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Tag: branding
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.)
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.
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.
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:
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:
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:
The recruiting function is constantly looking for ways to improve its business impact and unfortunately, just such an opportunity is about to hit them right in the face.
By now, everyone’s most likely heard of the impending Employee Freedom of Choice Act that will make unionization significantly easier.
As a recruiting professional, have you contemplated what role recruiting can play in maintaining a “union-free” environment at your organization?
Think about it! What better way to ensure that an organization will remain union-free than changing the recruiting, branding, and hiring process so that your organization is more likely to attract new hires who naturally (without any direct influence from management) wouldn’t want to join a union?
It is common to design recruiting and hiring processes to select individuals with certain mindsets or behavioral tendencies.
Southwest Airlines, for example, has been written up in numerous books and articles for how they successfully attract and hire individuals who naturally behave and act in a certain way. In the case of Southwest, its hiring process targets candidates who naturally put the needs of the individual customer before their own.
Southwest is not alone. A range of organizations, from the FBI to Disney and Google, have all designed recruiting processes that identify and hire individuals prone to certain behaviors and actions. So why not adapt that recruiting concept to focus on individuals who prefer an independent work environment?
Now is the opportune time to act before union-related publicity increases to the point where the spotlight is continually on any union-avoidance activities and while most recruiting functions are facing a reduced hiring load.
Rarely do recruiting leaders have as much time as they have now to strategize and to reengineer their processes.
The goal is to redesign your recruiting and hiring processes in order to improve the chances of attracting and hiring individuals who, when given a choice, have a higher probability of selecting independence over “big brother” group action (i.e., unionization).
Upfront, you need to realize that it’s ok for management to resist unionization. Most firms rely primarily on the “traditional approach” which focuses heavily on anti-union propaganda campaigns among existing workers.
However, there’s no reason why that approach can’t be supplemented by an effective recruiting campaign that proactively acts “on the front end” before workers are even hired.
Now, I’m not suggesting even for a minute that you go out and purposely hire only “union hating” new employees, because that actually would be illegal.
What I am suggesting is that recruiting can make a major contribution in maintaining your workforce’s flexibility and competitiveness by revising your firm’s employment processes so that they now include elements that “naturally” attract more independent-thinking workers.
Incidentally, I started my working career as a card-carrying union member and now as a professor, am currently represented by a union, so don’t automatically assume that I don’t understand the value unions can provide.
However, I would remind you that as an HR employee, if your executives choose to go down the “maintain a non-union environment road,” it’s your responsibility to make sure that recruiting makes a substantial contribution to that effort.
After getting management’s approval for the overall concept and strategy, identify the types of personalities, demographic groups, and regional locations where you’re likely to find a large percentage of “independent thinkers.”
Way back in the 20th century, I learned an important fact about recruiters. We’re all salespeople. There are good salespeople and bad salespeople, but every recruiter has to be in sales if they are to function.
This is not up for discussion. We sometimes dance around the premise, but recruiting is essentially the selling of a company on a candidate and a candidate on a company. Those who choose not to engage in selling can pretend to be noble, but they’re doing a disservice to their clients and employers. It’s engraved on stone tablets for every third-party recruiter who makes it longer than three months, and even the most sales-averse HR generalist has to admit that at one time or another, they’ve tried to talk a manager into meeting with a candidate based on their internal interview. It’s the nature of our business.
Where we sometimes butt heads is in the implementation of a sales mentality versus that of a process-oriented human resources approach. I have good news: The sales mentality is remarkably effective for finding high-quality candidates or hiring large numbers of people quickly. Unfortunately, no company needs that kind of structure forever, and the friction caused by a sales mentality in hiring can lead to management, administrative, and even legal obstacles. The human resources approach of a kindler, gentler HR works when you don’t have urgency, and when you have an enlightened HR/executive management relationship, but process-oriented hiring turns off the top creatives and results in the hiring of a stable, but less aggressive workforce. That’s no way to run a company in uncertain times.
In a relatively obscure part of the state of Washington lies a relatively obscure lab, working to free America from its dependence on its few remaining global enemies, such as Iran and Venezuela.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory works on a few easy little projects such as saving the environment, reducing oil dependence, and preventing terrorism. Recruiting for the last one — preventing terrorism and nuclear non-proliferation — is the work of Rob Dromgoole.
“A modern-day moon shot,” he says of this lofty work. Eight different recruiters at the lab recruit for about 615 hires annually (about half of them interns/students), among a workforce of about 4,200. Turnover is around 6-8%, tenure about 11 years.
Many employees have doctorates, and many masters’ degrees. About half of the hires come via referrals. The rest are from direct sourcing, Monster, CareerBuilder, Facebook, LinkedIn, and from colleges.
Some of the lab’s favorite schools, particularly for candidates with graduate degrees: keep reading…
ESPN’s Bruce Feldman’s new book “Meat Market” chronicles the business of recruiting in big-time college football, with a focus on Ole Miss coach Ed Orgeron. In his talk with ERE, you may get ideas (including when he discusses “negative recruiting”) that can work in the corporate America.
There is only one way to accurately categorize Google’s recruiting efforts: they are a recruiting machine.
While you might have heard speculation to the contrary, they continue to innovate, particularly in the area of employment branding, where they maintain global dominance. Several years ago, I wrote a broad case study on Google recruiting that highlighted its overall approach, but I didn’t go into any depth about the company’s bold approaches in the area of college recruiting.
In this article, I’ll highlight some of the creative things that Google has tried in college recruiting, including its latest triumph, the amazing Google College Ambassador Program. (If you missed the original case study, or would like to revisit it, you can find it here.)
The recent collapse of the banking and financial markets has subdued much of the consulting and investment banking competition that Google once faced on campuses. Despite some turbulence, the high-tech industry is still a shining light in this economy, and Google is by far most students’ number-one choice of employers among high-tech firms.
Recent research reveals that 45% of engineering students would like to work at Google. Even outside of high-tech, Google’s employment brand still shines. It was recently selected as the number-one ideal employer among all undergraduate students by Universum. In their most recent study, 17% of the students participating selected Google, up from 13% last year. Those leads will undoubtedly be lengthened next year following the implementation of their new and innovative College Ambassador Program.
The number-one weakness of all college recruiting programs is their inability to maintain a “continuous presence” on campuses throughout the academic year. Every firm is forced by travel expenses and a finite supply of recruiters to limit the number of days they can have a recruiter on any particular campus.
Because of the cost, recruiters typically fly in, spend a few days, and then fly out. As a result of this “here today gone tomorrow” approach, some college recruiters have even been labeled “seagulls” because they are viewed as “flying in frequently, dropping a load of crap, and then leaving.”
Even Google has realized that it cannot afford to park its recruiting staff on every key campus for enough days during the year to really make a difference. As a result, they developed an “on-campus ambassador” program that I predict will soon be copied by many other major firms.
The premise is simple. Instead of periodically flying in representatives, why not recruit individuals who are already there (students) and convert them into ambassadors?
Whenever there is a downturn in economic conditions, one of the first knee-jerk reactions that many CFOs and senior managers take is placing a freeze on all hiring, pay raises, budgets, and promotions.
The effect of long-term hiring freezes is particularly damaging to the recruiting function, because “no hiring” generally means that a majority of recruiters will be laid off. Historically, budgets for recruiting have been cut so low that the function is literally decimated, making it rather difficult for companies to resurrect a decent function when the economy swings up.
Many executives think that the decision to institute some sort of resource freeze is one that helps the organization because it contains costs; however, the opposite is more often the case.
Poorly thought-out freezes that impact talent acquisition and other talent-management activities may actually harm the organization by:
Rather than waiting for the inevitable announcement of a freeze, recruiters need to be proactive and preempt any such silliness long before it occurs by making the business case for leveraging this time to re-architect the talent acquisition function, upgrade its strategic programs, and trade up the talent population while salaries and vendor costs can be negotiated down significantly.
(Incidentally, you can tell when a hiring freeze is imminent because they are almost always preceded by the infamous “paper clip memo” from the CFO, which limits the purchase of office supplies, magazine subscriptions, and travel).
Because every organization is unique, there is no one magic way to structure the business case, but I have put together a list of arguments that you can select from:
Is your company’s recruiting video boring? If you didn’t think so before, you might think it’s a yawner after you check out Liz Claiborne Inc.’s new recruiting video “Runway of Opportunity” (embedded at the end of this article). When Helene Richter, director of talent operations for Liz, set out to create a recruiting video that matched the energy of the company and the fashion creativity pitched to consumers in the company’s clothing ads, she watched a lot of recruiting videos. Her conclusion: “They were sometimes humorous, always educational, but mostly boring, and certainly not artful,” said Richter.
Richter teamed up with Yahoo! HotJobs (profile) creative director David Lam and created “Runway” which features Liz Claiborne’s chief creative officer and mentor from TV show Project Runway, Tim Gunn.
Lam approached several clients late last year about creating recruiting videos as part of a Yahoo! HotJobs pilot program, and Richter jumped at the chance. She also came up with the video’s main concept and the basic script. Richter said that the video’s production costs would typically average $20,000 to $25,000; she received a discount for being part of the pilot program.
Besides revealing the company’s creative side, Richter also wanted to show prospective applicants that not everyone who works in the fashion industry looks like Kate Moss and that a typical day at Liz doesn’t begin with a cry of “gird your loins” as it did when Miranda Priestly arrived at the office in “The Devil Wears Prada.”
Rating employers is not a new idea. Vault has (profile; site) been doing it for years and for pay. There’s JobVent, which has an 11 point rating system and the ability to leave comments. Jobster (profile; site) has a feature where employees can talk about what it’s like working for their company. F–ked Company used to have the dirt on all sorts of companies until it got, you know.
So when we came across the announcement of CorporateGrade.com we were admittedly underwhelmed. But considered from the standpoint of it being part of a trend, the site takes on greater importance.
CorporateGrade.com is new and in beta, so it doesn’t have much in the way of content yet. But it’s easy to use and has
a good bit of sophistication. Ratings can be anonymous, although the registration process does require a valid email address. Not that that’s going to deter bitter employees or ex-workers or even just someone out to sully a company. While that’s often the first objection raised by company officials (only the disgruntled participate in these sites), we found just the opposite to be true. CorporateGrade’s first participants appear to be a balanced lot, providing a good glimpse of life inside a company, a division or the office where they work.
Ratings have been around even before the Internet. But those were either compiled by an ambitious author (Places Rated Almanac, for example) or were limited surveys. The Internet expanded the reach, and opened the door to anyone who wanted to participate. Today, ratings have become so available and influential that a very high percentage of consumers both consult product reviews before making a buying decision and are influenced by what they read. Social media is increasingly exerting both an influence on decision-making and providing a way for consumers to offer feedback.
Who wants to be thought of as an “employer of choice?”
“Don’t we all,” says Karin Lash, regional director, interactive strategy for TMP Worldwide.
But, how do you do that? How do you build an employer brand?
We caught up with Lash and Ryan Estis, senior vice president and chief talent strategist for NAS Recruitment, who shared with us some of the essentials of effective brand building. Watch as these experts outline the ingredients for building a brand that will help you attract quality candidates.
You’ve done your homework and sold the boss on getting a company video made. In fact, you did such a good job the CEO is hinting around about having a starring role, and since it was your idea, you’re in charge of the project.
Now what do you do?
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