Long term listeners to the show will know how critically important I feel employer branding is to talent acquisition. Unfortunately, though I still see lots of companies treating employer branding as a surface level marketing exercise rather than giving it the strategic depth it requires.
I’m pleased to welcome employer branding consultant Neil Harrison as my guest this week to discuss what employers should be doing to build a compelling brand in 2019. Neil has over a decade of experience running major employer branding projects and has some great insights to share.
In the interview we discuss:
- How the practice of employer branding has developed in the last ten years
- The relationship between employer branding and marketing within organisations
- Why employer brands need to continuously evolve and can’t just be a snapshot in time
- The critical importance of research
- The danger of creating a non-authentic employer brand
Neil also shares some practical examples of employer branding in action and gives us his view on its future evolution.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:01]:
This is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 171 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Long term listeners to the show will know how critically important I feel employer branding is to talent acquisition. Unfortunately though, I still see lots of companies treating employer branding as a surface level marketing exercise rather than giving it the strategic dep it really requires to discuss what employers should be doing to build an effective employer brand in 2019. My guest this week is brand consultant Neil Harrison. Neil has over a decade’s experience running major employer brand projects and has some great insights to share. Enjoy the interview. Hi Neil and welcome to the podcast.
Neil Harrison [00:01:51]:
Hello Matt, nice to be here. Looking forward to this immensely.
Matt Alder [00:01:54]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Neil Harrison [00:01:59]:
Yeah, I’ll try my best. So I’ve been working in the field of employer branding for an awful lot of time. Probably wasn’t called employer branding when I first worked in what was then, I guess recruitment advertising. But really for the last 15 years I’ve spent a lot of time working with organizations in order to enhance their employer brand in order to construct their employee value proposition. So I spent about a dozen years as head of employer brand at TMP up until a couple of years ago. That point I’ve set myself up on my own and doing a whole range of work within this kind of space for a number of organizations direct a lot of agencies. So seeing a huge amount of variety, lots of interesting organizations, lots of interesting challenges.
Matt Alder [00:02:46]:
So I think having worked in the space for so long, it probably gives you a great perspective on, you know, how employer brand has developed as a concept over time. You know, what is your your perspective on how it’s developed and where it currently sits?
Neil Harrison [00:03:02]:
Yeah, it’s a good question. It was absolutely brought home to me a couple of weeks ago when my son, who’s at university, asked me to help with his dissertation on employer branding and I was kind of struck with two things at that point. On the positive side, that employer branding has effectively joined the mainstream and is being seen as credible enough to be taught at university. I thought that was tremendously positive. I was slightly concerned that if employee branding is seen as a slightly academic subject rather than something that’s living and breathing and organic. But no, for me, that’s one of the massive changes, is that 20 years ago it certainly wouldn’t have been a university subject. Now it’s seen as something that is important to university students with as they come into the workforce. In terms of changes, I think there’s been a massive sense of maturity about the marketplace. I think people generally, generally practitioners with employer branding, far more confident. I think if we’re having this conversation 10 years ago, there’s a sense that of talent acquisition and heads of employer branding perhaps being a bit, a little apologetic, not one as confident as it might be. There’s always that conversation as well about their relationship with their marketing colleagues. Is that a marriage of equals or is a sense of talent acquisition perhaps a poor relation to marketing? Think that’s changed significantly. I think the nature and tone of those conversations have changed. Today, marketing often wants to be part of those conversations, and quite rightly so, they’re interested in adding their own kind of perspective, their own sense of value to that. And for me, the best talent acquisition professionals are absolutely welcoming of it. I think there’s a lot to be learned in terms of that. I think if there’s any tiny bit of caution around there, it’s the sense of. Although an awful lot of people throughout an organization, whether it’s marketing, whether it’s pr, whether it’s comms, whether it’s indeed senior management, absolutely, quite rightly want to get involved, one area will be judged on it and that’s talent acquisition. So there’s a balance to be achieved there. But certainly I think it’s a more confident profession. I think it’s a profession that’s emerged in terms of the importance that’s attached to it. And I think fairly obviously the talent acquisition marketplace we’re in right now, there’s incredible amount of competition, huge amount of skill shortages. Any kind of conversation of this note will obviously take on board Brexit as well. Brexit will change the talent landscape. For me, probably not for the best. I think we’re already seeing a lot of EU people who’ve been employed in the UK deciding that, well, is the UK really interested in them and perhaps going back to home countries? I think in terms of lots of talent pools within the uk, you’ll see additional pressures on those. So employer branding has definitely changed, it’s definitely become for me, more professional, a lot more pressures on them right now. And some of that’s good in terms of the fact you’ve got a generally strong economy, global economy, certainly a UK economy, and that’s creating a lot of pressure on the labor market. And organizations that are imaginative, who take this kind of whole space seriously, who want to invest in it, are demonstrating really how good they are. I was doing some work very recently, a piece of research on candidate experience and I interviewed a whole number of senior talent acquisition professionals across the space and Google were one of those organizations. And if ever there was an employer brand that probably could be and tiny bit complacent, allowed to put their feet up a little bit, it’s probably Google and it’s the organization that absolutely dedicates time, focus, thinking, certainly headcount to this whole space in a way that I think I’ve ever seen before. So it’s something they realize that, you know, the sort of people that they’re looking to recruit are massively hard to find. Yes, they’ve got a super brand, they’ve got a super reputation, but so have a whole bunch of other people and they absolutely don’t let complaints complacency into their thinking, their approach for a second. So for me it’s a fascinating profession that evolves all the time and I think that sense of movement is massively important. And one of my kind of thought pieces right now is around this idea of the snapshot. And if there’s a sense of employer branding being slightly tactical, it’s around the view that we’ll look at. An organisation will often look at its employer brand, three, four, five years. So often they will go through a process of looking at their evp, doing some really interesting research around a variety of talent pools, speaking with senior management, understanding where the organisation is going, what the strategic journey looks like. Over the next few years they’ll talk to internal talent pools to understand what’s the employment reality. They’ll often take that research outside the building and understand how the talent pools are looking to engage with how they process this organisation. And then people like myself will try and craft an EVP on behalf of them. Often that EVP will exist for, as I said, three to five years. And that for me is a snapshot in time and I’d equate it to the ten year challenge. It’s going around in terms of Memes right now. So a lot of people are putting photos of themselves up 10 years ago and comparing them. But with today, things move so, so quickly. So if we think of any organization nearly in any marketplace over the course of three to five years, that organization’s business, its products will change exponentially. And that’s not the only thing that’s changing. The markets in which they’re operating, they will change significantly. Their competitor set will change economies, economic sentiment will change as well. So effectively, if they’re operating with an EVP or an employer brand, that’s based on a snapshot in time of three to five years previously, for me, they’re not projecting where the organization is going. They’re not projecting today’s reality of working there. They’re projecting a historical perspective. So, yeah, lots of changes for me.
Matt Alder [00:09:55]:
Matt, I think you’ve raised a lot of really interesting points there. And, you know, certainly, you know, like you, I’ve noticed that, you know, the employer brand conversations are mainstream and sort of talking about it, you know, whether it’s called employer brand or talent brand or whatever, you know, whatever the label of the week. Label of the week is, you know, and obviously a big part of that, you know, you mentioned the dreaded Brexit word, but I think, you know, we’re seeing it across the globe. There are economic and political factors, you know, at play in lots and lots of different countries that are, that are causing sort of squeezes on certain areas of talent. I think also one of the interesting things you said there was about, you know, the danger of employer brash brand, you know, just being academic and not necessarily practical. And I think one of the issues when employer brand gets discussed on platforms like these, it tends to, it can sometimes be very, very theoretical. So could you perhaps sort of talk us through a few, you know, practical examples of, you know, employer brand issues or employer brand in action that you’ve either seen or that you’re kind of working on yourself.
Neil Harrison [00:11:06]:
Yeah, and you’re right. I think there is a danger of it being the university comparison. Referencing my son was, for me, a slight concern because employer brands have to relate to organisations as they move forward. Obviously it has to relate to the working populations that are being recruited, are being retained, are being motivated by those organisations. And I think one of the, and I would say this because I spend a lot of time researching different talent pools. For me, one of the key areas where organisations either get employer branding very right or indeed get it very wrong is around research is around understanding what’s really going on underneath the bonnet of their organization. So what is the employment reality? What’s it genuinely like to work at this organization? How do people interact with each other? What are the core behaviors that run through the organisation? What’s the culture like? And in the absence of really talking to people and spending time engaging with them, listening to them, I think often organizations can rest on assumptions, on historical evidence there. I’ve just done a really interesting piece of work for one of the London’s major councils and for them, the EVP that’s fall out of that, that makes a whole bunch of sense. In addition to that, though, there’s a whole lot of. Absolutely, for me, and the hope for them too, a lot of really interesting themes that’s come out of that research. Again, simply by talking to the internal talent pools, the guys are looking ultimately to replicate through recruitment activities for them. There was lots of concern around turnover and they hadn’t perhaps realised the implications of turnover to existing staff there. And what they were finding was because of turnover, people were stretched, people new to the organisation weren’t being welcomed into this place, they weren’t being inducted as they might be. So lots of very practical implications around that, I think. And again, research for me underpins everything about an employer brand, because if you don’t have those really solid foundations, if you don’t have that really real sense of authenticity coursing through an employer brand, you’re kind of making that up. And I think people, particularly once they join an organisation, if they don’t sense that authenticity, if they don’t sense that the organization they thought they were going to join is the one they’re actually walking into, then I think that’s where you have massive issues around, certainly culture, certainly morale, both of them a premature departure. People don’t think they’ve all joined the organisation they’ve signed up to. I think, as I said, just going back to the point about research, there’s some absolute fundamentals that often fall out of that. I did a piece of creative testing on some new employer branding work last year for major police force and we conducted research amongst some external talent pool and these are the guys who potentially could be police officers with this particular force. Lots of fascinating feedback around which groups like particular work, some very specific issues, likes, dislikes around that. But fundamentally the key and the core message that came out of that research is they don’t necessarily believe that that force is recruiting recruiting because they don’t necessarily see them on the streets in the way they used to do, because they don’t see them on the streets because they hear about public sector headcount cuts. There’s a natural assumption that the police aren’t recruiting at all. So nearly more important than a particular message and a particular tagline was that sense of commitment, that sense of reassurance of that particular force is out there and communicating with them. I’ve just done a really interesting piece of research for a university as well and organisation, again, similar piece of research, again, trying to understand a little bit about sense of morale, a little bit about the employment reality of working there. Because if we’re going to ultimately project that externally, we need to have understood from an internal point, point of view how that really works. And for me, one of the obvious things that came about that was two really interesting things. Leadership on one hand were taking the organization through some fundamental changes. Higher education is going through some massive changes, lots of kind of pressures, so lots of cultural change going through universities. And this particular example was no exception. The view was that because leadership thought they were communicating, thought they’d laid out the next two or three years what they expected of people, how they thought changes were going to impact what different behaviors, competence is expected from people. We talked to people at those junior levels, they absolutely didn’t get that coming through. I think for me, another fascinating point of view as well is it’s an organisation that seemed nearly too polite going through real change, but the organisation was reluctant to call out poor behaviors. So people who to a certain extent as well, there’s a lack of recognition going through the organisation because the organisation didn’t feel they wanted to call out good behaviours. It didn’t really differentiate those from the poor behaviours that going on there. So those are the things you get to understand about an organization. And lots of similarities from one organisation and one industry sector from another, but. But some fundamental differentiations that we need to understand to a greater extent in order to populate that employer brand. So that sense of really immersing yourself in an organization, I think is where you get an employer brand, which is different, which is ownable, which is something an organisation can take forward, not take forward and set in stone, but organically review. And I think today we have so many different ways of testing validating an employer brand, an EVP which sits behind that, that to have this mechanical exercise where every three or four years we review it. For me, sound feels just wrong because if we’re talking about organizations disrupting, being nimble, being fast moving, then that EVP has to demonstrate similar kind of capabilities. It has to be capable of that sense of evolution and movement. And that for me is one of the big kind of changes, whether it’s little pulse surveys, whether it’s sitting down in terms of focus groups. And one of the richest areas of that research is understanding how we can extract stories from people. So Messages are great EVPs, that’s fantastic, but they tend to be carried to a far greater extent these days via stories. So if we’re trying to talk about, let’s say, enablement or empowerment or freedom, whatever it is, people will believe that to a far greater extent. If I’m hearing people from my peer group talk about those values, those attributes in stories that I believe in, stories that I could potentially see myself being part of. And I think the ability of an organization to tell those stories, to let their own people articulate those stories, gives you the opportunity of creating not only an authentic, unbelievable EVP and employer brand, but one that’s got warmth, that’s ultimately, it gives you an ability to create traction.
Matt Alder [00:19:19]:
I think, again, you raised lots of interesting points there, but I just want to kind of pick up on the measurement aspect of this. You know, in my experience, talking to employer brand managers in large organizations, there seems to be sort of very little consensus on, on how you measure an employer brand. And in fact, some people will say, well, you know, you can’t measure it. I think if we compare that to, you know, branding in the, you know, in the. In the kind of consumer marketing space that couldn’t be more different. So Fiona, my wife, who’s appeared on the podcast before, is a. Is a marketing director in the. In the drinks industry. And I look at the amount of data that she works with to, you know, judge the health of the brands that she manages and also optimize and make changes to the, to the. To the brand strategy. It just seems worlds away from where we are with employer branding at the moment. Why do you think that is? And, you know, what’s your view on employer brand measurement?
Neil Harrison [00:20:20]:
It’s a real coincidence, actually, because earlier on today, I was. I was going through a demo of a social listening team. Excellent tool, lots of adaptability, absolutely fascinating. Had the opportunity, the capacity to create vast tranches of data. When I kind of probed the guy giving the demo a little bit more around employment around employer branding, all of a sudden these tracks, these reams of information contracted significantly. So he was demonstrating a social listening tool where we were. Brand sentiment was being discussed. And really the amount of mentions from an employment point of view of this organization, which we’re demoing and it’s a huge global organization, was tiny. So I think going back to the story about your wife that the kind of tools and the methodologies that she will use, I don’t think we can necessarily apply because they’ve been constructed with its particular audience or particular set of audiences in mind. And actually, in a funny way, you talk about there being a sense of disparity around in terms of owners and employer brand, in terms of how they measure the success or otherwise. An employer brand, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing or a logical thing because however, we measure an employer brand in terms of its impact and success has to be relevant for that particular organization. For some organisations, cost per hire, time to hire, absolutely key drivers, those are the really obvious ones. But if you apply that to all organizations, I think you’re using a really blunt tool because let’s imagine you’re a small setup. You’re looking at data scientists, software engineers. You know, they’re incredibly hard to find and, you know, they’re probably not really cheap to find either. So actually, in a funny way, you don’t mind waiting a bit longer, you don’t mind paying a bit longer if you get that talent on board. So actually, those metrics become far less relevant for me and having this conversation during a pitch just last week around exactly this subject, and for me there’s probably two metrics which are emerging which I think have got real kind of value, whether they work for all organizations, possibly not. So one is around customer experience, candidate experience. I beg your pardon. So to understand how a candidate feels through that whole process, how aligned the EVP is to that process as well. So the messages they’ve heard externally, how do they translate internally? So I’ve been tracking into this process because I’ve heard that Company X is offering this in terms of kind of my freedom, my space to operate and my ability to learn and progress. Does that feel as if that’s being delivered during the candidate process? Do the hiring managers that I’m being exposed to, do they exude those kind of behaviors, those kind of competencies? Kind of just the opposite. And the communications that I’ve received, again, what’s the tone of voice? Does that feel as if it’s all about freedom and progression, or is it telling me something else? One of the key factors there is often around an ats. Now, some ats are absolutely value adding. Others can feel incredibly clunky, particularly if you are looking for younger millennial audiences, then their capacity to feel Patience around clunky IT and technology is massively limited. My daughter’s just graduated from university doing an engineering degree, so very technical, very IT literate, and she will be very, she will be very judgmental if she comes across organizations whose candidate process and ATS is anything but intuitive because that’s not the environment, that’s not the world she’s been brought up in. So for me, that candidate experience is absolutely critical. So for some organizations, the more far sighted ones is a real sense of continuity and a continuum. So the message that people are delivering to external candidate audiences via their attraction messaging shares a whole lot of DNA with that candidate journey, that candidate experience. And when people join the organization, what are they hearing during induction and onboarding? Is it something similar or do the organization they land into three months later, whatever it is, again, does that feel like a whole different organization than the one they thought they’d been recruited into? So that for me is another key part of a metric we should apply. How is candidate sentiment during that process? The other one I think as well you can look at too is that sense of understanding of an organization. And that’s something we need to track. So we’ve embarked on an employer branding campaign. How are candidates responding to that messaging? And if we do that on, let’s say month one of the campaign or the new employer brand, the new vp, how does candidate sentiment, how does awareness, the levels of association with that brand, that messaging, how does it track over time? So hopefully in four to six months time, people are much more aware of the brand, of the message, of what it’s trying to say than they were initially. I think those two areas there because that’s ultimate, the audience. It’s for me far more important how are candidates feeling and how are they understanding the organization they might or might not join? So yes, there are lots of different ways to measure an employer brand. For me it’s about candidate experience and people awareness and potential alignment with an organization’s employer brand.
Matt Alder [00:26:44]:
So final question, where are we going next? Where would you expect to see, how would you expect to see employer brands sort of develop over the next one to three years?
Neil Harrison [00:26:54]:
Well, one year takes us through Brexit. So that’s going to be, who knows, is going to be the key factor there for me where this industry is going. It’s about, I think greater levels of professionalism. So greater levels of metrics, greater levels of understanding how an employer brand is going. Understanding on a lot closer, more intuitive basis how an employer brand and that EVP and that message Platform is being considered, is being processed. Not something to come to as an automatic every three or four years, but are having a far more organic relationship if you like. I think as well one of my slight concerns about the process becoming more and more efficient, more and more streamlined, which on the surface of it sounds terribly positive, is the, is the ability of it to look at non perfect candidates. So I wrote a blog about this a couple of weeks ago and I think if we’re not careful particularly a it’s the right thing to do but B there’s a sense of our ability to look laterally in a very crowded talent marketplace is around trapped talent. So if my CV for example has a gap in it, if my CV reflects the fact that perhaps I joined the workforce immediately post recession in 2010, 2012 and that reflects a marketplace with far less choice. If I entered the workplace without much guidance, without much sense of role modelling, I’ve just ambled out of university if you like. Often my CV will be very much impacted by that. Older candidates, for example, whose academic qualifications reflect more the time they left school or college than their actual academic capability. People have gaps in their CVs people have caring duties. For me, if we’re not careful, our ever slicker ATS and application process will mean that those people stay as trapped talent and not talent that organizations out there can really take advantage of and can join the labor force. So I think that’s going to be a bigger part of it. I think employer branding will it should grow and grow as a profession. It would be lovely to see it stay as a university subject and there’s no reason it should. And I think the fact you’ve got Brett Mitchington’s World Employer Branding Day, I think that draws attention to it. That’s increasing levels of profile about employer branding. It’s increasing levels of professionalism around there as well. So having a focal point around there I think is massively useful. I think to a certain extent it’s and its incumbent on organizations because they’re faced with massive skill shortages and I think the more metrics we have around there. I’m just doing some fascinating pieces of research right now across Nordic area and the amount of employer league tables, whether it’s the universums of this world, the Randstads, Hays indexes, there are so many different ways of gauging different how employers are tracking how they’re performing, how they’re perceived by candidate audiences. I can only see that employee branding is going to be something that people take more and more seriously and take more and more seriously, invest more thought, more kind of leadership into. So yeah, I can, for me, I can only ever, I can only really see positive aspects in terms of the way the profession is going to evolve as long as it does evolve, as long as it keeps moving. And that’s my concern as I started right at the beginning of this Around a snapshot. If we’re not careful, employer branding can be about a series of snapshots three or four years apart, rather than an organic, evolving, more nimble process.
Matt Alder [00:31:07]:
Neil, thank you very much for talking to me.
Neil Harrison [00:31:09]:
It’s a pleasure. Thank you. Nice talk to you, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:31:13]:
My thanks to Neil Harrison. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
