Employer Branding For Dummies. Richard Mosley

corporate and customer brands, you’re ready to start thinking about how closely you want to align your employer brand with the existing brand associations.

Aligning your employer brand with existing brand associations

      When corporate and customer brands overlap to some degree, start with an understanding of how the products and services are perceived and the kind of brand associations the customer brand marketing team is trying to promote. Then decide how closely your organization’s employer brand should be associated with its existing corporate and customer brand identities.

      To build an employer brand that’s closely associated with your organization’s corporate and customer brand identities, develop a relationship with the customer brand marketing team to agree how you can support each other in building a brand reputation that works for both employees and customers.

      

Your employer brand reputation inevitably reflects the customer brand. For example, L’Oréal is widely known for its female beauty products, and inevitably its employer brand is generally more attractive to women than to men. Vodafone’s customer brand campaign “Power to You” inevitably shapes expectations of employee empowerment.

Diverging from existing brand associations

      If your employees have needs that differ from those of your customers, create an EVP, as explained in Chapter 4. The EVP draws focus to the attributes of your organization that are most relevant to the talent you’re recruiting. Identify which brand attributes the customer and employer brands can and should share. For example, at McDonald’s, certain brand associations are shared between customers and employees, while others are not:

      ❯❯ Family feel: Shared by customers and employees

      ❯❯ Low prices: Valued by customers, but likely to discourage candidates

      ❯❯ Future focused: Valued by employees, but neutral for customers

      

When envisioning an employer brand, be prepared to break away from an existing brand identity that’s likely to discourage targeted applicants. For example, Citibank’s advertising line “Citi Never Sleeps” was designed to appeal to customers, but it was far less appealing from the perspective of potential candidates.

Choosing to align with a corporate or customer brand

      If your organization has a corporate brand along with multiple customer brands, consider the degree to which you want to align your employer brand marketing within specific business units with the overall corporate brand or with the more immediate customer brand that those employees will be working for. For example, would candidates prefer to work for Bentley or Volkswagen (the parent company)? Would they prefer to work for Ben & Jerry’s or Unilever?

      Discuss the options with your organization’s senior management team. A strong desire to build the corporate brand may influence you to align your employer brand more closely with the corporate brand. On the other hand, a desire to maintain the distinct character of individual brands within the portfolio (including strong employee identification with the customer brand) may encourage you to create a range of employer brands with the corporate employer brand playing a more supporting role.

      

If you choose to create a range of employer brands, consider using the corporate brand as the “management brand” for those likely to seek a wider career across the group, with the customer-facing brand playing a more dominant role in attracting and engaging local, frontline employees.

Supporting the business strategy

      Business strategy is the plan an organization has in place to achieve its long-term objectives; it defines where and how an organization can best compete in the marketplace. P&G CEO A.G. Lafley suggests the two key business strategy questions are: “Where should we play? And how can we win?”

      Business strategy is beyond the scope of this book, but whatever your organization’s strategy is, be very clear about the resources and capabilities the business requires to build and sustain competitive advantage. These resources and capabilities include the kind of talent profile(s) you focus on, the employment benefits you use to attract them, and what you expect from employees in return if they choose to join you.

Getting the right talent onboard

      Three goals of every employer branding initiative are to attract, engage, and retain the best talent. To accomplish these goals, you first need to figure out what “best talent” means in the context of your organization. The best talent for your organization isn’t necessarily the brightest, most creative, or most highly skilled candidate. More likely, your ideal candidates possesses a unique blend of knowledge, skills, confidence, drive, imagination, integrity, and a host of other qualities that make them perfectly suited for your organization, its mission, and the positions to be filled. Employees with “the right stuff” enhance your organization’s corporate culture and contribute to its diversity. They make your organization better in all the ways that make it distinctive, and they help to reinforce its competitive advantage.

      

As Intel once declared, “Our rock stars aren’t like your rock stars.” We can’t provide you with a list of attributes that make the ideal candidate for your organization, but we can provide you with the guidance to conduct such an assessment of your own. In this section, you discover how to define the talent you’re targeting, so you have a clear idea of whether your current employer brand is achieving the desired results and, if it isn’t, what you need to do to make sure it does.

Determining the desired culture fit

      Most organizations require a variety of different skills and competencies to meet their resourcing requirements. However, before you start segmenting your workforce into different target talent groups, identify the overall qualities you would like all your employees to share in terms of the desired culture and values. These qualities may already be clearly articulated in a statement of your company’s values. If they’re not, then consult with your leadership team to determine these baseline characteristics. Typically desired qualities fall into the following three categories:

      ❯❯ Collective purpose: The ability and commitment to work with others to achieve a common goal. This category includes customer focus, teamwork, respect, honesty, integrity, and communication skills.

      ❯❯ Mental agility: The ability to adjust one’s thinking to best meet the challenges of work. This category covers innovation, imagination, learning ability, resourcefulness, and problem solving.

      ❯❯ Drive: The dedication to completing a task or achieving a goal. This category includes personal initiative, passion, confidence, decisiveness, performance focus, and persistence.

      Although all these qualities are certainly desirable, the important distinction between a generic target profile (good people) and the specific profile targeted by your employer brand (the right people) is differentiation. Among the generally positive qualities, which particular qualities do you emphasize? On which dimensions do you want people to overindex (outperform)? To answer this question effectively you must be clear about the culture your business most needs to achieve its strategic objectives and win in the marketplace. Here are several examples:

      ❯❯ Google looks for the following qualities in its ideal employee: A desire to use technology to make the world a better place, an entrepreneurial spirit for developing and selling new ideas, and “Googliness” (a mashup of passion and drive that Google describes as hard to define but easy to spot).

      ❯❯ In addition to the requisite professional and technical knowledge to join the world’s most prestigious consulting firm, McKinsey also looks for the following personal characteristics: an unusual blend of passion, dedication, and energy. It looks for people who are creative and insightful problem solvers, who enjoy working in teams, who have an entrepreneurial spirit, and who are interesting people outside the office.

      ❯❯ Helmut Schuster, the Executive Vice President of HR at BP,