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Employer brand is the backbone of any great talent acquisition strategy. However, the advent of social media in recent years has complicated employer brand management. In his October 2009 article, “Revelation — Your Employer Brand Is No Longer Owned by Your Firm,” Dr. John Sullivan outlines how social media and other web technology has shifted the power in employer branding away from the organization to the masses. His article outlines very thoroughly how everything from text messaging to Twitter has affected this balance of power.

Effective employer brands are authentic reflections of a company’s culture, values, and purpose. Employer brand flows from the people of the organization, and it belongs to the people of the organization. To this end, employer brands aren’t created; they are discovered, expressed, and managed. While social media has certainly made the management of employer brand more complicated, in some ways, it has also made it simpler. The true impact of the tools outlined in Dr. Sullivan’s article is transparency. Employees have always owned the brand; they just haven’t had the tools to broadcast their opinions to large audiences as they do today.

Due to the transparency created by social media, it is no longer about simply discovering the brand and finding ways to express it through corporate and recruitment communication. Employer brand management has become a dynamic, full-contact sport that has broad implications for organizations. Embracing that the brand belongs to the people raises some sticky questions for human resources teams. keep reading…

Who had the best Super Bowl commercial? Yeah, we know, it probably was Budweiser. The beer company’s advertising hegemony is so nearly complete that Anheuser-Busch should probably be given the lifetime achievement award and let somebody else have a shot at the top spots.

But we’re a recruiting-focused site, so we’re asking you to choose between Monster’s fiddling beaver and CareerBuilder’s (very) casual Friday.

If you’ve actually been paying more attention to the game than to the commercials , the two videos are below.  If you’ve been mostly watching the commercials, then you should know that as this is being written, it’s half time and the Colts are ahead of the Saints 10-6.

So much for the high scoring game me and everyone else was expecting. The Colts’ defense, by the way, is amazing.

But back to the poll. Conveniently, both commercials aired before the half. So take a look at the commercials, and cast your vote.

Here’s Monster’s fiddling beaver:

Here’s CareerBuilder’s casual Friday ad:

The following was written Friday, before the Monster ad was available.

Our poll, unlike the USA Today poll or those marketing professors at Western Michigan University is limited to only the two job boards whose ads ran during today’s Super Bowl.

As this is written on Friday afternoon, Monster hasn’t released its Beaver-themed 30-second spot. CareerBuilder, which offered a choice of three for visitors to its website to vote on, hasn’t said which it will run.

So even though we’re opening the poll at the kickoff, you really do need to wait until both ads have run. When the game is over, we’ll try to remember to find the ads online and either post them here or provide links.

If you can’t wait for us, then try going to Spike.com, which religiously posts all the commercials that run during the Super Bowl.

We’ve set the poll up to allow everyone one vote. And don’t waste your time clearing our poll cookie; we’re also tracking your IP. We’re wise to you.

In a blog post of less than 300 words late Friday afternoon, Google announced changes to the way search results will be reported. From now on, the results of an identical keyword search could be different for each user.

It’s been the case for some time that identical searches have produced slightly different rankings in the results depending on the searcher’s country or, in some cases, city. It’s also been the case that users with Google accounts get customized search results, based on their search histories. keep reading…

Last week I introduced this series by stating that a majority of social recruiting initiatives currently in progress in organizations around the world would fail primarily because they relied solely on the limited resources of the recruiting function to establish visibility online, engage an audience, and service that audience throughout a multi-stage conversion cycle.

This week my attention turns to why the recruiting function cannot — and should not — be the primary executor of social media activities, as well as tips for getting the rest of the organization to help out.

A List of Reasons Why Recruiters Can’t or Shouldn’t Do It All

There are a variety reasons why recruiters shouldn’t be expected to handle most of the day-to-day aspects of social media recruiting and communications.

keep reading…

What do you get when you search your name online?

Aw, come on. Of course you’ve looked yourself up on the Internet. Almost half of all Internet users did in 2007. The latest survey puts the number at 59 percent.

And if you really, really haven’t then you may want to retake recruiting 101.

Just as companies no longer are masters of their own brand, neither are you. There are sites to rate teachers, cops, doctors, even parts of your anatomy. Then there are the pictures and comments well-meaning friends have posted about you.

Google yourself and you may find those bleery-eyed conference party photos of you rank higher than than does the whitepaper you authored. Or, you may discover you rank lower than the death notices of others with like names.

To help remedy that there’s PlaceYourName.com. It’s a personal marketing service that promises to help users “manage and control what is seen about them when their names are searched online.” keep reading…

The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Anderson is about an emperor who hires two swindlers to create a new suit. The emperor presides over a kingdom of prosperity and peace and is pretty concerned about appearances. The swindlers manage to sell him a new suit of invisible material that they claim is visible only to those worthy to lay eyes upon him. Once it is “finished” they drape him in pantomime and he proceeds to swagger naked amongst his minions only to called out by a child who says “the emperor has no clothes!” The moral of the story is that none of his loyal inner circle bothered to tell him he was naked. It had to be a kid on the street who didn’t have anything to lose to point out his folly.

In today’s age, the fable is a metaphor for those in HR who are unwilling to state an obvious truth to a higher up out of fear of appearing stupid, sacrilegious, or politically “incorrect.” They would sooner let a company’s reputation stick out buck naked than tell the truth about the company culture and reputation. This is co-dependency with a superior who wants Yes-men, not accountable partners.

I arrived at this observation because I am always struck by the stark difference between what companies think their employees think about them and what they tell me when I interview them. I also am always shocked about what those employees will say on Twitter, Vault, and any other number of “pink slip” sites about these top-rated employers. I wonder if anyone in competitive intelligence, PR, marketing, or HR ever reads about the fallout of bad managers making bad decisions, including furloughs, reduced hours, wearing double hats, etc. When did having a bad reputation not count?

I’ll give you an example of something that happened to me at Wal-Mart. keep reading…

For more than a decade, I have worked tirelessly to maintain my status as a recognized global expert on employer branding. I have advised numerous firms; developed positioning methodologies now in use by many HR consultancies and recruitment marketing firms; given dozens of employer branding presentations; and have even written a book on the topic.

Despite many successes, it’s time to admit that a major employer branding principle is no longer true: that corporations can own or control their employer brand image.

The premise was that corporations could proactively put together a plan to win awards as excellent places to work, secure mention in news pieces and editorials, participate in case studies, and be talked about at industry events. Because corporations were coordinating nearly all of the information that made them visible, it was possible to heavily influence how they were perceived.

It was a practice that made firms like Google, Starbucks, GE, IBM, Microsoft, and HP famous as great places to work. However, that was then and this is now.

keep reading…

Entice Labs, the Provo, Utah, company that set out to create a better recruitment marketing system, is suddenly getting industry buzz.

Earlier this year, John Sumser described the company as a “game changer.” In June, Susan Burns, president of Talent Synchronicity, said the company’s TalentSeekr product is “a sleek and effective approach to targeted employment brand positioning.”

Now, TechCrunch has said of the company, “it still beats hiring a headhunter.” OK, so that’s not as scintillating an endorsement as either Sumser’s or Burns’, but then TechCrunch is a site for geeks, not recruiters. But you gotta figure that a product that wows both techies and recruiters is worth taking a look at. keep reading…

How would you brand a newly minted London firm that recruits intellectual property attorneys for jobs all over the world? With a video of a wedding photographer kicking a goose, of course. How else?

Amazingly, that’s what Fellows and Associates has done. And just to make sure you get it, the firm issued a press release over the weekend discussing the video. keep reading…

Adidas will be going live at the end of August with a corporate careers site it’s convinced will be an “industry disruptor.”

It took a year and a half for adidas to put its new site together, with help from Carat (which is now Freestyle Interactive). Steve Fogarty, adidas North America Recruiting Captain, was the project leader. Other major stakeholders included adidas Group Global Head of Recruiting Steve Bonomo; Reebok Recruiting Manager Tara Gallone; and TaylorMade Recruiting Manager Kate Hinshaw.

Fogarty, who with Bonomo is speaking at ERE’s conference coming up in Florida, is underwhelmed by what he sees in corporate careers sites. (He does like, however, the U.S. Army’s recruiting work — “they put genuises behind it, Fogarty says” –  helped by a huge budget and support from McCann Erickson. He’s also fond of Microsoft’s Hey Genius campaign, and what Cirque does with its high-profile entertainment jobs.)

Anyhow, Fogarty found that most companies either brand themselves well, but make it hard to find what you want on their career sites, or they do the flip side of that: offer a truckload of information but the brand is lost. keep reading…

Years ago, John Sullivan was doing some consulting work for W.L. Gore, the makers of Gore-Tex. “You guys are the best story never told,” he said to them.

Not any more. Gore will be telling scientists, engineers, and other prospective employees its story by launching a new global branding campaign from Arizona to China with a modest little theme: Join Gore & Change Your Life. keep reading…

Who’s talking about your company? What are they saying about it? How can we influence that?

The astute Shannon Seery Gude of the company Bernard Hodes says that employers aren’t always looking in the right place for answers to that question. They’re looking at Google Alerts, perhaps. Maybe Glassdoor. But, she says, they often neglect the Indeed Forums. “Look for your company and see what’s going on in the forums.”

She suggests searching for “working for IBM” – filling in your company name for IBM.

(I also tested out the use of quotes, by putting “working for Google” in quotes to sharply limit my results. And I couldn’t resist trying a search for Hodes.)

“What we will often find is the No. 1-returned search result in Google comes from the Indeed forums,” she says. That means job-seekers are ending up on Indeed, so recruiters should, too.

As the summer’s gathering of social-media-using recruiters kicks off at Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, recruiters at DaVita, KPMG, CO-OP Financial Services, Burger King, California Pizza Kitchen, and the University of California we talked to over the last couple of weeks say that social media is an ongoing experiment, one that in some companies is being done without any specific plan, but is nonetheless yielding results. keep reading…

Like tens of thousands of seniors across the U.S., Eric Barker graduated this month with no job.

But unlike every one of those tens of thousands, the newly minted MBA from Boston College took the unconventional step of running a job-wanted ad on Facebook.

“You know that old saying,” he wrote us explaining why, “If your stock broker knows so much, how come he isn’t rich? I think the same thing goes for marketing: ‘If that marketer is so good, he’d better be able to market himself.’”

So that’s just what this marketer did. His target is Microsoft; the work is entertainment, and; the results? Well, no job yet, but a boatload of contacts, lots of buzz, and offers of help from people like Glenn Gutmacher of Arbita and JobMachine. “Considering this was just a little experiment in unconventional job hunting that cost about a half hour of my time and less than $50, it’s been insanely successful,” Barker says. keep reading…

Having a clearly defined strategy is the most important factor in achieving employer branding objectives.

That’s the takeaway from the Employer Brand Institute’s Global Research Study of more than 2,000 companies.

Engaging the CEO and senior management in the benefits of employer branding also ranks highly. Surprisingly, conducting internal and external market research ranked the lowest in importance, suggesting companies are rushing into employer branding without a clear direction of where they are heading.

The results of the global study should be a concern for CEOs where money invested in employer branding initiatives may be misdirected and/or misaligned with the business strategy. Most companies are in the early stages of developing an employer brand strategy that builds competitive advantage (globally only 16% have a clearly defined strategy), so the survey results provide some important guidance for leaders to ensure their investments are focused on priority areas. keep reading…

It has been an amazing year in recruiting and talent management. Despite severe economic hardships, budget cuts, and hiring freezes, recruiting functions have continued to innovate and stretch the limits of “standard recruiting.”

After evaluating hundreds of applications, here is part two of the list of best practices in recruiting that I recommend you emulate.

(This article was updated May 4, 2009; it originally said that GE Healthcare “abandoned its outsourcing model,” but this was incorrect. It did not.)

keep reading…

Back in 1992-1993, during the last serious recession, I got laid off. I was out of work for approximately 13 weeks before being hired as a recruiter. My job was focused on hiring sales representatives and I had more than enough candidates for the role. Perhaps because of that, I was arrogant. I let many candidates whom I had contacted or interviewed for the role simply slip away, without calling them or following up. Not long after that, I was at a job fair and some of the candidates I had interviewed for the sales rep role came up to me. In front of my relatively new colleagues, they pulled no punches in criticizing me for not following up and getting back to them.

As embarrassed as I was to hear that then, my accusers were right! I had dropped the ball and not gotten back to them. What I had not realized (even though I had experienced the same thing during my own period of being laid off), was that during recessionary times, everything we do as recruiters gets magnified.

As a result, to me, times of difficulty do put us under a microscope in which perceptions are skewed. However, so too do they present great opportunities to build even better relationships with candidates and third party search providers, to sharpen our skills and give ourselves greater tools as recruiters, and to further enable us to be unique professionals who stand out from the pack.

But to begin, let’s be clear: It’s an ugly world out there. Your company may have gone through layoffs and decimated its recruiting department. And now you’re the one that’s left — and you still have to fill requisitions and hire people.

keep reading…

I’m thinking you’ve got a branding challenge if you’re trying to attract people to work in the inner-city — as public school teachers.

The New York City school system, a 2009 ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards finalist, is doing something about it. The department of education, which has to hire 4,000-7,000 teachers every year, or about 7% of its workforce, wasn’t happy with the quality of the teachers it was recruiting. It redid its brand to try to attract passive candidates who are high achieving, intellectually curious, and highly motivated.

It came up with an “I Teach NYC, Because it Teaches Me” motto to use on its website and elsewhere. The “elsewhere” includes a Twitter profile, a wiki for teachers and applicants, and a Facebook fan page launched June 2008. That Facebook page exceeded 3,000 page views per week during the peak time at the end of August 2008.

With the Ad Council, it also made videos — like the one I embedded below that made me wish my math and music classes in school were a lot more fun.

After about months of the branding initiative, it’s a tad too early to judge the quality of hire being generated. What we do know is that about half of the school system’s Facebook fans are over 25. These are folks who have work experience, and are exactly who the system’s trying to attract.

keep reading…

Claire Prager of the Cheesecake Factory describes the making of this $30,000, four-minute video developed and produced in two months last year as “pretty painless” — which is not how I’d describe trying to finish off its entire dinner-size Thai Chicken Pasta.

Job seekers are viewing the video at a rate of about 40,000 per year. Their eyes are peeled for an average of 3:48 minutes. (The average for similar videos is 2:33.)

Prager, senior manager, talent selection, was responsible for the overall execution of the video, a task she says MadDash’s good work made easier. The video, aimed particularly at the passive job seeker, was posted on Monster, CareerBuilder, AHRE.org, and HCareers. The Cheesecake Factory shows it again during new-hire orientation (which, we report with jealousy, involves a meal at the Cheesecake Factory), as well as at college career fairs and other job fairs, and on the company’s careers site.

The Cheesecake Factory selected an Area Director, Senior Vice President of Kitchen Operations, Executive Kitchen Manager, and General Manager to play key roles in telling the story. While developing the video, it selected the following elements to include:

1. Who is The Cheesecake Factory?
2. Quality
3. Our People and Our Culture
4. Technology and Innovation.

The uber-consistent restaurant chain also owns the Grand Lux Cafe and now RockSugar.

Even in a recession, employment branding is still counts. During times of instability where employee trust and loyalty are eroded through short-term cost cutting and job shedding, employee engagement plummets.

Many employers in return can count on employees’ feeling less connected to the organization, and being less productive. But even in a crisis where 2.6 million jobs were lost last year, there are organizations that will seize the opportunity and achieve a significant competitive advantage by continuing to build and sustain employer brand strength.

In an outstanding webinar delivered for ERE this week (and embedded at the end of this article), Frank Lane, author of Killer Brands, offered this definition: 

A Killer Brand exists when an entity derives a disproportionate amount of success in its category because of a compelling and differentiated expectation that comes to be associated with its name.

A quality employment brand strategy proactively and appropriately manages expectations, reputation, and image, all toward what you’re trying to do — attract and engage a skilled and productive workforce, which is the most critical driver of business success. Even in today’s environment, “A” players will exercise careful choices about where they come to work and what they want out of the employment relationship. Many will also be preparing for change as that market recovery presents new opportunities. Every category-leading “brand” is focused on two primary channels to grow share:

• The attraction of new customers
• The continued loyalty of existing customers

While attraction/recruiting needs have certainly lessened (although in some sectors critical skills are still in high demand) the brand loyalty of existing employees will certainly be an issue into the foreseeable future. And while many people may be thankful or merely satisfied to have a job today, that level of brand equity will not necessarily translate into productivity, engagement, and retention tomorrow. That’s why forward-thinking organizations will use this down cycle to prepare and deploy a strategy to grow and sustain a true talent advantage.

And it represents an opportunity to consider what “disproportionate amount of success” your organization derives because of the desire among A-level talent to apply their skills to your business?

In evaluating your organization’s employment brand strength, consider these four primary objectives:

keep reading…