Does your organisation own an Employer Brand that you’re proud of? Many businesses of all sizes are good at putting a positive spin on their achievements, quality of work place and ‘mission statement’ but they fall short on delivering a brand that continues to draw good talent, continual growth in capability and be a continually diverse and employer destination of choice.

So where’s the short fall? Historically, employers have focused on aspects of a career promoting job opportunity, personal development, financial reward, good working conditions and flexible benefits. Then millennials came along coupled with our western world’s digital revolution and the rest of the planet leapfrogging into the digital present! 

Most people want some level of security in employment, but also want to feel stretched, challenged and valued for excelling in their effort and achieving useful outcomes. There are plenty of talented individuals out there and companies adopting a more diverse and ‘digital’ approach to the work environment are set to greatly capitalise on the ability to accelerate their business through innovative and motivated talent.

Creating an Employer Brand to continually attract good talent and is a cultural and employer/employee behaviour trait. From the hospitality industry to corporate finance certain behaviours and messaging install an employer brand, things such as:

• Promoting specific career opportunities, rather than just selling the usual mission statement and unique selling points of an organisation.
• Hiring people to achieve outcomes, regardless of working patterns, salary and job title.
• Positioning salary and rewards based on the value of the specific outcomes you wish to achieve with new hires.
• Look at Diversity as a key to bringing in new sympathetic behaviour and skills; not just based on gender, ethnicity and age. Focus on skills sets, flexible working to allow talented individuals to return to work or work out of their domestic geography, achievement based reward rather than salaries or hourly rates.
• Hiring with a team based approach to achieving goals, build ‘smart teams’ with complimentary skills, experience, creativity, energy and naivety (yes - not knowing what can’t be done is such a useful trait!)
• From day one of someone joining your organisation, start helping them plan their next career steps (internally or externally), if someone has no development goal in place, what will motivate them to get on with their own evolution?
• Encourage ‘churn’, move people around your organisation, create new teams to focus on emerging challenges and deliver real commercial outcomes.
• Help ‘dead-wood’ up-root and regrow elsewhere or externally from your organisation, be ethical and take a community view of your staff and treat them as people.
• Clever recruitment advertising, attractive and well written briefs and job specifications are all important, but they will mean nothing if behaviours don’t continue on through on-boarding and beyond.
• Make each and every employees day rewarding, positive and ensure a collegiate culture emanates throughout from the board room right through to the back office.

There are any other factors and much more detail than the above headlines, though following some of the obvious behaviours and adopting a flexible and engaged approach for our now far more digitally native and diverse work force brings significant agility and performance improvements.

To explore more about your organisations talent acquisition and on-boarding own challenges and how to evolve your strategy for digital and transformationally oriented employees give us a call or drop us an email via our ‘Contact Us’ page.

Simon Raitt, founder @ TAaaS