hardest to employ due to the competition. Furthermore, it’s imperative to gain the right type of competence to deliver successfully on the goals and objectives outlined in the business plan. In alignment with your workforce plan, your EB strategy will help you achieve your workforce needs and can be done in a simple, yet comprehensive, three-step process, one which will be outlined in this article. Read the rest of this entry »
Christopher Van Mossevelde
cvm@universum.se
Joao Araujo