“Employer Brand is a revolution happening on a budget and the Employee Value Proposition seems to have taken root”, said Richard Mosley, co-author of ‘The Employer Brand’ and Global SVP at People in Business.

All the people I spoke with were quite clear – developing your EB can be a great support for candidate attraction, but as Andy Hill, VP Talent & Resourcing at Invensys put it, “It’s not just about pretty adverts!” The EB you portray must be the way everyone sees working in the business. Becky Gloyne, Global Marketing Talent Acquisition Manager at Nokia went on to say, “It’s about ensuring your Employer Brand Communications Strategy is aligned with your Corporate and Consumer Brand. To do this you need to bring HR and Marketing together.”

One person who has helped numerous businesses develop their EB is Katrina Fox, Employer Brand Consultant at Peters-Fox. Katrina said, “Before you start any EB project, you need to listen. What is it like to work in your company? Ask all employees and make them feel part of it. Employer Brand is beyond attraction.”

Social Media has undoubtedly become far more important in developing and maintaining EB. ” You can be more direct, more relevant and get to audiences which may not have been easily accessible before”, said Becky Gloyne.

Wherever you are putting your message across, be it through social media channels or your recruitment website, content is key and delivering the message from the viewpoint of the employee is now crucial. “You need to socialise your Employer Brand, make it more interactive, conversational”, says Richard Mosley.  As Andy Hill sees it, “Five years ago, people looked for jobs on job boards, now there is a trend towards using search engines. As an example, we used to be on page 20 of Google for some of our jobs, now we’re ranked 12^th on page 1.” Richard Mosley added, “Job content is far more variable than the type of car you might buy and for once I can see recruitment being ahead of consumer marketing.”

Lisa Wallace, who at the time of writing was Interim Graduate Resourcing Manager at Boots noted, “3 to 4 years ago, few used Facebook for recruitment. Now it’s really big.” Richard Mosley added, “inAmerica, more people get jobs via Facebook than Linkedin.” Lisa had a similar view of Twitter, “Three years ago out of 300 applicants, only a handful used Twitter and even then it was for purely social reasons. Now there’s a huge jump in the number who use Twitter to follow companies.

Andy Hill has recently led Invensys through an extensive global Employer Branding process and Becky Gloyne is doing so with Nokia at the moment. They were both of the opinion that you need to show relevant content, given from the point of view of the employee. Becky also noted, “The main thing is to be completely transparent about everything that’s going on and to be honest about what is and isn’t working”. Andy added that whilst you can’t control what everyone is writing, “You want to get the people you want to hire talking about you and then give them a great experience.”

Everyone was clear that once you’ve got candidates to apply, a great candidate experience is essential. Andy Hill reminisced that when he was with Vodafone, if they had a million applicants and only hired 4,000, the odds were that 200,000 unsuccessful applicants would be Vodafone customers, easily able to switch providers, so candidates had to feel valued and respected even if they didn’t get the job. At Nokia, Becky Gloyne ensures all relevant candidates are encouraged to join candidate communities in the form of Nokia run Linkedin groups, enabling on-going communication. For Lisa Wallace, with the upsurge in graduate applications, she ensured not only the right content was on their website, but that it would take candidates to the limit of their interest, still making them feel valued, but also giving them the opportunity to deselect themselves if they realised the opportunity was not for them.

In practical terms, it is important to measure your return on investment in Social Media. Becky has found, “There are a number of tools you can use to report on everything from activity to engagement and growth and determine which social channels are driving traffic to your website.”

As Katrina Fox sees it, “Employer Brand will be with a person from candidate throughout the entire employee lifecycle to exit,” Richard Mosley says, “The future of recruitment is about how you manage people internally over how you communicate externally – your people will do the external communication.”

Becky’s final point was that, “Your Employer Brand and Employee Value Proposition must always be evolving, just as what it’s like to work in your company is continually changing.”

In a candidate market where opinion of your Employer Brand is increasingly led by the aggregated effect of individuals commenting through social media, you have to be transparent and also lead the conversation. I was reminded of a quote by the author and speaker, Don Tapscott on how the Internet makes businesses operate nakedly, saying, “If you’re going to be naked, you’d better be buff!”

Points to note would appear to be:

• Employer Brand comes from within and in a Social Media world, you can’t fake it.
• Social Media is significant and you need to embrace it and use it to maintain Employer Brand and quality candidate applications.
• Employer Brand is part of the Company Brand so HR and corporate comms need to work together.
• Focus on Return on Investment and make sure you have the tools to measure how well your Social channels drive quality applications.

You can follow the author on Twitter @JamesChapman_

“It’s about getting Back to Basics and showing value to the business” said Gary Franklin, newly appointed Group Head of Resourcing for First Group and Co-Founder of The Forum for In-House Recruiters (The FIRM).

Surprisingly, for six entirely separate individuals, this was the overriding sentiment shared by all of my interviewees.

The main areas of their focus, were Up-Skilling existing recruitment teams; Employer Brand and Candidate Experience; show Return on Investment to the Business. They are all linked and together speak to candidate and business needs.

Up Skilling

With the pressure on from the business to achieve more with the same or less, the focus has to be on getting the best out of the resources you have.

Depending on the type of roles you are recruiting for, there is a greater or lesser emphasis on Passive Candidates. “The ability to find passive candidates IS rocket science, but it’s not news. Internal Recruiters have to get better at it”, said Malcolm Kemp, Director of Talent Acquisition at Betfair.

“There’s lots of talk about Recruitment 3.0 and 4.0, but before you can get to that you need highly competent recruiters who can find and manage candidates and talent pools”, said Gary Franklin.

According to Peter Hetherington, Head of Recruitment EMEA for Corporate Executive Board,  “There are three levels of internal recruiter, starting at Process Expert, then  Pipeline Manager, who can see round corners and do some prediction. Finally, there is Talent Advisor, who wields significant influence within the business”. Part of CEB is the Corporate Leadership Council which has an arm, CLC Recruiting, working with global heads of resourcing. A well researched statistic of theirs is that only 19% of internal recruiters are at Talent Advisor level.

A barrier to up-skilling recruiters highlighted by Peter was the lack of opportunity for professional development in recruiting. A professional qualification is sorely missed where many other functional specialisms, like HR with the CIPD, has one.

Employer Brand and Candidate Experience

The emphasis seems to be on improving employer brand to achieve a better candidate experience. The targeted output is more candidates, both now and in the future.

With recent experience at Home Retail Group, Lee Evans, now Recruitment Business Partner at Volkswagon Group, also focused on the mass candidate market. “We need to use technology to manage candidates better, so they can deselect themselves and still feel that the business values their skills and has noted them for the future”, he said.

Where talent is scarce, the story tends to be different. Matt Alder, Founder of Metashift and well known industry Futurologist recounted a recent business meeting where one of the participants left his phone on. It rang five times within an hour. “They are all recruitment calls and I’m not going to return any of them”, said the frustrated employee.

Matt feels, “It’s all about Personal Brand and Employer Brand. If candidates are getting numerous generic approaches, they just switch off.”  This view was echoed by Malcolm Kemp who added, “It’s not just about firing off a load of Inmails. You need to get into the candidate communities and engage. With a better employer brand you don’t’ need to work so hard to have direct conversations”

For Craig Morling, Group Resourcing and HR Projects Lead at Premier Oil, building employer brand to underpin candidate attraction is vital. He says “it’s a challenge of diminishing candidate populations. As many Oil & Gas candidates are in their 40’s and 50’s, they won’t be working much longer.”

“In a market where only 5% to 10% of candidates are active participants and writing in online communities, that leaves a minimum of 90% who are only reading. At the very least you need to have a good Linkedin profile”, said Matt.

An additional area highlighted for focus was Mobile. With more and more candidates wanting to interact and apply via their mobile devices, businesses who adapt their web strategy to accommodate this will stay one step ahead.

Show Return on Investment

When all is said and done, it doesn’t matter how good you are at finding candidates, if the business cannot perceive your worth, you will struggle to maintain your budget and your position.

Peter Hetherington says, “In 2012 there’s a lot of uncertainty about the economy and a potential double-dip recession. You need to benchmark your performance. Improve your leadership conversations and justify your seat at the table.”

“Let the business know what you are doing”, said Malcolm Kemp, who on the day we spoke was writing his own article for Betfair’s internal newsletter, on the value his internal resourcing department is bringing the business.

“You need to change the perception of HR/Recruitment as a cost centre”, says Craig Morling.

“Budgets are being squeezed across the board”, said Lee Evans. Gary Franklin added, “Large firms want to optimise budgets and get better results. Less admin, more recruiting”.

It is important to note that whilst budgets may be tight, there is investment in internal recruitment. Two of the six people I spoke with changed jobs between interview and publication. Gary Franklin added, “Of the interviews I had, all bar one were for newly created roles” Also of note is the increasing number of smaller firms who are investing in internal recruitment functions.

At a time when businesses and candidates are demanding more from the internal recruitment function, it would seem that this year’s resolutions are:

• Develop existing recruitment teams and achieve more.
• Build a greater external profile and engage more with candidate communities.
• Raise awareness and demonstrate effectiveness in the business. 

Follow the author on Twitter @JamesChapman_