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Written by Mark Hornung
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Thursday, 08 December 2011 07:37 |
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 Winston Churchill was visibly upset during a meeting with Josef Stalin during WWII. Churchill had just learned that a family friend had died. He apologized to Stalin for being carried away by the death of his friend while the Russian people were losing millions during the war.
“The death of one man is a tragedy,” Stalin remarked. “The death of millions is a statistic.”
Stalin understood that stories count more than numbers.
Stalin understood that stories count more than numbers.
Stalin was coldly correct. Many of us remember the book and movie about Anne Frank who died in the Holocaust. Hearing about the millions who also died doesn’t have the emotional impact that this young girl’s story continues to have. If you visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., you will be given a “passport” that bears the name and background of someone killed by the Nazis. The creators of the museum understood that the number of deaths is overwhelming, but that individual stories make these crimes more real. (I still think about the Seventh Day Adventist conscientious objector whose background I was given.)
What does this have to do with recruiting and employment?
Lately it seems that the field has become obsessed with metrics. Vendors claim that their dashboard or their tracking method or their search engine optimization technique will build your employer brand. And while all of these can help convey the brand and measure its uptake, they cannot and will not build the brand. Only stories can do that.
To go back to Comrade Stalin’s observation, statistics can quantify your employer brand, but they do not embody it. For that you must have stories about real people in your workplace.
An example of how employers have forgotten this can be found on Twitter. Follow most any employer’s tweet stream and the messages typically contain a job title, location and a short URL linking you to the careers Web site where you can learn more.
In today’s economy, these tweets are bound to attract a number of applicants. But are they the best applicants? And, to be brutally honest, does any recruiter really need more candidates to sift through nowadays?
Far better are the employers who share some of what it’s like to work in the organization, alerting followers to events where they will appear, even admitting occasionally that the poster is having a bad hair day. We can relate to other people and their foibles, and we begin to bond with these people much more than with an anonymous corporate entity that simply spews out the 21st century equivalent of newspaper help-wanted classified ads.
Think of the great employer brands today and what springs to mind are the stories associated with them. Southwest Airlines? You think of the flight attendants who tell jokes during the safety announcements. SAS Institute? The CEO going around at 5:00 PM and telling people to knock off and go home. Starbucks? Read “How Starbucks Saved My Life” by Michael Gates Gill. Apple? Steve Jobs (who, even though he could be a holy living terror, pushed people to do their best work). Ritz-Carlton? “Ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.” You get the idea.
What stories do people tell and re-tell about your organization? What processes do you have for identifying and archiving those stories in order to perpetuate your culture? Could you summarize that body of knowledge into a short phrase (< seven words) that could serve as a rallying cry for your employees (à la “Freedom Begins with Me” at Southwest)?
This concept was neatly summarized by another famous person of the 20th century, Albert Einstein. The physicist once observed that, “Not everything that counts can be counted; and not everything that can be counted, counts.”
About the author
D. Mark Hornung is Senior Vice President at Bernard Hodes Group and leader of the Hodes employer brand practice. Mark has studied and taught branding for over twenty years, starting as a copywriter and later award-winning creative director. In 1995, he joined J. Walter Thompson and was privileged to attend the JWT Brand School in Chicago. Briefly seduced by the siren of the dot com, Mark returned to employment marketing with Hodes in 2003, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He writes the company’s blog, “Hodes Voices” and speaks at conferences throughout the world on his passion, employer branding. |
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Employer Branding: Engaging and keeping talent from the start |
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Written by Alfonso Jiménez
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Wednesday, 07 December 2011 19:56 |
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Why is talent important?
In a knowledge-based and service-oriented economy, competition actually takes place over one key issue: the talent of those involved in the business and engaged in the company’s success.
In the past, the competitive advantage of organizations focused in other factors: capital, financial assets, raw materials, specific technologies, patents or licenses. Nowadays, all the above are no longer barriers to competitiveness, but instead, most are widely accessible. In most businesses, the only driver for competitiveness is talent.
Moreover, talent, understood as the result of multiplying people competencies (what they know and, more importantly, what they can do or even what they can potentially be able to do if developed right) times their level of engagement, is a very rare asset.
Developed economies are experiencing a demographic crisis, in which there are less and less people and at the same time, the educational and professional level of those few is also lower.
For instance, in Spain, the number of young nationals is progressively decreasing from 30% of the overall population to the current 19% and moving towards 14% in the next few years.
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Delivering a signature employment experience |
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Written by Brett Minchington
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Wednesday, 23 November 2011 18:05 |
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Have you read Brett's new book, Employer Brand Leadership-A Global Perspective?
The key moments of truth for your employer brand
Companies are increasingly realising that looking at only one part of the employee lifecycle e.g. recruitment, is simply not enough! Employee’s needs and motivators change over time during the course of their tenure. These changes may be influenced by lifestyle factors such as age, gender, experience, qualifications, marital status, stage of life, career aspirations, etc.
Your employer brand strategy must consider the complete picture and leaders need to carefully consider and plan how the employee experience impacts people at each touchpoint across the lifecycle. Smart Executives realise that a ‘one-size-fits’ all lifecycle strategy fails to optimise productivity. Companies that segment and align the employee lifecycle as part of their employer brand strategy will benefit from maintaining higher levels of engagement, productivity, customer satisfaction and profit!
Where to begin!
A lifecycle mapping audit will identify any gaps in employee experience from pre-hire to re-hire and your future strategy will need to address these gaps to ensure your people policies, processes and systems are working to provide a signature employee experience. In theory it makes good sense, in practice, much work needs to be done as there are many moving parts to join up. Segmenting and effectively managing the employee lifecycle will require a culture change for many companies.
The fifteen moments of truth
Whilst there will be variances depending on company size, scope and scale, the key ‘moments of truths’ across the employee lifecycle which will require your focus include:
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Take a lesson in employer branding from NASA and Atlantis |
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Written by Mark Hornung
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Saturday, 09 July 2011 09:39 |
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Original article posted at Hodes Voices
 A news reporter was covering the Mercury space program in the early 60’s and was on a press tour of the Cape Canaveral complex. Looking for an angle not covered by the other media, he asked a lone man near the group who he was and what he did.
The man gave his name, said he was a janitor at the complex, and then added, “I’m helping to put a man on the moon.”
Many have heard this attributed to President John F. Kennedy, but there is no confirmation of that. The take-away, however, is that the janitor came to embody the ultimate engaged employee. Even though he never flipped a switch or wrote a line of code, he still saw his job as contributing to the overall mission and was determined to do the best he could to ensure the organization’s success.
In light of the launch of Atlantis on the final scheduled mission of a Space Shuttle, it is fitting to look back upon fifty years of human space travel and its legacy. NASA and its astronauts gave us Tang, Velcro, Teflon, and memories many of us will carry forever. If you were above the age of reason when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon, you can remember that moment like it was yesterday.
Another bequest from our space program is the example of setting a visionary, inspiring goal and focusing your workforce on its accomplishment. A good example of this is the scene from “Apollo 13″ when NASA engineers must devise a solution for the faltering space capsule using only the parts and tools available on the spacecraft. Friends of mine who work at NASA say that the conference room table the engineers used to hold the parts (it was a true story) is venerated to this day and the story is legendary within the agency. Ask yourself: would those engineers have thrown themselves into that challenge as wholeheartedly if their mission was to “maximize shareholder value” or “develop the next generation of widgets”?
When articulating your organizational mission, look at it critically. Does it inspire people, like “putting a man on the Moon” did? Or is it an amalgam of business doublespeak that basically says, “we’re in it for the money”? If you want your people to give 110%, it helps if they aim high.
As they say at Star Fleet, ad astra per aspera. “To the stars through hardship.” |
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Re-thinking employer branding, Pt. 1 |
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Written by Mark
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Monday, 14 March 2011 07:40 |
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In a blog post by Mark at Hodes, he writes, "Employer branding owes much of its intellectual legitimacy to the practice of product and corporate branding. Talent executives have studied what their counterparts in Marketing and Communications have learned and adapted that body of knowledge to employment."
Thus, concepts such as the Brand Funnel and positioning have become essential parts of any discussion about an employer brand. For those not familiar with those concepts, a brief digression.
The Brand Funnel is a visual representation of the stages a consumer— or candidate— goes through during the process of buying a product or service or applying for a job...........
To read the full employer branding blog post please click here> |
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