We're all suffering from status update anxiety now.
In an age of transparency tyranny, War for Talent 2.0, and an osmosis between social and business spheres, organisations need to re-think the importance of their employment brands.
The talent that you are seeking to attract, engage and retain are not just looking for a stimulating career any more. They are looking for a boost to their personal brands. Today we are hyperlinked, interconnected, and linked in 24/7/365, and talent carefully monitor, nurture, and measure their personal brands in social media. Working for the right brand isn't just good for your career, it directly determines your social status, and builds you up for the next career move. There is a generation of digitally native talent who have grown up working dual shifts at their own public relations firms monitoring ‘Brand Me'.
They tweet, leak and status update.
They count personal brand return on efforts in likes, re-tweets, and comments. Having a cool employment brand by your side is important for brand alignment, authenticity, and status. It's crucial for living a credible, exciting, empowered and stimulating life - both on and offline.
They know that the War for Talent was never really over. That it merely entered a period of ceasefire during the global financial crisis. They have been re-grouping and they have observed the rules of engagement changing. They are expecting the internal reality of an employment experience to align with the external perception of your brand.
That brand is one that now merges the customer-facing brand with the talent-facing brand - for better and for worse. We can all think of the brand damage experienced by Nestle, BP, Dell, Vodafone and Dominos Pizza over the last 12 months as a result of the social media amplification of PR crises. Similarly, we can witness the positive results of organisations boosting their customer-facing brands by successfully displaying a youthful and fun employment brands like Air New Zealand's 'Bare Essentials' safety campaign.
No longer is your brand's karma just comprised of the efficacy, ethics, and innovation inside your supply chain. 'Leaks' are in the zeitgeist and don't just affect the United States' diplomatic corps, and if your customer-facing brand is out of whack with your employment brand, customers and talent will punish you. For all their self-obsessed cynicism, Gen Y take moral issues seriously.
In many ways, because of this transparency tyranny, employment brands are your brands.
Across the world, three strategies seem to successfully align customer-facing brands with talent-facing brands.
Thought Leadership is the recognition from the outside world that the company deeply understands its business, the needs of its customers, and the broader marketplace in which it operates. This includes an awareness of talent desires. Thought Leadership is not only one of the key B2B marketing strategies that companies and management consultancies around the world are using for brand awareness and business building, but it's also a key to boosting employment brands. AMP through its Amplify events - an innovation and thought leadership festival, Aurecon with its focus on 'Live Your Ideas', and Fuji Xerox with its 'Innovate' programs across Asia Pacific, have understood that thought leadership attracts clients as well as talent.
Ideas are not ageist, and emerging talent are keen to work for meritocratic organisations that reward innovative thought, whether you're 25, 45, or 65. Thought Leadership program boost not only the intellectual output of organisations, but are also a key leadership development, attraction and engagement tool. The concept is an example of the blending of your customer-facing brand and your talent-facing brand.
For employment brands to live in the hearts and minds of talent today, it needs to be communicated in a digilogue fashion - blending digital and analogue ways of communicating. Good customer-facing ad campaigns today get amplified via social media platforms, and create buzz around the employment brand, too. New Zealand Post blends high tech/high touch through its iPhone app, which enables you to send analogue, tailored, and personalised postcards of your iPhone photos via its application. Technology enables tailored conversations with customers, and even though KPMG recruited 14% of its staff on Facebook already in 2007, a computer interface can never really replace a human face. Organisations need to find inspiration in the likes of Apple's offline and online retail success when it comes to building their employment brands. This 'digilogue' approach to communicating your employment brand is utilised by the likes of Deloitte, Bayer, and Google via YouTube. With Cisco projecting that 90% of all webcontent will be video by 2014 and YouTube the second largest search engine in the world, organisations need to embrace both old and new ways of communicating their employment brands.
'Pale, male, and stale' cultures are anathema to a good employment brand. Today's workforce is more diverse than ever, 2011 is the first year when we have 4 generations in the workplace, and today's college graduates are 30% more narcissistic than in 1980. In fact, some of the greatest customer-facing brands are those that encourage diversity, quirkiness and a certain style of 'misfit talent'. Toyota launched its Rukus brand with the mantra of 'don't blend in', Apple re-launched its brand and culture with its 'Think Different' campaign, and because of Facebook's social analytics, tailored psychographics are replacing demographics as every marketer's wet dream. Talent today expect to be able to turn up in a workplace culture that doesn't reflect corporate structures that look like phallic symbols. Instead, they expect a certain sense of counter culture. A culture that challenges the status quo. This is the reason why employment brands like Virgin Blue, Zappos and iiNet are popular.
Talent is increasingly drawn to the challenger, the misfit, and the corporate jester who marches to the beat of a different drum. Their engagement is directly relevant to your bottom-line. A 2009 Gallup quantified the impact of customer and employee engagement. They found that those in the upper half on customer engagement and the lower half on employee engagement, or vice versa, get a 70% boost in bottom-line results; those in the upper half on both customer and employee engagement get a 240% boost. A counter culture that is on trend and enables talent ingenuity and unique styles of intelligence to flourish, will reap positive brand karma.
In summary, we're all suffering from status update anxiety now. Talent and customers seek out authentic brands who align perception and reality. Forward-looking companies understand that business and social spheres are merging and are focusing their branding efforts on strategies that incorporate both a talent and customer element. Thought Leadership, Digilogue and Counter Culture are three examples of employment branding strategies that are on trend and serving organisations in Australia and New Zealand well.
Incidentally, they all focus on the personal brand self-actualisation of your talent. Which ones are you going to pursue?