“Get an employer brand, and become the employer of first choice” That’s what everyone in HR is being told, either by the academics, or by the consultancies who specialise in employer branding. But how much resource should your organisation put into building a brand?
Is every organisation trying to be the first choice employer of the whole working population? If you are Smalltown Widget Co. are you going to get an employer brand that rivals Google? Obviously not. You need to keep a good reputation in your particular labour market, and you need to attract an adequate source of good candidates to fill your vacancies.
Most consultancies that claim to be employer branding experts focus on the visual aspects of what applicants to your company might see; logos, strap-lines, job ads and the look and feel of your website’s recruitment page. As explained in my January blog “What role does branding play in Employment Marketing? ”, these are peripheral issues in the marketing of employment.
The most important part of getting marketing right is to have a clear definition of your target market. You can then work on getting the right marketing mix of product, price, place and promotion that will appeal to that market. For most employers, and particularly if you are a small organisation, the most important of those is the product – the job. What will they be doing in the job? What aspects of that will provide your target market with job satisfaction? If you have not got that right, it is difficult to attract and retain employees purely through price (remuneration), place or promotion (recruitment channels and employer brand.)
Little and Large.
Big organisations often want to put less emphasis on particular jobs in their marketing, preferring to stress the wide range of career possibilities that the organisation can provide. An employer brand approach suits such organisations, and they have considerable resource to put into the brand. Often the employer branding effort will piggy-back on the strength of the company’s product/service brand.
But if you are an SME, how much effort can you usefully put into branding? I currently work for a company whose total headcount is just over 200 people. With turnover and some modest expansion, in the last two years we have needed to recruit 30 people a year. Most of those positions were in London, but some were in China, India and the US. Most of the positions were for market analysts. We need to recruit very smart graduates, usually in economics, with excellent writing skills. This means our employment marketing objectives are to secure a reliable source of good recruits, maintain a good reputation in our specialist field, and to stay competitive in a market with about half a dozen direct competitors. I do not need to get the company name known by the general public. I do not need to make our company the first choice for every profession from actuaries to zookeepers. I do not need a brand as recognisable as Google or Nike.
The Corner Shop.
I think any theoretical framework for Human Resources should be universally applicable to all organisations that employ people. And for me, a marketing framework for HR meets that criterion. I can illustrate that with my Corner Shop Exercise. (For American readers, the Neighbourhood Convenience Store Exercise).
Imagine you run a small neighbourhood general shop. Profit margins are tight, but you decide you really must hire some extra help for a few hours mid-week, whilst you go to the warehouse to buy stock, and then unload, and sort stock in your storeroom. The employment product will therefore be “taking payment for goods, bagging the purchases, making sure the local kids don’t steal stuff”. This job could be done late afternoon / early evening, a 3 hour shift on two mid-week days. Who is your target market? Most people I have tried this exercise on will at this stage be favouring senior school students as the target market; cheap, available, need the pocket money, but sensible enough to be left in charge of the shop. How and where will you advertise? Your target market will be very local – will it need any more than a home-made poster in your shop window? And how much do you think you will pay?
On a small scale, you have just constructed a marketing mix; product, place, price and promotion to suit the segment of the labour market that you need for your business. Then you remember that you sell alcohol, and that licensing laws require that anyone selling alcohol should be over 18 years old. Perhaps you need to consider other segments of the (very) local labour market as the potential source of your assistant, such as stay-at-home mums, and people who have retired from full-time work. You will have to pay them more than a 16-year old.
Now we have demonstrated that a change in the employment product caused you to change your target market, and adjust your pricing to suit. The principles of marketing applied even to this scale of operation: branding did not. Update: On Tuesday I attended a presentation on employee engagement and retention. The speaker had lots of useful information on what employees' priorities are, how employers could retain staff, etc. The audience were mostly SME's from media and publishing sectors. When the speaker came to the topic of employer brand, she suggested that we should try to compete with Google, Apple and Virgin. If only it were that simple!
