Packaging Your Talent Brand Platform and Strategy

No matter how authentic and insightful your research and creative synthesis in refining your organization’s talent brand, if you want it to mean anything in the real world, you will likely need to present it in a palatable, compelling, and actionable way to enterprise leadership.

Your objective should be two-fold. One, to convince and inspire your management with the potential corporate-cultural value of the brand platform for recruiting, retention, inclusion, or engagement initiatives, and any other human capital purposes you identify. Two, to help them see how they can implement it in practical terms in any or all these contexts.

Here are a few components you might consider incorporating in your presentation to company and HR management.

A summary of your “discovery” results and how they support your talent brand platform. This can be as thorough or as concise as is customary in your organization.
A concise compilation of the brand (a page or two max) that includes, at a minimum: a capsule of the brand’s value in 80 words or less for brand evangelists to use in introducing the key values of your workplace culture in their social circles; a longer employment value proposition that summarizes in several paragraphs the advantages and compelling attractors of the workplace culture; a short slogan-like formula that expresses resonantly what it means to work at your organization; and a list of the talent brand’s 8 or 10 primary attributes (usually adjectives).
A display portfolio of thumbnail renderings of creative examples in an appropriate range of options for execution and distribution (say poster designs, print brochure, screen saver, website and online newsletter design, web banners, video storyboard, Facebook “fan” page design, and so on). Because your leadership will want to see and touch how the brand will play out in many organizational and engagement contexts, provide a rich selection of creative examples keyed to the brand but addressing a sample of HR programs beyond recruiting — for example, retention, mentorship, inclusive leadership, diversity, workforce planning, training and development, etc.
A talent brand strategy that details recommendations for “operationalizing” the brand, with attention to your primary audiences and the specific human capital operations (e.g., retention, engagement, inclusion, staff development, knowledge management,and so on) in which you see the talent brand serving as a thematic/creative platform.

In the June Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership article, I talk much more about branding, particularly how an employment branding initiative needs to start with your current employees.