Integrate your brands

Employer branding is a dependent marketing tool: it’s influenced by the company’s corporate and consumer branding strategies. Yet to integrate the brands is a challenge to manage and communicate effectively to employees, customers and investors.

Companies with strong consumer or corporate brands often have an advantage in employer branding. However, a consumer brand might skew the employer image and lead to misconceptions. Or a strong consumer brand might inflate expectations amongst candidates, meaning that the company instead faces the risk of disappointing. To believe that a strong consumer brand will automatically translate into a strong employer brand is chancy.

You should:
• Use Common Messages
• Dare to differentiate
• Track expectations

To be continued…

Re-published: “Integrating your brands”, by By Annika Lagerholm, Universum Quarterly, 2006, Issue 1

Address diversity in your Employer Branding

Embrace diversity: It’s necessary to meet an increasingly diverse customer-base and be able to recruit and retain skilful employees. If you fail to introduce diversity into your workforce, it’ll cost you missed business goals and even potential lawsuits.

For many years, diversity was regarded an unimportant issue. Yet, due to demographic changes that have lead to shortages of skilled workers, employers need to recruit from a broad and complex talent pool. The success of diversity initiatives generally depends on three key factors:

3 success factors for diversity initiatives

1. Develop formal structures and processes in the organisation, such as recruitment, compensation, promotion and career development
2. Change personal attitudes and behaviour, such as corporate culture, leadership styles and attitudes amongst employees and managers
3. Include everyone in the organisation
 

 Re-published: “Diversity”, by Annika Lagerholm, Universum Quarterly, 2006, Issue 1

Your corporate website – the most powerful employer branding tool

It’s important to make a good first impression: going to a company website is the first thing students do when they want to learn more about an employer—what they find on the site will reflect negatively or positively on the employer brand. In addition to the types of information students want, companies should take great care in making the site easy to navigate and visually attractive, a boring or cumbersome site easily translates into a boring and cumbersome employer.

Website do’s
Testimonials from employees are popular and so are application pages where students can submit their resumes. It’s important to students that the site contains relevant information for them and is easy to navigate.

Quotes from American students:

• “The best websites are the most informative on the application process, and the career opportunities. Hard, concrete facts are always best!”
• “Information, emphasis less on philosophy than on what philosophy has accomplished.”

Website don’ts
Students bristle at irrelevant information, cluttered websites, pop-up advertising and dead-end links.

Quotes from American students:

• “Many are designed for customers, rather than prospective employees, with no access to the employment areas of the website.”
• “Pompous fluff! Every company has ideals; I want to know what the difference is between your company and the others in your field.”
• “If the website is hard or confusing to navigate, it doesn’t look professional.”

Re-published:  Universum Quarterly, “The Importance of Websites”, by Catrine Johansson.

By Michelle Boyde
Source: Universum Quarterly 2010, Issue 1

Do you work in a recruitment team or a rejection team? It’s possible that you have not considered your role in this light before. Many employers decline far more candidates than they ever hire. The world’s most popular employers will always have to deal with declining large numbers of candidates. However, due to the impact of the global economic crisis, employers of all sizes, from small start-ups to multinational conglomerates are facing the issue of declining candidates in large numbers. Today’s rejects are possible future lateral hires and potential customers or business partners – do your processes protect your employer brand against this threat?

The phrase ‘rejection machine’ was coined by Charles Macleod, head of global resourcing and mobility at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). This is a very fitting phrase as PwC receives 20,000 to 25,000 applications for 1,000 jobs in the UK– they certainly do much more ‘rejecting’ than ‘recruiting’. This expression prompted Universum Quarterly to take a look at an aspect of the recruitment process many employers are reticent to discuss.

Once upon a time…
What a great story can do for your company

By Kina Zeidler
Source: Universum Quarterly 2009, Issue 1

A great story sells – but a really good one can also be used to enforce corporate cultural values. Storytelling describes how companies and organisations use stories to communicate, internally and externally; yet, storytelling is mostly known as a method for companies to sell more iPhones or Nike shoes.

Now, add the prefix ‘corporate’ and you get ‘Corporate Storytelling’ (CS). It is an increasingly popular management and leadership approach, where a collection of stories, from the corporate corridors to the factory floors, are used internally in an organization to exemplify good leadership practices, demonstrate corporate values and to enhance internal organisational communication. All companies have real-life stories they can share within the company and between locations. CS can play a vital role in a recession, when knowing how and what to communicate has become ever so important.

Once upon a time, in 1995, a Mr. Pierre Omidyar was dining with his fiancée. During dinner, his beloved mentioned that she had problems finding collectors of the breath-freshener PEZ dispensers so she could boost her collection. This gave Omidyar the idea to build a Web site for her where she could trade them: auction giant EBay was born. The story quickly spread far and wide – and so did the myth of EBay, a company whose service we use and a company we’d like to work for. But why does this story stick? And why do we re-tell it to others? According to CS gurus and company representatives, the answer is simple: the story is real and memorable. But practically, in corporate life, how can you use stories to improve your internal employer brand?

5,800 students from Russell Group universities select their “Ideal Employers”
 Apple and Google were the undisputed winners in Universum’s Ideal Employer rankings this year, released on April 15th, according to a student poll of nearly 12,000 students – yet look at Russell Group’s students only and the choice of employers change. Read the rest of this entry »

The UK Universum Awards took place on April 15th at Regent’s College, situated in the beautiful Regents Park, London. The evening celebrated the top Ideal Employers of business and engineering/IT students in the UK. However, students studying natural science, humanities/liberal arts/education and law also have their favourite employers and the winner are: Read the rest of this entry »

By Christopher Van Mossevelde

Britain’s graduates say they would like to work for an employer that is judged well or is held in high esteem by the community or the public generally. This probably confirms what Dov Seidman wrote, that we’re now in the “Era of Behaviour”¹ – let’s hope that it becomes the era of ‘good’ behaviour.

With Goldman Sachs under current public scrutiny in the UK, the short-sighted focus on shareholder value at the expense of others, the doing ‘more with less’ mantra that has resulted in the recent public calamity at France Telecom with employee suicides, and the general burden that this recession has had upon employees, to say no more… has perhaps, or at least I hope, catapulted students to drastically re-think their career choices. 

Student research reveals that Britain’s students deem ‘good reputation’ as the most important attribute an employer can have, should it strive to be perceived as an ‘ideal’ employer – 49 per cent select this as an attractive employer characteristic.  And if an employer doesn’t have it, they may lose out in terms of their brand perception. Finally, we’ve seen some results in the latest UK ideal employer rankings by Universum, as students have judged the recklessness of the financial institutions and banks have lost out in the popularity stakes².

How employers are viewed by others is important for graduates who are choosing their future employer and thus an important employer branding issue to consider for companies and organisations. Similarly, ‘high-ethical standards’ is highly regarded by 30 per cent of students, yet what are the values they deem important, relating to employer conduct, and with respect to the rightness and wrongness of employer actions, is still to be determined. It’s for us to ask the students to clarify and to remove this ash cloud to let the sun shine through – so be it!

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¹ “Inspirational Shame in the Era of Behavior”, by Dov Seidman <http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/apr2010/ca2010047_343747.htm>

² ”Why apple is a tasty job option”, by Steve McCormack  <http://www.independent.co.uk/student/career-planning/getting-job/why-apple-is-a-tasty-job-option-1944828.html>

By Michelle Boyde

This week, my local paper reports that over Easter the local Trinity Methodist Church will offer a messaging service: text with a prayer and somebody will pray for you. Even God is now connected 24 hours a day, which means we must accept that students, and in turn recruiters, must embrace social media and the continuous connectivity and instant feedback it fosters.

Also this week, a career service contact told me that LinkedIn, usually the reserve of professionals, is used to connect students and employers for interviews by the career service – no more emails, just LinkedIn. However, Facebook continues to be the platform of choice of today’s students. On April 15th, Sedef M Buyukataman, university relations manager European & emerging markets from Cisco will share how they have used Facebook as the corner stone of their graduate recruitment strategy at the Universum Awards. All employers need to know how to utilize social media channels. If you have not yet signed up to Sedef’s seminar, you can at www.universumawards.com.

Happy Easter!

By Michelle Boyde

Today’s Guardian touches on internships and how UK employers financially exploit young people. It reports that one in three UK interns are working for nothing. However, with high-unemployment and a wealth of new graduates scraping around for constructive work experience to enhance their CVs, this is not overly surprising. Universum data has continued to show internships to be a popular channel for learning about employers. In 2009, over a quarter of students wanted to take part in an internship. The question is: will recent experiences have disillusioned students about the benefits of internships? The brand new results from the Universum UK Student Survey 2010 are released April 15th and are sure to give us an indication. It’s possible, however, that high-unemployment will see our young people prepared to ‘intern’ in the name of experience whether they are paid or not.