10 essential considerations for your employer brand

1    Employer emphasis has shifted significantly from recruitment to engagement and retention. Employers now realise more than ever that employees are the life blood of their organisation and can make the difference between success and failure.
2     The ongoing strength of an organisation’s brand relies heavily on its ability to maintain communication with employees and address concerns regarding their employer’s ability to withstand the downturn and protect job security.
3    Companies are looking for ways to reduce recruitment costs. Reducing costs however, is not about less communication and less marketing. It is about looking at ways to be more efficient and perform more recruitment tasks in-house.  
4    The downturn will differentiate those organisations that adopt a defensive stance from those that embrace the opportunity to engage with their employees and strengthen resistance to adverse market forces.
5    A new style of company leader will emerge who is people-focused and can inspire employees to make deeper commitments to their employer. These newly engaged and motivated companies will be the leaders in 2009 and beyond.
6    Employer branding will be recognised as a critical complement to a company’s corporate brand. An increasing proportion of advertising and marketing budgets will be channelled into employee focused activities.
7    Companies who define and strengthen their employment proposition, and the promise they make to their employees, will be favourably positioned ahead of competitors when markets recover.
8    Recruitment companies will increasingly realise the value of employer branding to themselves and to their clients. They will stimulate closer relationships with practitioners of employer branding, particularly those with end-to-end service offerings.
9    Employees will expect their employer to be open, truthful and consistent in what they say and what they do. Alignment is very important – the recruitment promise with the employment experience, and the corporate brand with the employer brand.
10    Organisations will increasingly realise that people are the essential fabric of their business and critical to future business success. Consequently they will commission on an ongoing basis deep research on how candidate and employees perceive the employment experience, with a view to monitoring the results and realigning where necessary to optimise those perceptions.

Tony Heywood is a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia, founder of Heywood Innovation in Sydney Australia and co-founder of BrandSynergy in Singapore.
tony@heywood.com.au
www.heywood.com.au
www.brandsynergy.com.sg