Regional Talent Acquisition Heads Meet to Discuss Respect in the Workplace and Other Factors Affecting Employer Branding

The Chapman Consulting Group today hosted an HR roundtable discussion for 20 select Talent Acquisition heads. Regional staffing leaders from high-profile multinationals in the Financial Services, Technology, Healthcare, Professional Services, Media and Industrial sectors met over lunch at the Singapore Cricket Club to discuss the topic of employer branding. The discussion was led by Sue Redden, co-founder of Peer Group Communications, a London-based consultancy that specialises in working with multinational companies on their global employer branding strategies.

The key take-away from the meeting was the need to continually view your company’s employer branding strategy as an ongoing priority, rather than view it as a one-off project. A company’s employer brand changes over time, especially after significant business events such as corporate transformations and M&A activity. Moreover, the company’s overall Employee Value Proposition (EVP) may need to be tweaked depending on a particular business division or on geographical specifics, requiring the creation of a Targeted Value Proposition (TVP) that makes sense to each group’s particular sub-brand within the organisation.

Key Challenges

The key challenge to ‘getting it right’ is in getting buy-in from a wide array of stakeholders within the business from the outset. For a successful employer branding strategy to be properly measured and then to later offer tangible results, the company must set out these targets with buy-in from all departments which this effects: HR, Recruitment, Sales & Marketing, Communications and ultimately the CEO themselves.

Because of the difficulty in coordinating these groups, and due to the growing need to prioritise employer branding to define company values both internally and externally, some progressive companies have created a new ‘Employer Branding’ or ‘HR Communications’ department, which has the ownership of this task. Sadly in too many companies, employer branding is still a nebulous concept and can sometimes ‘fall between the cracks’ of these different departments.

Like in defining the value of HR itself, the other key challenge is in the lack of a one-size-fits-all definition. In one company, the desired result could be improved recruitment at lower cost, and in another it could be solely to do with internal employee engagement and culture building. For some it’s just for external recruitment purposes, but for others it can form the basis of their entire people management strategy.

The Context of Recruitment

In the context of the participants at today’s event, the most important factor for all to keep in mind regarding recruitment processes was the need for consistency throughout the various ‘touchpoints’ of a person’s interaction with the company and its brand. At every stage throughout the process of job application, starting as early as seeing an advert or in the receipt of an email confirmation message for an online job application, the company has the opportunity to improve the experience of the participant.

The participants heard about a number of case studies where this had been put into practice successfully, and where there had been particular issues that needed to be resolved. One of the key new teachings in the science of employer branding is the notion of respect in the workplace. While more traditional issues such as working environment, career paths, and the general meaningfulness of a role will continue to play a large part in engaging an employee, increasingly we’re seeing issues such as diversity and human dignity playing an increasingly important role. This is particularly the case where a business has been hit hard by a recession, as a company can often show it’s ‘true colours’ during a period of corporate instability, and it can be very difficult for a positive Employer Value Proposition to ring true to either its existing employees or potential applicants.

The subject of changing economic circumstances brings us back to the original point of the need to see the Employer Brand as a living document that needs to change along with the company, so that it always rings true. The worst thing that can happen is if a company ‘oversells’ itself with too much aspiration and not enough reality. The effect of this is a big shock to a new employee upon entering the company itself. Therefore it’s important to aim for the ‘ideal’ in employer engagement in the recruitment of new talent: no surprises.

Conclusion

While participants demonstrated a good understanding of all the key points that were mentioned, there still exists numerous blockages to putting into place these effective employer branding strategies in Asia Pacific. In some cases it can boil down to a simple issue of readiness — where companies don’t yet have an effective and joined-up international communications platform that unites the company’s ethos across the region, it can be hard to get to the first step in even articulating the importance of employer branding. In other cases the readiness can be there, but the political will to join forces between the various department and stakeholders was not yet in place. And even in organisations where the ‘stars are in alignment’ in terms of the company’s understanding of employer branding, the issue can boil down to budget and the difficulty in proving the return on investment to these strategies.

There’s no doubt that this will continue to gain importance in the market, and some companies represented at today’s lunch are already ahead of the curve. For the time being in the Asia Pacific region at least, these companies can hopefully begin to enjoy the results of this investment before the rest of the market catches up.