An employer brand is sometimes thought to live in the silo of recruitment communications and only be concerned with the attraction of employees. As a recruitment communications organisation, we believe that this is not – and should not – be the case.

An employer brand is how the organisation communicates and engages with all of its employees – current, prospective and past. There is another vital point. In our opinion, an employer brand is not a true brand in its own right. It is not something dreamed up by recruitment and advertising agencies that stands alone and separate. An employer brand will only work if it operates in conjunction with the organisation’s corporate and consumer brands.

The challenge is therefore to join the employer brand up to the existing brands and reflect the behaviours exhibited throughout the organisation, to investors and consumers. It needs to manifest the real and the aspirational truth about working in an organisation and mirror the values that are portrayed through the external corporate and consumer brands.

Brand promise

If these are disjointed, the ‘brand promise’ that is given to new employees will quickly fade as the reality bites of working in a very different organisation to the one promised. In the first part of Employer Branding: Taking It Online, we present our current thinking on employer branding including:

● Background to Employer Branding
● Delivering an Employer Brand
● Return on Investment
● Employee Value Proposition

We stress that employer branding is not something to be taken lightly. It takes commitment from every part – and at every level – of the organisation. Get it right and there will be a return on investment, increased loyalty and low attrition. Get it wrong and the opposite will be true.

Background to employer branding

Like many terms, employer branding can be seen to be ‘of the moment’. There are job adverts published weekly for Employer Brand Managers. There have been 160 articles on employer branding in English speaking publications in the last six months, compared to half that in 2005/2006 . On Google there are now 285,000 pages for ‘employer branding’ up from 150 in 2001 .

The roots of employer branding though stretch back to the 1990s. Market conditions and a grim recession prevented the concept from flourishing and it has only been in the last five years that employer branding has become a major force.

In 1996, Simon Barrow and Tim Ambler gave this definition:

We define the Employer Brand as the package of functional, economic and psychological benefits provided by employment and identified with the employing company .

The main role of the employer brand is to provide a coherent framework for management to simplify and focus priorities, increase productivity and improve recruitment, retention and commitment.

One could surmise that employer branding is related to a buoyant market economy. McKinsey’s War for Talent seems to be in full force, and recruitment and retention are definitely subjects that are still keeping CEOs awake at night.

Is this going to change if the credit crunch continues to bite? No, we believe that employer branding is here to stay. Organisations have realised that their people provide one of the few competitive differentiators. Good talent management makes sense and employer branding is an intrinsic part of an organisation’s armoury.

Delivering an employer brand

Should employer branding be an arduous and difficult undertaking? We think, and hope, not. The creation of an employer brand should not be excessively time-consuming nor overly complex – but it needs to be right. To initiate the delivery of an employer brand, there are three fundamental stakeholders who must be involved.

● Senior decision makers: to give insight into the vision, strategic direction, core objectives, competition landscape and attitude of consumers to the organisation.

● Key employee groups: to give opinions of the working environment, benefits, prospects, management and communication within the organisation. During this process, you will often encounter a gap between what the management think and the views of employees on the ground. With larger organisations in multiple locations and a diverse workforce, this will need to be repeated with several key groups across the organisation to get an accurate reflection.

● Relevant external labour pools: to highlight their understanding of an organisation, current obstacles to success and perception of the organisation in the market. Perception often lags behind reality so if an organisation has recently improved its remuneration structure, it might still be perceived as a poor payer in the market.

Return on investment

The concept of branding is well honed, and every senior leader expects to see a substantial return on investment. Employer branding is the same. We have mentioned that it will take commitment and long-term investment to get it right. Organisations should then rightly expect to see a return.

Investment in an employer brand does – and will – pay off. We have identified the following benefits to a good employer brand:

● True differentiation in your resourcing marketplaces
● An accurate, aspirational set of employment messages
● Consistency through the candidate/new starter journey
● Greater clarity of how you are perceived externally
● Your media investment working harder
● How perception varies between labour pools, locations and demographic groups
● Transparency as to your internal employee challenges
● Improved engagement of existing employees

There are also financial returns. By getting the employer brand right, there will be a reduction in the amount of money needed to invest to bring good people into the business. Standard figures are that you will have to pay on average 16% on top of current earnings to bring in talent, and as high as 22% if your employer brand is perceived to be unattractive. With a good employer brand this can be reduced to 11%.

Employee value proposition

The Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is the living reality of the employer brand. It is the promise that you make to current, future and potential employees. By defining an employer brand you will create an organisation’s EVP. For example, on a recent employer branding project for HSBC, we found that the central tenet of the organisation was the investment in, and development of, their staff. The organisation invests hugely in their people and there are opportunities to work locally, nationally and internationally. The EVP that we developed for HSBC was ‘Here you can’.

Research by The Conference Board found that an employer with an actively managed EVP will extend its target audience to 62% while an organisation with a non-managed EVP will only reach 41% of its target audiences .

As we have mentioned before, employer branding is not just about reaching potential employees. It is about an employer promise that is carried through all stages of employees’ experiences of that organisation – through recruitment, into employment and when having left the organisation.

Utilising research from The Conference Board we have analysed how engagement and commitment changes during the lifecycle of their employment. An employee who joins an organisation with an exemplary EVP will exhibit high levels of commitment (38%), compared to 9% if joining organisations with a poor EVP. After a year, if the EVP is correctly managed, commitment will fall but only to 31% compared to a very low 3% commitment level in organisations with a poor EVP.

What does the future hold?

Looking at the big online successes of 2007 will go some way to highlighting areas that may be in big demand for 2008 and beyond.

Some of the largest growth areas online have been some of the simplest: Google, YouTube, Facebook and the iPhone for example. These didn’t actually bring us anything new, they simply bought us a simple and usable way of accessing the content. Google made it so simple to search the web, YouTube brought video content to the masses, Facebook took web 2.0 and made it simple but essentially the end deliverable was nothing new.

With new devices such as the iPhone, we will see an explosion in mobile marketing with an increasing part of internet consumption coming from mobile handsets. This will make mobile compatible versions of current websites big in 2008. In 2007 there were 72 million mobile phone subscriptions in the UK against an estimated population of 60.2 million . T Mobile has partnered with Yahoo! to launch the new web’n’walk service which will offer consumers targeted graphical ads when using the service. Google is launching an open platform for mobile phones called Android demonstrating their belief in the future trends. With the expansion of WiFi networks, this mobile consumption will escalate.

We will also see sophisticated targeting tools emerge in 2008 allowing advertisers to target their messages to the most relevant audience. It will become much more commonplace to serve content rich advertising based on location, time of day, known internet behaviour patterns and interests.

One area that is already here is Google Gadget Ads. These are essentially high-quality websites, newspages and blogs that partner with Google to display targeted AdWords ads.

Just as users can search for keywords on Google and see ads related to those keywords, visitors to content network sites can see ads related specifically to the content they are viewing on a web page.

The Google system analyses the content and theme of the site, considering factors such as the text, language, link structure and page structure. From these factors, it then determines the central themes of the webpage, and targets relevant Gadget Ads using the ad groups selections created by TMP.

So, when you choose to advertise on the content network, you can expand your marketing reach to targeted audiences and potential customers visiting these sites every day.

Another big area of growth in 2008 will be internet television. With the launch of BBC iPlayer along with 4OD, Sky Anytime and ITV On Demand, there will be huge potential for targeted advertising to be served on these platforms. If a single integrated platform is developed in which you can access all channels in one, then this really opens up advertising and targeting possibilities.

Of course, it is not possible to talk about the future of internet applications without talking about the future of the internet itself and the continued evolving journey from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 – sometimes known as ‘the semantic web’. Web 1.0 was about publishing and making enormous amounts of information accessible. Web 2.0 was about the user interface and enabling users to connect to one another and harness the collective intelligence of crowds to give information a value, e.g. people who liked x also bought y. If that is the summary of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, then Web 3.0 is effectively giving the internet a brain.

According to Nova Spivack, founder of Web 3.0 company Radar Networks, Web 3.0 refers to the attempt by technologists to radically overhaul the basic platform of the internet so that it ‘understands’ the near infinite pieces of information that reside on it and draws connections between them. An example of this technology will be in natural search. Search engines will be able to understand the complete meaning of a question typed in, rather than match articles based on certain keyword relevance. E.g. ‘Which UK Prime Ministers died of disease?’ On Google, this currently returns articles on Prime Ministers’ speeches, diseases, and dead Prime Ministers but it wasn’t actually able to understand what was asked and respond with an answer. In the future it will.

This future will also link our applications together, essentially linking every aspect of our digital lives. So for instance, if you type an email with something specific in the subject line, you will automatically be given related articles, books, documents and videos that you have that are linked to that subject.

A final area to have a look at is virtual worlds. As broadband penetration and processing power increases, these immersive virtual worlds will become more and more popular. There are currently a lot to choose from with some worlds being vastly more popular than others such as Second Life or Entropia. There are others that cater purely for specific categories, such as Toontown or Whyville that are specifically for children.

Now the PR hype has died down somewhat from using virtual worlds, we are in a phase where organisations need to look carefully at how or what their overall strategy is. Virtual worlds offer a unique creative environment in which you can interact in real time. Some big players are about to enter this market, such as Google, Sony and MSN. This gives us the prospect of having linked virtual worlds where one avatar can exist within all worlds. The boundaries are almost limitless.

The future is an exciting place!

* An extract from TMP Worldwide’s White paper