Employer branding A no-nonsense approach - CIPD

The classic spider diagram is a great way to map how
your organisation is perceived as an employer by three
key audiences – potential employees in the big wide
world outside; current employees; and the people at
the top who run the show.
The example shown here is an investment bank that
wanted to develop its brand and significantly raise its
profile, particularly among a global graduate audience.
You’ll notice that on virtually all points, external
perception lagged way behind internal reality. Most
significant of all is the issue of competitiveness; clearly,
potential employees didn’t really rate the bank’s chances
against the giants of the sector such as Goldman Sachs
and Merrill Lynch.
But notice something else: there’s a high degree of
alignment between how senior management perceive
their organisation, and the perception of those analysts,
traders and associates down on the trading floor or
dashing off to a client meeting. That’s a strong position
to be in, because it means you can present a united
front to the talent market, and any promises you make
for the brand externally won’t be sabotaged by internal
sentiment and perception.
Around how many nodes should you conduct this
extremely valuable exercise? And how should you label
them? The simple answer is: it’s up to you. Only you
can choose the issues, the identity features around
which you want to construct your brand on the basis of
those that are relevant to your particular activity or
industry sector. For example, a retailer would be crazy
not to include competitiveness or commercial focus. A
small or medium-sized enterprise (SME) will surely want
entrepreneurial spirit to be very much to the fore, while
an NHS trust may well want the extent to which it’s
perceived as having a learning culture to be part of the
equation.
As for how many… well, any more than six nodes could
start to get a bit unwieldy.
This is not a quantitative exercise, and the results are
not scientific in the traditional sense. But they certainly
give you a clear, very graphic expression of where your
brand is now, the direction you have to take it in, and
the likely scale of that task.
How do you choose and label the nodes around which
you build your diagram of the brand? There’s no
absolute logic to this – it’s a process that’s partly
intuitive. But you will know the issues that are
particularly important to your brand, bearing in mind
the nature of your organisation and its business. For
example, when I developed the Land Rover employer
brand, diversity was a really big issue for an
organisation that was seen as being (and probably was)
as chauvinistic and ‘blokey’ as Jeremy Clarkson. For a
major retailer, commercial awareness is clearly important
– the sense of ownership over the organisation’s sales
and profit performance. (In this context, we’ll take the
oft-quoted ‘customer focus’ as read.)
For a newly merged NHS trust, the issue of teamwork
may be particularly important; for a call centre
operation, the social dimension of its jobs may need to
be mapped and measured.
Only you can decide the issues on which you want to
be measured, the strengths for which you want your
organisation to be known.
Across the great divide
It’s helpful to see the whole brand development/
communication chain as two opposing funnels – input
and output. It’s that bit in the middle that’s the real
challenge. You need to make sure the research insights
really do drive the expression of the brand – but not in
a boring, literal, ‘plonky’ way. You need to ensure that
all creative expression through every channel is fresh
and sparky – but still anchored firmly in what the
research is saying.
Getting biological: creating your brand’s stem
cells
We’re now at the most critical point in the whole brand
development process – the gap (which may appear
seductively small) between the two funnels, between
input and output.
It’s at this stage I find myself unavoidably using the
language of genetics, with acronyms like DNA and
phrases like ‘stem cells’ entering the discourse. But the
analogy’s a sound one, and it may help to explain and
rationalise a process that’s both right- and left-brain,
creative as much as analytical.
Employer branding