“Begin with the end in mind.”

This is one of the seven habits of highly effective people promoted by thought leader Steven Covey, and it provides an excellent insight into organizational effectiveness. If the “end” in recruiting is to deliver the right person for the job—right now—it becomes imperative to create a meaningful connection with talent. The ability to connect (or even better, to develop relationships) and offer meaningful and accurate insights into your unique employment value proposition will provide a real competitive advantage in what promises to be an increasingly difficult labor market.

Employment branding is a long-term strategy that helps create the right perception of your unique employment experience and cultivate meaningful connections with talent. While the focus of employment branding is often external communications (as was the focus of my previous article on this topic), employment brand strategy is most effective when it connects with talent consistently, at every phase of the employee lifecycle. While the trend toward an increasingly competitive labor market creates challenges in attracting quality talent, it also means new opportunities for the best players on our current roster. And that makes engagement and retention mission-critical to the future success of the enterprise.

The truth is that there is no replacement for offering great career opportunities and working really hard to make sure your best people are more than satisfied in their employment. But even great career opportunities and high employee engagement don’t automatically translate into an immediate pool of quality talent to help sustain growth, accommodate attrition or add new skills to the organization. Often, the best careers (just like products) need to be marketed and sold.

So, with the end goal of attracting, engaging and retaining quality talent in mind, here are some things you can do to ensure your employment brand strategy becomes a distinct competitive advantage:

• Partner with marketing. While achieving brand synergy is critical to the success of an employment brand, the relationship with marketing can prove beneficial far beyond simply following communications guidelines and/or ensuring that the employment brand aligns with corporate brand initiatives (not to underestimate the importance of this). Spending real time around marketing pros will provide you with a better understanding of effective employment brand management strategy. You will discover how important it is to not overlook critical elements like research, integrity, consistency, satisfaction and feedback. Marketers understand that customers have choices and that a customer today doesn’t translate into a customer for life. That is why category leaders are obsessed with delivering a quality “brand experience” and creating meaningful customer connections. Top talent is the corporate recruiter’s most important customer—so consider the quality of your employment brand experience in conjunction with your marketing department.
• Conduct executive interviews. Attracting and retaining skilled staff ranked highest on executive agendas for 2005, according to a global study recently released by Accenture. Knowing that talent is top-of-mind makes this an ideal time to involve C-level leadership in contributing to the employment brand strategy. By developing a deeper understanding of the leadership perception of the current and desired employment experience, you will begin to establish the “Employment Value Proposition Aspiration”—the pinnacle of achievement with respect to the employment experience in your organization. You will also become more aware of leadership expectations as they pertain to attracting new talent into the organization, and ensuring your current employees are engaged. These discovery interviews help shape the strategy that will enable you to achieve desired outcomes. And the time spent engaging leadership creates additional organizational support for your talent management strategy.
• Conduct employee population focus groups. Current employee input is critical to discovering realities that will ensure employment brand messaging is on target. It is imperative to avoid any disconnect between the employment brand and the actual employment experience your people live every day in the workplace. Understanding what your best employees believe is unique, different, or better about your career opportunities goes a long way toward shaping or evolving your employment brand strategy. This is also a great opportunity to understand what you can do better. A comparison of executive and employee insights serves as a useful “gap analysis,” where a sizable difference in opinion or perception should raise a red flag. Efforts to bridge any measurable gap will positively impact employee engagement.
• Conduct “target talent” focus groups. As important as it is to understand and accurately position your true employment experience, it is just as critical to define the key drivers that are determined most significant by your external target audience. Knowing what is likely to resonate most powerfully with the talent you need, and determining what existing perceptions or misconceptions exist about your organization’s employment experience, will positively impact your employment brand messaging and talent acquisition efforts. Every recruiting organization covets more of the right talent. Determining what can motivate the right talent to respond and consider a change are key insights necessary to building an effective engagement strategy. Challenge yourself to consider whether you have a compelling enough opportunity to impact your target audience. If you have a great story to tell, does that awareness exist in the marketplace?
• Institute recruiter effectiveness training. When most effective, employment brand strategy is consistent at every employee touch point. As such, those charged with talent acquisition inside the organization need to be true employment brand ambassadors, create meaningful connections with talent, and provide each candidate with a special experience specific to the interface with your organization. A recent ERE article series extolled the benefits of great recruiters and offered ideas on how to attract them. But most people who are great at anything are committed to or require ongoing skill development. It goes without saying that better recruiters have more talent connections (or relationships with talent, and spend more time cultivating them) and understand that, increasingly, the candidate is the customer. The best recruiting teams lead organizations in cultivating relationships with talent and creating memorable candidate experiences. Opportunities for training are in abundance, but for some organizations, none may prove to have more impact and be more readily available (and free) as the next tip.
• Partner with sales. A great “recruiting development” initiative is to partner with the sales organization, and model or transition best practices for customer attraction, engagement and retention in sales as they apply to talent management. The parallels for achievement in both endeavors are increasingly being discussed, and they are many. Inviting a top producer or leader from the sales organization to serve as a liaison to the recruiting team, or share success stories around customer engagement and managing relationships, is useful in challenging even skilled and tenured recruiters to embrace a more dynamic approach to talent acquisition. The obsession a quality sales organization has around activity (quality lead generation), engagement, measurement and results, all lends itself to assisting the recruiting organization gain a competitive advantage in the quest for the best new employees. In many instances (especially in a service organization), the obsession a sales organization has with customer engagement and satisfaction begins at the point of commitment. Shouldn’t it be the same in recruiting?
• Improve the user experience on the careers section of your website. While there continues to be a focus on the career site application process and reliance on a developed ATS solution, this isn’t why candidates end up on your career section or apply for jobs. Steven Rothberg has provided a great series on improving corporate career sites, so I won’t belabor the point here. Suffice it to say, this is simply the best and most important place to extend your unique employment value proposition. Make sure you are providing candidates with a quality employment brand experience on your careers section, and leave them with an image and real understanding of what is special about working for your organization. Consider video streaming, career pathing and “a day in the life of” features to serve as a demonstration of what you offer. Develop content that’s specific to key audience members (college students, RNs, diversity applicants, etc.) and deliver a user experience online that makes people want to apply for a job. This is often the first interface you have with talent. Make it memorable.
• Focus on onboarding. The transition from commitment (acceptance of the offer) to employment is important in order to ensure a quality start to the relationship. You never get a second chance to make a good first impression, and if the impression you create during the hiring process is markedly different from the employee’s first day on the job, you’ve taken the first step toward disengagement. Basic orientation is no longer enough to ensure that a meaningful connection lasts beyond acceptance and throughout the first year of employment, the most significant period as it pertains to long-term retention. Onboarding is a developed strategy, with the appropriate investment and resource allocation, designed to ensure that talent assimilation into the organization is an extension of the employment brand experience, a validation of the candidate’s decision to join your organization and an evolution of meaningful connection into a fulfilling engagement.
• Engage with employees. You have to do a lot of things really well in order to keep your best people on board and deeply engaged in their work. Beyond great opportunities and dynamic work, improving internal communications can significantly impact engagement. Effectively crafted internal communication builds trust, establishes clearly defined expectations, helps rally people around a compelling or unifying mission and reinforces the valued contributions of the employee population. Employment branding is equally important internally in upholding the organization’s ongoing commitment to delivering a rewarding career experience. Remind people what you are doing really well. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side, and sometimes we can forget how good we have it. Although it isn’t the focus of this article, when it pertains to engagement, nothing is more important than great leadership. Increasingly, people leave managers (not necessarily the organization), and the relationship with the direct supervisor may have the most significant impact on retention and engagement. Develop great leaders and make sure they live the employment brand in principle and practice every day.

An employment brand is a promise that creates expectations about an experience. To ensure success, make certain your organization can deliver the employment experience your employment brand perpetuates. Remember, expectations of the career experience begin at commitment and continue throughout the entire employment relationship. In the “end,” talent will prove to be your organization’s most significant competitive advantage!

Originally published via the Electronic Recruiting Exchange (www.erexchange.com) on December 13, 2005.

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