The Employer Brand, New and Improved (if it exists at all)

Tonight on the HR Happy Hour Show, (8PM ET, if you don't know what time that equates to where you live, then you have bigger issues than catching a recruiting podcast to worry about), we will welcome Jake Dunlap, VP at Glassdoor.com to tackle the always interesting and occasionally controversial topic of Employer (or Employment) Brand. Glassdoor is the leading destination for employee and candidate authored company reviews, salary information, interview experience, and a whole lot of 'What's it really like to work here' testimonials.Cubs legend - Mordecai 'Three Finger' Brown

Controversial in the sense that Bigfoot, unicorns, or a Chicago Cubs World Series title are controversial - some folks are adamant and passionate that these things exist, attempt to point to (at times) circumstantial evidence to prove they are right, and eventually end up resorting to the 'nyah, nyah, nyah' line of argument to cement home their intellectual triumph.

Like unicorns, we want to believe the Employer Brand exists as more than just a concept, but rather an almost tangible, manageable, and potentially leverageable (I know, I hate that word too), component in our Human Resources and recruiting strategic toolkit. The idea that the way the organization presents and helps shape their brand message - the collection of what the organization values, represents, promises, and rewards its employees, (and by extension its candidates), can help that organization achieve superior results in recruiting, retention, and employee performance is certainly quite compelling.

But whether or not the Employer Brand actually exists is still not a given across the HR profession. Yesterday, Brent Rasmussen writing on TLNT.com shared some of the results of a recent Careerbuilder survey that indicated nearly half of HR managers questioned reported they did not have an employment brand. So despite some evidence to the contrary - that same Careerbuilder survey also indicated that job seekers strongly take into account elements of 'brand' in their decision processes, the idea of organizations possessing a distinct employment brand from whatever face they paint on themselves on the consumer side still has not seemed to achieve widespread or mainstream acceptance in the halls of HR.

Tonight on the show we will talk with Jake Dunlap from Glassdoor about the concepts of employer brand, whether or not it really does exist, (FYI - the Cubs last won the World Series in 1908), and more importantly whether debating about its existence is kind of a silly exercise anyway, and that sites like Glassdoor and a few little social networks you may have heard of called Facebook and Twitter can 'prove' the point of the employer brand advocates and end the debate in about five minutes.

We will also discuss how smart organizations are using all available resources, both ones they can control, and ones they can only guide, to try and portray their unique value proposition to effectively compete for talent, both on the open market, and inside the enterprise.

Employer branding is a great and interesting topic, I hope you can join the conversation tonight.

You can listen to the live stream of the show starting at 8PM ET tonight here, or by calling in on 646-378-1086. You can also follow the backchannel conversation on Twitter on hashtag #HRHappyHour.

Deliver that sofa by 10:00AM, and please skip the Adult Bookstore on the way back

In this age of colossal growth and ubiquitous access to social networking platforms, increased individual ownership of smartphones and tablets, wifi connectivity pretty much everywhere, and with organizations and Human Resources departments seemingly on high alert at all times - monitoring Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and industry blogs for any posting or comment that might bring the brand and organization into disrepute, it is sometimes easy to forget the 'real-world' and even mundane ways employees carry the brand and organization message out into communities and with current and potential customers.

Case in point - today's New York Times online 'You're The Boss' blog has an interesting piece titled 'Monitoring the Private Lives of Your Employees; which almost refreshingly has nothing at all to do with keyword searching, Twitter stalking, or online sentiment analysis. Rather the piece asks a practical and almost overlooked question in today's digital age - whether or not a business owner (and by extension and implication the HR function), should be concerned that a branded and logo'ed company delivery truck was spotted by a member of the community in the parking lot of 'adult-oriented' establishment.

The specific example cited in the piece refers to a vehicle not directly owned by the company, but by a supplier, but the author of the piece, Paul Downs, rightly broadens the question to imagine it actually is one of his own delivery trucks at the adult shop, and proceeds to explore the question of the right or appropriate level of employee monitoring needed for this kind of scenario. Here is part of Mr. Downs take on the matter:

When we do send our guys overnight, we don’t pay them for every hour they are away from home. Yes, I cover the meals and hotel bills, but they aren’t on the clock the whole time. So how diligent should I be in supervising every minute they are away? There are reasons to object to porn shops, so I wouldn’t be thrilled to hear that my truck had been spotted at one, but there is other behavior that can cause a problem. Should I forbid my people from getting a beer or two with dinner?

Small-business owners can choose how militant they want to be regarding their employee’s behavior. Big business seems to be quite puritanical these days: drug tests, smoking bans, weight-loss programs — all of these make sense from a cost standpoint but they are also quite intrusive. With a smaller company, I don’t have either the desire or the resources to monitor my employees’ private lives. We do have policies about showing up at work drunk or high — I have only had to enforce them once, and in that case I didn’t hesitate to fire the offender on the spot. But should I concern myself with what they do on Friday and Saturday nights? Personally, I don’t believe it’s any of my business as long as everyone shows up ready to work Monday through Friday.

Mr. Downs position as a small-business owner might be informed (and constrained), by a lack of resources, i.e. I doubt his company can afford or even needs a 'social media monitoring team', or even cares to invest some limited effort in simple automated tools for tracking brand mentions and comments online. But even if he had all those things, or some of them, he might not have ever found out about the 'delivery trucks stopping at the adult bookstore' deal.

And from the tone of his comments in the article in the Times, he probably doesn't care. His position of 'I don't really care what they do in their free time as long as they are ready to perform on Monday', might be an old-fashioned attitude in our modern, digital age. But it is also one that recognizes all the social media policies, IT-enforced blocks or restrictions on access to social sites, and fancy and expensive tools and technologies for monitoring engagement, messaging, and sentiment online, won't do him one bit of good if one of his delivery truck drivers decides to make the Adult Emporium his preferred lunch stop. That may or may not be an issue for Mr. Downs, but that kind of thing has been an issue since well, forever.

To control that type of behavior, you really only need to hire the right kind of delivery drivers, which is something I bet Mr. Downs has a pretty good handle on.

What do you think - are we getting too caught up in what employees are doing online and forgetting their impact as brand ambassadors out in the real world?

Have a great weekend!

Brands, Red Gorillas, and Cold Rain

The new website Brandtoys has introduced what they are claiming is the world's first visualization engine to assess and compare consumer sentiment and the online buzz of brands. The visualization takes the shape of a whimsical character whose physical attributes, (color, shape, size of ears, size of legs, and even surrounding climate), are determined by Brandtoys using source data from consumer surveys and from mining mentions of the brand on the social web.

The idea being, for example, the more online chatter and buzz about a given brand, that brand's character will be portrayed with large ears; if the online sentiment surrounding a brand skews negative, (think BP), then it will be 'raining' on the brand's character.

To get a better idea of how this visualization works, take a look at the character for BP, pretty much a globally maligned brand stemming from 2010's Gulf Oil Spill and BP's subsequent handling of the crisis:

Sort of what you'd expect - BP is characterized as a petulant, angry figure with an aggressive stance, and in the end appears totally unsympathetic or approachable. Persistent (and deserved) negative sentiment about BP produces the rain clouds above our little friend's head.

Big deal, you may think, who needs a funny character to know that most people don't think all that highly of BP at the moment. But where the Brandtoys approach to the presentation of consumer and online sentiment data is more compelling is in the comparison of competing or adjacent brands (and their derived characters). Then the differences seem to be a bit more subtle and interesting.

Have a look at the comparison of three similar brands - Miller Lite, Budweiser, and Heineken:

 

While the character manifestations of each character are broadly similar, there are a few noticeable and striking differences, the Miller Lite character has much larger ears, signifying a high level of chatter and conversation about the brand; the Budweiser character's eyes are shut, indicating relatively low scores for brand 'charisma'. For a branding or marketing professional, 'seeing' these difference portrayed in this manner is got to be far more resonant than scanning a column of figures on a spreadsheet.

But beyond being a cool, quirky, and kind of fun site to play around on (I dare you to not spend 5 or 10 minutes creating your own characters), the Brandtoys team emphasizes that the characters are backed by solid and ample hard data and analysis. The larger point to me, and why I decided to write about this site today, is that it reinforces the potential that we have in presenting data in new and innovative ways, ways that can help tell a story, that can enlighten and engage an audience, and are simply a heck of a lot more interesting than another spreadsheet or Powerpoint presentation.

We have lots and lots of data. You business leaders are likely overwhelmed with the endless barrage of messages they receive each day. 

What can you do to make your message and the information you are trying to communicate stand out?

Maybe presenting your analysis with the assistance of a goofy red gorilla is not such a bad idea after all.

The Company Soundbite

Recently the Tech news aggregator Techmeme, launched a neat little sidebar titled 'Who's Hiring in Tech', that contains a list of some of the biggest names in the tech space that are actively looking for talent.

Not terribly interesting on the surface, many companies, especially tech enterprises are facing targeted talent shortages, and increasingly pitched battles to duke it out for the best developers.  But the cool aspect of the 'Who's Hiring in Tech' ads, are the little soundbite messages that follow the company names, that according to Techmeme, are written by the hiring companies themselves.

Take a look at the image on the right and see what you think of some of the even-shorter-than-a-Tweet taglines that attempt to answer the 'What's it like to work here?'  or the 'What do we actually do here?' questions. 

What taglines seem to connect and resonate with the most?

I kind of like Zynga's - 'It's fun over here. Let's play.' and Foursquare's funny URL redirect that actually takes you to their home page, (it might have been smarter to have the kitten URL redirect to their Careers page, but still it is kind of neat).

It is interesting to see these mostly recognizable and complex organizations try to distill their employment branding message down to a short phrase, and kind of instructive as to the aspect of their company that they decide to emphasize, when clearly the format allows only an incredibly targeted focus.

I would think it would be a good exercise for those corporate recruiters and talent pros to undertake, to see if you could distill the essence of your unique employer value propostition to a short phrase. 

I suspect if your phrase comes easily to mind, or if you ask 10 people to craft one, and 7 or 8 of them are really similar, then you likely have a pretty good idea of what your company offers current and prospective employees.

On the other hand, if you struggle to come up with your tagline, or if their are widely divergent opinions on what the tagline should read, then it may be time to step back and sort out what you do indeed want to portray to the outside world of candidates and prospects.

What do you think? Does it even make sense to try and sum up an EVP in about six words?

Do Bad Reviews Really Drive Away Candidates?

Some background from the Digital Marketing blog Econsultancy.com:

Between one and three bad online reviews would be enough to deter the majority (67%) of shoppers from purchasing a product or service, according to a Lightspeed Research study.

Here is the chart from the research report that reflects this conclusion:

In the consumer and retail world these days pretty much no matter what the purchase situation - big ticket items like cars or consumer electronics, or even less costly and more ethereal kinds of buying decisions like, 'Where should we have dinner in St. Louis?'; it seems like the majority of folks spend some time online,either on commercial websites, crowdsourced review or rating communities, or on social networks before making the decision on where to spend their time and money.

And we see from the results of surveys like the one referenced in the Econsultancy piece, from anecdotal evidence and observations, and from just examining our own behaviors we know this to be true. When was the last time you tried a new restaurant without checking out the website, or seeing if there were any reviews on Yelp?

In the consumer space the potential detrimental effects of a negative review on sales, market share, and reputation are increasingly seen by marketers and brand managers as very real and relevant. Sure, there remains and will continue to be differing opinions as the correct strategy that consumer brands should adopt in response to these negative reviews, but there no longer is much serious discussion that they do have an impact at some level on the brand. The Lightspeed survey that is the subject of the Econsultancy piece takes this realization a step further by quantifying the impact of these negative reviews on purchase decisions. Which is pretty neat.

Let's spin this forward to the workplace, and specifically to the recruiting/employer branding space. It has become pretty much accepted that similar to the consumer market, that organizations not only need to carefully monitor their employer brand, and be mindful and aware of negative mentions and reviews of things like the application experience, the work environment, and the organization's reputation as a good or bad place to work on sites like Glassdoor and on social networks, that they may also need to take positive steps to ensure their messages about the unique employer value proposition are being clearly communicated.

What seems to be missing though, in the organizational employer branding space, is a better understanding of the specific impact that both negative and positive reviews or mentions have on the potential candidates attitudes towards the organization, and ultimately their willingness to apply for positions.

At the recent HR Executive Forum in New York City, several senior Human Resources leaders from some of the largest companies in the country talked about their companies and their CEO's reviews on Glassdoor.com. Quite frankly I was surprised how much this rating and information site had caught the attention of these HR executives. But while they were all aware of the content that had been posted on the site about their organizations, none seemed to offer any real understanding of just what, if any, real impact the information on Glassdoor had on things like applicant numbers, quality of applicants, and lasting impact to their ability to attract the talent they are seeking.

It is obvious that bad reviews of the organization as a place to work are, well, bad. But just how bad? When and how should HR and recruiting organizations respond?

How many bad reviews on Glassdoor or digs on Twitter add up to a meaningful and harmful impact?

Is there any way to know? I'd be curious to hear if anyone is aware of any data on the recruiting side similar to the consumer data referenced in the Econsultancy piece.