By Michelle Boyde
Last week I asked the global head of employer branding for one of the world’s most prestigious employers what would be exciting in 2011 and what would be a challenge for those working in EB in 2011. Her answer to both was keeping up with the pace of social and mobile media including phones and iPads.
This week Adidas, the sports firm, was the first employer to launch a recruitment app for the iPhone – over 7,000 applicants downloaded it.
Richard Branson plans to launch a digital magazine specifically for Apple’s iPad called The Project. And on 3rd February Rupert Murdoch and News Corp ploughed ahead launching its new iPad newspaper, The Daily.
When Murdoch invests $30m into a project and Branson is doing the same its time to pay attention. Apple is already working on the new version of the iPad, due to debut in the next few months. Tablets are here to stay and there is an opportunity for the most fast-moving employers to build their brands in this channel before the masses.
Do you have an iPhone app yet? Can your potential employees apply through their tablets? How do your ads look?
By Michelle Boyde
Nokia is in a state of crisis. And for anyone who didn’t know, new CEO Stephen Elop has shouted it loud and clear. In his words, Nokia is on “burning platform”.
Its share of the handset market has dropped from 36.4 per cent in 2009 to 28.9 per cent in 2010. Furthermore, its share of smartphones has dropped from 46.9 per cent in 2009 to 37.6 per cent in 2010.
Nokia represents the disaster looming in the wings if you let your employer brand slip. In 2008 they were ranked 12th by IT students in the UK, now they are 14th. Two years ago Nokia was the most popular employer for Finnish IT students – now they are just the runner up. And over in the US, their rank for IT students has fallen from 47th to 55th from 2008 to 2010. It appears to be a slippery slope – never mind a burning platform.
Their two biggest competitors, Apple and Google, have stronger employer brands – they also have a higher market share of the smartphone market.
It’s a vicious circle: if you don’t offer the most innovative products top talent does not want to work for you. If you cannot hire top talent, you cannot stay ahead of the game to produce the most innovative products.
Nokia has a challenge ahead.
By Michelle Boyde
A picture is worth a thousand words – so the cliché tells us. But are we ready to adopt this philosophy when it comes to the CV. Graduates sending video CVs rather than the tried and tested wordy CV is a growing topic of conversation.
University career advisory services are being approached by companies who can help their students to produce a professional video. The resounding reply from graduate recruiters is they don’t have the resources to look at videos. Equally, it could be a discrimination minefield. A candidate can be judged on experience, qualification and skills alone on paper, but on video all our personal characteristics are laid bare.
But it can be good. If you need someone who is personable, speaks confidently and sounds trustworthy – what better way to judge this without an interview? For candidates who want to impress and make a spontaneous application, it can be unique way to stand out.
I am confident this will be a topic of conversation in 2011. Right now it might not be a channel for graduate recruitment, but times do change. Very few people would dream of posting a paper CV these days – everything is done by email now. So who is to say that eventually the video will not be the application tool of choice?
By Michelle Boyde
If your head is still firmly in the sand, it’s time to pull it out. Competition to hire the best people is stronger than ever. Whatever the unemployment figures tell us, getting those top 5 per cent of talented young things to sign on your dotted line is getting harder still. Just because you can fill your positions today does not mean you always will.
Today Skype announced it plans to hire 400 new employees, almost doubling its headcount. CEO, Mr Bates, explains that Skype’s weakness is a shortage of product engineers capable of pushing out new products. Their lack of revenue growth is directly related to their lack of talented people.
If you weren’t convinced that employer branding has a direct affect on the bottom line, keep an eye on Skype. If he can find those 400 people, with exactly the right skills, the correct experience and of course cultural fit and then get them to work for Skype, we might see something exciting happening. That’s tough anyway, but even tougher when competing against Google and lets know forget the new kid on the block: Facebook.
By Michelle Boyde
You always need to be a little bit sceptical about CSR and what it really means. It’s a buzz word, one to take care with. This week Credit Suisse, the Swiss investment bank, announced it is forcing hundreds of US managing directors to give 2.5 per cent of their 2010 bonuses to charity.
Donating to charity is always a good thing – as long as the people who need help receive it. But we know CSR is important to young people: students seek this in an employer – 19 per cent in the US and UK and 30 per cent in Switzerland (source: Universum Student Surveys).
When something appears to be forced, you have to question how this will affect the employer brand. Would it have been better to not have handed over such large bonuses in the first place and made a sizeable donation to charity alongside?
And are we really over scrutinising the banks? I am confident we are not. Will students see this as an attempt to soften public perception or a genuine charitable activity?
By Michelle Boyde
Love it or hate it, possibly the marmite of the social media world, Twitter has been making an impression recently. Stephen Fry and his mundane daily activities aside, twitter has the potential to make you look very clever.
Were you stuck across Europe, waiting for Heathrow to clear the snow – I certainly was. But my frustration at not been able to get home was diluted by the constant Twitter updates from @HeathrowAirport and later @Gatwick_Airport. The information was useful and quicker than anything the airlines or airport staff were supplying. Aside from feeling slightly smug that I knew more than my fellow passengers, I was impressed by the lack of excuses and the timely flow of real information.
KLM have been cleverer still: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqHWAE8GDEk. By monitoring Twitter feeds of passengers waiting to board their flights, they quickly researched them through social media to buy them a small gift suited to their interests. They then tracked them down in the airport to present the gift resulting in a happy passenger and more tweets: 100,000 impressions about how much they enjoyed flying with KLM.
This was also caught on camera resulting in the above YouTube video – more social media still – very clever indeed. Doesn’t it make you want to work for a company like this?
UK students are currently voting for their Ideal Employers, those they would most like to work for. Uiversum’s 2011 Ideal Employer rankings are due to be released on March 24th at the 2011 Universum Awards.
When: Thursday 24th March 2011, 3pm-10pm
Where: The Montague on the Gardens Hotel, London
As well as the awards and dinner, Universum presents three seminars to inspire you in your employer branding activities:
Future Shock! Generations at Work and the Challenges of Managing a Multigenerational Workforce
Paul Redmond, Head of Careers and Employability, University of Liverpool
Building Stakeholder Engagement to Support your Employer Brand – A Facilitated Discussion
Helen Bostock, Director, Global Head Graduate & Embark Resourcing & Development, Barclays Wealth
Conflict, Scrutiny and Opportunity: Attracting the Very Best to the British Army
Colin Cook, Marketing Director, Army Recruiting, British Army
Please contact Michelle Boyde, michelle.boyde@universumeurope.com to book your place.
By Michelle Boyde
HSBC is relocating its Group CEO to Hong Kong from London before the end of the year. This in a bid to be one of the first Western companies listed in Shanghai.
However, relocation is will not be the solution for most of the workforce. Employers will need to attract talent in the region to avoid expat packages and build long term local talent pipelines. This will be a challenge, even for those companies which have strong global employer brands. The results from the Univesum Chinese Student Survey show seven of the top 10 employers in China are Chinese. The ranking is led by China Mobile and Bank of China, illustrating that national champions still prevail in China.
By Michelle Boyde
Across the UK, 32 per cent of students want a career where they are “dedicated to a cause or feel I am serving a greater good”. This bodes well for General Electric and Siemens.
David Cameron has said that £60m of spending earmarked for upgrading British ports to make them suitable for handling large offshore turbines will go ahead. Cameron wants the UK to be a world leader in offshore wind energy.
This will generate 70,000 jobs for these employers. That’s a lot of recruiting and currently only 3.9 per cent of UK students was to work in the energy/power sector. However, if they can leverage the ‘green’ angle correctly and use it to strengthen two already strong employer brands, they have the opportunity to appeal to students, as well as have the jobs available for them.
By Michelle Boyde
Over the decade Universum has conducted research in the UK, work/life balance has always been our student’s top career goal. In fact, it’s a global career goal with only markets such as Poland, Russia, China and India ducking out of this trend. As much as the phrase is thrown around, most employers would struggle to define precisely what work/life balance entails. For many people, it may be a case of work/life integration. For those that see working at home as a route to achieving this, it continues to be a challenge for many of us in the UK. The Trades Union Congress (TUC) reports this week that one fifth of UK employers, 4.5 million people, would like to work from home but are not permitted to do so by their employers. How to achieve work/life balance, and of course what it is, will continue to be a point of discussion.
