In marketing, you cannot have a brand in isolation from the products and services sold. As employers, what exactly are we selling? Proponents of employer branding would say they are “selling” the organisation to potential recruits. Are recruits only interested in “the organisation” but uninterested in the job they might actually do in the organisation? I have never met a recruit or a serving employee who does not care what they do, as long as they are part of a particular company.
Employees are buying jobs and careers. In this transaction, they are paying with their time and effort, and are actually receiving money. This means our product is employment. That is the raw material that we shape into the employment experiences we are marketing.
Imagine all the work to be done in your organisation; visualise it as one job description of enormous proportions. This job description includes everything from deciding the financial strategy to emptying the office bins in the evening. How would you divide that up into careers, jobs and teams? What rationale would you use to find the dividing lines? That is how we define the employment product.
At the most fundamental level we decide whether we offer employment as a long-term career in our organisation, or jobs that can form an episode in a person’s career as they move between companies. “Job” in the sense means something shorter in duration than a “career”, not lower in quality. Larger organisations have more scope to offer intra-organisation careers than smaller ones, but organisations can choose where to position themselves on this factor.
To offer long duration careers involves trying to operate an internal labour market. Offering jobs that form steps in people’s careers involves frequent interaction with labour markets. This fundamental difference affects many other parameters of employment. It determines whether the remuneration policy focuses on internal comparisons or market comparisons. It determines the relative importance of succession planning and management development systems. It may influence the value placed on professional qualifications within the organisation.
Organisations may choose where to position themselves on this variable of career pattern offering. Two stereotypes drawn from opposite ends of this spectrum will illustrate the consequent differences in personnel systems and priorities.
THE LADDER CORPORATION
The Ladder Corporation takes the majority of its recruits straight from full-time education, either at school-leaver or graduate level. The recruitment literature emphasises the variety of work that can be found within the organisation, and the wide range of careers it can therefore offer. Promotion from within is the norm, and so its HR function has sophisticated systems with which to track managerial talent and manage their careers, such as succession planning and elaborate appraisal systems. Senior managers are expected to come from the ranks of "generalists" who have been moved around various functions and departments of the Corporation. As knowledge of the Corporation's business and procedures is highly regarded, relatively little importance is attached to external training. Unless they are a legal requirement, professional qualifications are seen as unnecessary for promotion within the Corporation. Remuneration policy is geared to managing internal differentials by means of job evaluation and grading schemes. Comparability of salary levels to those of similar organisations is a consideration, but the Ladder Corporation loses few employees to competitors.
PERCH LIMITED
Perch Limited recruits at all levels of the organisation. It may on occasions recruit school-leavers or graduates, but most vacancies are for those with some relevant vocational experience. The Company's managerial and professional staff see themselves as specialists in a particular function. Professional qualifications are seen as a useful indicator of some degree of competence. Experience of other organisations is valued as "breadth of commercial knowledge". Remuneration policy is geared towards maintaining market competitiveness. Perch Limited does promote from within, but often employees must compete with external candidates. Though many employees would welcome promotion within the company, few expect to stay there until retirement. They see their career development as their responsibility, not the Company's.
Organisations may choose where to position themselves on this variable of career pattern offering. The Civil Service, major clearing banks and blue-chip companies tend towards the Ladder end of the spectrum, whilst local authorities, hedge funds and small "hi-tech" companies tend towards the Perch end. Over the last 20 years, big corporations have shifted towards the Perch way of operating, by no longer offering “a job for life”, and recruiting externally for senior jobs. Some small organisations try to become more Ladder-like by offering development schemes for graduates, to retain them.
The career patterns that organisations offer are mirrored by the career patterns that people choose. In their study of management job change, Nicholson and West described these patterns as “in-spirallers” and “out-spirallers”. If you would describe yourself as an XYZ Corporation employee who just happens to be working in HR at the moment, you are an in-spiraller in a Ladder corporation. If you would describe yourself as an HR professional who just happens to be working at XYZ plc at the moment, you are an out-spiraller at one of several Perch companies that will form your career.
As the employment products offered by Perch and Ladder organisations vary significantly, their HR functions look very different, in terms of their priorities and activities. I will take reward as an example. In a Ladder Corporation, there is a big emphasis put on internal comparisons, and it is likely that HR will maintain a job evaluation system. Grading schemes and salary scales are well established, and only changed after much internal debate. Whilst the Ladder Corporation needs to ensure that its pay levels are comparable to competitors, it is not winning and losing people to its competitors at every level. In Perch plc, the emphasis is on maintaining market competiveness in various job disciplines. As Perch interacts with the market every time it recruits, competitiveness a real issue, sharper than a general notion of comparability. Concerns about pay will be focussed on market rates. Your sales people are concerned that they are being paid at the market rate for sales people in your sector. They are not interested in whether they are on the same grade as an accountant or an IT developer.
When working in HR in an SME, which are invariably Perch Ltd’s, you soon realise that most so-called “best practice” is geared to the needs of Ladder Corporations. The HR academics and the CIPD want to study what’s happening in the big corporations, in the mistaken belief that this is the “leading edge” that the rest of the profession will aspire to. It is not the case that HR people working in SME’s are just slow to adopt new techniques. We are just unwilling to adopt techniques irrelevant to our needs.
Employer branding is a concept that appeals to the senior management of Ladder corporations because it matches the career pattern that many of them have followed – having several jobs within one organisation. The emphasis on the whole company, rather than specific jobs, seems the obvious way to go. For Perch corporations, a good public reputation is helpful but what you have to market is specific jobs to specialist labour markets.
