Last week we announced  Master Burnett as a guest track leader at the Jobsite sponsored TruLondon 4 unconference on 1st & 2nd September.

Master Burnett is a talent management best practice evangelist and corporate strategy advisor. He currently advises companies on the implementation of world-class HR programmes, having started his careers with a technical recruitment services business, focusing on start-ups in biotech, telecom and new media. Here is his guest blog post for us, where he speaks about managing your employer brand  – a subject that he’ll cover in more depth at TruLondon.

“I’ve had the opportunity to be connected to the practice of employer brand management since before it was termed such, and over the past fifteen years have had an inside look at some of the globes most desirable employers. While many organizations today acknowledge the notion of an employer brand and a few dedicate resources to influencing theirs, virtually no one is practicing true brand management. The key reason most efforts undertaken by organizations today are ineffective is because all efforts see the brand to be managed as that of the “organization,” and not the product being offered “employment.”

The problem with the notion that an organization has a singular, all encompassing employer brand is that employee experience is inconsistent across the organization. Organizational brands are all about attributes, things like the trustworthiness of management, fair compensating, dedicated to employee development, etc. While it may be possible for an organization to devise a set of incredibly generic attributes that could apply across the organization, such attributes would neither distinguish the organization or contribute to a greater, well recognized brand position because generic attributes can be interpreted differently by different factions within a larger population.

Like it or not, true brands are established more by the experience of the target audience with the subject than by communications about the subject. In the case of employer brand management, that means that the employer brand(s) is influenced more by the day-to-day experience of the employees, contractors, service providers, vendors, strategic partners, customers, and applicants with the organization than by any articulation of engagement results, brand communications, or other form of organizational propaganda.

No matter how systems driven your organization is when it comes to talent management practice, employee experience will never be consistent across all job families, locations, business units, etc. Experience with the organization is wildly varied based on manner of engagement with the organization, scope of work being performed, attributes of the work location, benefits attached to the engagement, the quality of people encountered (including managers), and yes, the talent management systems in action.

If you have several years of work experience and have worked under more than one manager in the same organization, then you know that a great deal of how you would characterize your experience with the organization to friends, colleagues, and well anyone that asked for that matter, really comes down to how your current and former managers let you experience the organization.

Every time I engage with an organization that says they have done extensive work on analyzing their employer brand and employee engagement to arrive at a brand position, I ask them to complete a single exercise:

Choose any one of the brand pillars (attributes) that your research indicates is indicative of your organization and walk me through examples of how that attribute is experienced by the target audience throughout a random sampling of job families and locations.

Rarely can the client organization articulate anything more than a few key programs that touch at max 1-5% of the population, or demonstrate that they had even thought about engineering the experience to deliver the brand. If the client organization can walk through examples throughout the organization, next I ask:

How do each of the examples provided distinguish you not just from your product/service competitors, but also from other talent competitors i.e. other organizations that could benefit from poaching your people?

Again, rarely are client organizations able to articulate any solid differentiation or even demonstrate that they are knowledgeable of who the talent competitors are let along their brand position.

Building strong employer brands that make the efforts of talent competitors to woo the top talent in your profession or industry irrelevant isn’t easy work.  It isn’t something done by a committee staffed with people dedicating 10% of their time to it, and it isn’t something done through communications alone.

Before I started working with organizations on employment branding (Starbucks was my first), I was exploring how to distinguish the services of my boutique recruiting firm in the Silicon Valley during a time when recruiting firms were popping up left and right.  I registered for and attended a series of classes based on the thought leadership of David Aaker (known in the marketing world as the “father of branding”.) I walked away from those classes having learned a number of profound lessons, one of the most valuable of which is that great brands don’t emerge by chance, they take deliberate action and rely on managing the subject as much as swaddling the subject in communications and identity.
This is one of the subjects in the recruiting profession that I am most passionate about, and one I look forward to exploring with those of your attending #TruLondon further.”

To hear more from Master Burnett, visit the TruLondon web page, where you can buy tickets using the discount code JOBSITE – saving £25. The TruLondon page is THE site for all event information, including; the official blog, twitter feed, photos and Livestream coverage.  For the latest event details, follow us on Twitter @JobsiteUK or #TruLondon.

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