Yesterday Universum released it’s very first annual IDEAL employer rankings by young professionals.
Universum surveyed 10,306 young professionals, defined as college graduates with 1 to 8 years of professional experience, and asked them to pick their most ideal employers.
The results have caused quite a stir with Google (chosen by 25% of young professionals) nearly doubling its next closest competitor, Apple (13%).
Perhaps the biggest theme that can be drawn from the rankings is that young professionals are drawn to the jobs with the most financial stability. This can be seen with major tech companies and government jobs leading the way over many other employer brands.
You can read more analysis into the Universum rankings and see the ideal employer list in its entirety in the Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703512404576208702115862760.html?mod=WSJ_Careers_CareerJournal_4
So you want to attract diverse candidates to your company. Great, you’ve made a step in the right direction towards enhancing your employer brand. However, you’re not getting the right diverse candidates to apply. What should you do?
Take a look at the message you’re sending to diverse job-seekers:
- Look at your website. Does it send out a message of diversity? Does it show a diverse group of employees? If it doesn’t, minority job-seekers will feel it – and look elsewhere.
- Fine-tune your message. It’s one thing for a company to have a theoretical commitment to diversity. But if recruiters are sending out a mixed message, it can alienate people. Even if it involves a new training process, make sure that recruiting is happening in a culturally sensitive manner.
- Don’t get cute. Candidates will relate more enthusiastically to the concepts of job fulfillment and career growth than to blatant ethnic appeals. A message targeted to one particular ethnic group, if it seems condescending or pandering, it will backfire.
In a recent article from Recruiting Trends, Author Chad Storlie discusses how military experience can translate extremely well into the work place. The example Storlie uses is that of Operation Command Centers or OPCEN. Walt Disney World recently opened a brand new Operations Center, “to ensure that theme parks guests, employee, and services run smoothly, effectively, and on time.”
Globally, there are several hundred military OPCENs running all day and under combat conditions. Certainly, that type of experience could prove invaluable to Walt Disney World when looking for candidates to run their brand new Operations Center.
Since Gulf War Veterans make up less than 1 percent of the U.S. population, Storlie listed some incredibly useful ways for recruiters to learn more about adding value to their company by utilizing military experience:
1. Leverage Their Military Experience to the Company & Job
2. Mentor an Individual or Group
3. Further Education One Class at a Time.
Storlie goes over each of these methods in great detail and the whole article is worth a look. You can see the article in its entirety here:
http://www.recruitingtrends.com/how-recruiters-can-leverage-military-experience
There are many things the come to mind when thinking about diversity: race, sex, religion, sexuality and age are some of the first we tend to think of.
However, there is another valuable group of people that are often overlooked when employers think about diversity in the workplace–the disabled.
There is a recent article from www.diversityinc.com that discusses disabilities in the workforce. John Kemp, executive director of the US Business Leadership Network (USBLN) discusses the stigma that surrounds disability, and how employees often hide their problem from coworkers.
John Kemp knows a thing or two about the disabled in the work place–he started his life with his disability, and has two prosthetic arms and legs. Now, he says, is the time for progress.
“In October, the percentage of people with disabilities in the labor force was about 21 percent,” Kemp said. “That percentage hasn’t changed since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990”
It’s clear that the definition of diversity has changed over the years, and will continue to change and keep evolving.
So what is your company doing to address the topic of disabilities in the workforce?
You can access the article here: http://diversityinc.com/article/8127/The-Valued-Employees-Youre-Missing-People-With-Disabilities/
Re-published: “Diversity”, by Annika Lagerholm, Universum Quarterly 2006, Issue 1
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 organization, such as recruitment, compensation, promotion and career development
2. Change personal attitudes and behavior, such as corporate culture, leadership styles and attitudes amongst employees and managers
3. Include everyone in the organization
Dr. John Sullivan from ere.net has posted an interesting article about the top 30 social media recruiting errors. Many employers think that just by saying they “use social media” they are using it effectively when in reality that is really not the case. In fact, there are a number of mistakes that employers make over and over again when trying to implement social media strategy into their recruitment plans.
The common errors that Dr. Sullivan includes are separated into five major categories: strategy related errors, channel and tool selection errors, message and coverage errors, recruiter and employee support errors and process and administrative errors.
Essentially, for social media to work for your overall recruiting plan, a solid strategy is a must. You need to know who you are targeting, how you are communicating and always keep in mind your employer brand. In fact, Dr. Sullivan lists underemphasizing employer branding as one of the biggest mistakes.
What it really boils down to is that social media makes it too easy for employers to flood their subscribers with too much information that isn’t targeted or consistent. It’s important for an employer to have a plan in place and to stick to it lest they lose potential recruitments.
The fact is that social media can be an incredibly useful tool in recruitment. But unless you have a good plan in place, you should avoid it. To see the full list of common social media errors, go to:
http://www.ere.net/2011/02/07/high-impact-social-recruiting-errors-the-top-30-to-avoid/
Even the President of the United States speaks of the War for Talent. If the US is going to lead the way into the 21st Century, much has to be done to “out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world,” as Mr. Obama said. Considering the status quo, a lot needs to be done to keep up with the increasing knowledge and skill levels in emerging markets.
For employers in the US, the future looks grim. Nearly half of all new jobs will require more than just a high school degree, but a fourth of America’s students don’t have one. “The quality of our math and science education lags behind many other nations. America has fallen to 9th in the proportion of young people with a college degree”, he said.
Unfortunately, the educational crisis goes beyond the high number of students not completing high school or the lack of competent teachers. With so many Baby Boomers retiring from classrooms, the US has to prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math to secure the future quality of its education. In addition, these teachers face the challenge of educating and inspiring more students to go beyond their high school diplomas.
A long-term employer branding strategy will be needed in the US, as the talent shortage is further aggravated. Finding the right people, with the right skills, will be your challenge!
You see it on TV and hear it on the radio and it really makes you wonder. It makes you wonder how during a recession and fresh off government bailouts, many employers in the banking industry are still giving out record bonuses.
Many think during a period of such high unemployment, bonuses like these are completely indefensible. However, an expert in employer branding, Simon Barrow, asks why the banks aren’t defending these bonuses more vigorously.
Barrow doesn’t buy the classic excuse–that if the most talented executives don’t get bonuses, they’ll seek them elsewhere and move on to the competition. There are a number of factors that come in to why a person chooses their employer and remuneration is only one.
Instead, Barrow creates a list of a number of possible arguments banks could use to defend the practice of giving out bonuses–assuming his arguments are true, they would be powerful tools in defense of the practice.
Some of Barrow’s potential arguments include: the bonuses’ purpose of offsetting the high cost of education for those high ranking executives, the relatively short career of those in the banking industry and the high burn out/drop out rates of bankers.
Barrow admits he’s never been asked to defend the bonuses officially and thus can only speculate about ways to argue their validity. However, assuming his arguments are true to an extent, and they are quite believable, it makes you wonder why the banks haven’t fought harder to defend them.
To see Barrow’s whole article you can go here:
http://simon-barrow.blogspot.com/2011/01/why-are-bankers-not-defending-their.html
The Pros and Cons of Being Number One
By Annika Lagerhorn
Some companies have the advantage of being an employer-of-choice; these companies often have strong consumer brands and are generally the leading company in their industry. A number one position is a great resource in employer branding, but it also brings a number of challenges.
The Cons
• High expectations
Popularity increases expectations and the higher the expectations the more difficult it will be to meet those expectations as an employer.
• Too many applications
Popular employers typically receive an overwhelming amount of CVs and are unable to sort through the mountain of candidates to find the right type of employees. The employer branding strategy is therefore to narrow the focus to reach those that the company wants to recruit and retain.
The Pros
• Stick out from the crowd
Popular employers are the most successful to recruit and retain top talents. If the company is fairly small and the industry relatively new, the company will most probably have an anonymous existence on the recruitment market. For ‘unknown’ companies, an essential part of employer branding is to inform and explain what the company does and what it stands for― i.e. to build its brand awareness. Unknown employers spend more time and effort pulling people into their organization compared to popular employers that naturally attract key people― it’s a tug of war where the most popular team is the strongest.
An in-depth article by Universum Analyst Jens Trulsson recently appeared on RecrutingTrends.com. In the article, Trulsson discusses a number of key points about employer branding and talent attraction and how it relates to the Universum Student Survey.
Each year Universum surveys over 400,000 of the top students globally and asks them what they look for in an employer. There is no other survey out there that is as large, in-depth and to the core as Universum’s Student Survey.
To read the article in its entirety and also get an exclusive look at a page straight out of Universum Quarterly, go here:
http://www.recruitingtrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Universum-Quarterly-2010-Q4-Page-141.pdf
