Cheers,

Keith

Agree that the perception of the brand is in the hands of the public (never was a more obvious statement made), but do you really expect any TA leader worth his/her salt to sit on their hands and fail to respond to a poorly formed argument based on a flimsy survey with little basis in reality? You wouldn’t if you did your homework and looked at how the survey was created and published. If you had you would have seen that branding darlings such as Apple, Google, Facebook and Netflix were also in consideration, yet tobacco companies, weapons manufacturers, and oil companies did not make the list. Nice of you to send a message to TA leaders. I sure hope they’ve learned their lesson here, that there are more avenues these days for public discourse. Who knew?

Jerry.

Thanks for the invitation to EA but I am no stranger to your firm. I have been there many times and I have also known several of your VP’s of HR quite well. The point wasn’t to label EA or B of A as bad companies. It was to send a message to TA leaders like yourself that if a group of active Internet or social media users don’t like your firm, there are now more avenues (including glassdoor.com that is guided by one of your former VP’s) for them to express their dislikes. Whether their voting or their negative comments are accurate or inaccurate, the message will be seen and probably believed by many others.

Using your logic that the EA’s #1 worst ranking was a result of “misguided and misinformed gamers”, then B of A’s coming in #2 must’ve been a result of a horde of colluding wild and crazy bankers simultaneously flooding the voting. The fact is that any company’s employer brand is now in the hands of the public. Whether you like the public’s perception or even whether it’s an accurate perception won’t change its negative impact on recruiting. Incidentally, I wouldn’t recommend that any leader label their current or potential customers as “misguided” in a public forum.

John

I think the list has mildly interesting ideas, not “bold and courageous” ones.

I call and raise with two of my own:
1) Re: your limited contract idea: Instead of giving a no more than 4-5 year upper limit on employment for new employees, you give some new employees 3 year, guaranteed-raise, no-lay-off-without-cause employment contracts. That should reduce attrition.
2) As a benie: you offer to assume the new employee’s student loans for as long as they work with the company, or until it’s paid off. (Have HR figure out the tax implications to make it work.) That should really interest the grads from the most expensive schools that hiring managers love….

Cheers,

Keith “Bold but not Courageous” Halperin

Anyway, it’s good (*but unfortunate) marketing for an aging workforce. And they are aging — just like Microsoft and Oracle. There may be slight advantages to the payment structure but — as most working HR generalists know — death is expensive and most surviving families prefer 5x life insurance paid out in a lump sum when a spouse dies.