What’s about to happen in SA is unprecedented. If you employ highly skilled technical people – your attraction problem just got MASSIVE.
If you had an Attraction and Retention Strategy before the GFC and have let it slide – NOW is the time to rethink it. Whatever industry you are in. Aged care and health are growing sectors – limited in growth by their ability to attract and retain staff. $30 Billion is about to be spent on Defence, much of it in SA. Defence will be a mass consumer in SA between 2020 and 2030 – including a mass consumer of talent!
Does this affect your industry? We are about to embark on unprecedented expenditure – with many large Defence projects about to start, overlapping each other. Defence is coming for your engineers, in particular. Defence will also need tradespeople: electricians, fabricators, electro-technicians, supply chain and logistics specialists, commercial negotiation specialists, and a whole lot more capability – and they will be offering huge salaries.
As was recently explained to me by an Organisational Development Manager in Defence – Defence projects have “full costs recovery” on labour costs! That’s right – they don’t actually pay the salaries – which means they pay a lot because it’s not coming off their budget! Scared?
So, you might want to get out and dust off that old “Attracting and Retaining Talent Strategic Plan” – review, revise and re-draft it now.
You’re going to need:
- An attractive Employer Brand
- Employee Value Propositions that clearly articulate why people should work for you
- A Strategic Attraction and Retention Plan that will guide your whole attraction, recruitment, selection, on-boarding, development, remuneration, wellbeing, flexibility, work design and retention strategy.
The Five Pillars of a Strong Employment Brand
– Ron Lawrence (VF Corp, USA).
1) A clear value proposition – find out what characterises your organisation’s culture. Do you need different value propositions for different groups of employees? Are they clearly expressed and understood?
2) Synergy with customer brands. (Generates employee engagement and consumer loyalty). Eg Nike – in Oregon their offices look and feel like a camp for athletes.
3) Authenticity / Consistency – they must ring true, they must be well-communicated, they must be delivered in employees experience. (Check this with feedback from recent hires, departing employees and employment applicants who do not end up working for you.)
4) Loyalty – create loyalty by going one more step. Helping employees in need (e.g. insurance co after Hurricane Katrina, be a good corporate citizen – have a CSR program or be seen to “do the right thing” (e.g. Johnsons – product recall).
5) Cultural Consistency in practice – you must deliver on them.
What HR Practitioners can learn from the latest in Branding Experience
- People are brand conscious – but often not brand loyal.
- If a product elevates your status in the eyes of your peers it will be conspicuously consumed. Translated into employer branding – if being interviewed or employed by your organisation elevates a person’s status in the eyes of their peers – they are more likely to talk about it.
- It’s important to live the brand traits.
- Experiences are key. Offer an experience that can’t be bought to enhance your brand.
e.g. a product branding competition might offer a day with David Beckham or a Meet the Band prize. What experience could you offer? (e.g. Google – bring pets to work, free gourmet food and drink, gym and workout facilities, laundry service; Woods Bagot with their PUBLIC branding; the company conference with Anthony Robbins? Do you have a senior thought leader on board who would be a new employee’s mentor / manager?) Provide positive, memorable experiences and the tools to embrace it.
Developing your Employee Value Propositions and Employer Brand
These notes are provided to you as a brief summary of the main stages of the branding process that you might want to follow as you develop your Employer Brand.
There are many, many actions to take in stage 5 to integrate your Employer Brand into everything, every touch point, of the employee lifecycle (from attraction and selection to change management and employee exit).
For more detailed assistance to develop and implement your strategy, please contact Bridget at HR Development at Work.
1) Research
You already have an Employer Brand – it’s been created in the minds of employees and the target market by their experiences with your organisation to date. You are not starting with a clean slate (unless you are a new organisation). Your Employer Brand may be good, it may be poor, it may be wishy-washy and undefined – but you need to know what you are starting with.
- a) Conduct research with current employees, job applicants, exiting employees.
Find the associations people make with your brand (their perceptions, images, the attributes and emotions they associate with your organisation).
What attracts and retains people in your organisation? What do they value most about their employment experience? (e.g. overseas secondments, work life balance – working from home). Determine the key attributes of their employment experience.
Be careful to note if there are distinct differences of opinion by factors like: job performance, organisation fit, job type, life stage/time in the workforce – it may be that graduates, or people coming from another sector (public/private) have differing attraction factors. It may be that what attracts your top performers is different to what attracts your poor performers!
Research also helps your people feel that they were involved in the development of the brand – and (just like homemade apple pie versus store bough) they then have more interest in becoming passionate about it.
- b) Find out your brand position – how are you seen by potential employees / current employees compared to other likely places they might work.
Involve employees / your target employees at different levels and job types. We all have different comparison employer groups.
You want to become an expert on the target market (as a marketer would) – know their likes, preferences, aspirations – so you know how to deliver the kind of employment experience that your target market (the talent you want to attract) wants.
2) Develop Employee Value Propositions (EVPs).
In consumer marketing this stage could be called a “brand story” – it represents in an instant emotional way what the brand stands for and what it is about.
In employer branding I would call this stage developing Employee Value propositions – statements about the value that you offer to employees. Using what you learnt in the research stage – identify the key attributes and emotions that attract staff, that you want to have associated with your brand.
Make your strategy a targeted one – sufficient to attract the right people from each of your targeted groups of employees. Your strategy should focus on what your “best fit” staff (by demographic, location etc) value most in a work experience.
(Reverse Brand Engineering – You may also have to address negative attributes already in existence about your Employer Brand. Call us for more information about how we can assist you to manage this process).
Phrase EVPs as direct propositions e.g. “Come and work for us and spend three days a year with thought leaders like the Dalai Lama.” Or “Come and work with us, cycle 2 minutes to work and have a pony in the backyard for your little girl” – if you are in a rural location.
3) Test out your Employee Value Propositions
- Test your EVPs – find out if current employees relate to them.
- Test them out with your target recruits. You may have different EVP’s for different groups (e.g Accountants, Engineers) – make sure this isn’t a problem
- Pilot them on current employees (especially an EVP such as “Come and work with us and have a senior manager as your mentor for your first 2 years”.)
- Refine them before going to the market.
4) Recruitment
Start to manage expectations and target those who can naturally operate within your “brand space.”
Ensure any third party involved (a recruiter) is really clear about your brand and communicates it clearly to the candidates. Test candidates experiences to check for this – sometimes a poor recruitment agency experience can put your candidates off.
Align your selection methods and the underlying competences, values and behaviours with your employer brand (if they are not already aligned).
Click here for more information on HR Development at Work’s help with candidate attraction, defining key competences and designing reliable, valid in-house selection methods, including competency interviews, to enable your managers to select the best.
5) OD, Training and Development – How is the promise delivered?
Reinforce the brand, the organisations culture, the “way we do things around here”, the organisation’s valued behaviours etc. An employer brand – in its essence – is about everything we do for and with employees and everything they say or do related to their employment.
So, the biggest part of Employer Branding is managing every part of the employment experience so it leads to the perceptions and associations that you want to create or reinforce. Involve employees in this process of designing work experiences – they’ll be the experts on the experience they desire.
The employer brand needs to integrate with every process and organisational system – including induction, reward and communications – to ensure that employees across the organisation (current and new) engage with the brand. Create brand engagement experiences, create passion for the brand.
On-boarding / induction are a key part of managing expectations and aligning employees’ expectations with the organisation. What is this experience like in your organisation? Does this experience feel rewarding, exciting, welcoming?
Manage each experience in the company – these moments of truth – to provide an employee experience that fits with and reinforces / creates the brand.
Managers and staff may need additional training to align operational practices with the EVP’s/Employer Brand. This training helps to ensure that the employer brand is actually delivered and that the employee experiences what they expected.
Attracting and Retaining Talent Masterclasses
Book your in-house Masterclass now with Bridget Hogg, designer and facilitator of the very popular “Attracting and Retaining Talent Masterclass.” These Masterclasses have been held with business associations and organisations across Australia since 2004 – book yours now.
We run in-house Masterclasses for top teams to help organisations develop a Strategic Attraction and Retention Plan.
The Masterclass covers:
- The key issues around attraction and retention of talent in your organisation, based on industry research
- Employer Branding
- Employee Value Propositions
- How your attraction and retention strategy will impact on your recruitment, organisation development and the whole of the employee lifecycle.
The outcome of the Masterclass is a draft Strategic Attraction and Retention Plan with ideas around your Employer Brand (your current brand and Desired, Future Brand) and Employee Value Propositions captured.
Register your interest for an in-house or industry Attracting and Retaining Talent Masterclass now by emailing bridget@developmentatwork.com.au
To see what previous participants in a Masterclass have said about how it helped them scroll down the testimonials page of the HR development at Work website.
For more about the services of HR Development at Work, see our website https://www.developmentatwork.com.au