Not Brand

HR – Branding

Introduction: Human Resource: Human Resource is increasingly receiving attention as critical strategic partner, assuming stunningly different, far reaching transformational roles and responsibilities. Human asset is having most important priority in the organization and it integrates all human resource policies and programmes the frame – work of the company strategy. Human resources help in transforming the lifeless factors of production into useful products.

Branding:                                                                                                      

            Branding is endowing products and services with the Power of the brand. Branding is all about creating differences. To brand a product it is necessary to teach consumers by “WHO” the product is, “WHAT” the product does and “WHY” consumers should care. Branding involves creating mental structure and helping consumer organize their knowledge about product and services in a way that clarifies their decision making and in the process provides value to the firm.

Human Resource Branding:

            Branding in Human Resource has traditionally been a limited to the employment function. The Human Resource Branding has become a concept of great interest. The importance of mastering the concepts and skills behind branding has a greater implication for Human professionals. Now a day’s more and more eyes are looking towards Human resource as the call for need.

            Customers differentiate firms by their products. Marketers have traditionally used “The 4 Ps” (product, price, position and promotion) to set the products of their firm apart from those of the competitor in the market place. Employees now differentiate their jobs by HR branding .The 4 Ps of HR are People, Pay, Position and Prospects.

As the functions of HR started spreading across the organization, the services rendered by the HR department to the employees can be treated as the same thing as selling services to the external customer. Hence, the HR department should care about its brand identity.

For a company to be successful, it has to attract, motivate and retain the best and brightest, making it competitive in the race. As organizations are complex, open systems, single interventions are not enough. The best organizations have compelling people strategies that are perfectly aligned with the organization’s business strategy. Once the people strategy is aligned with the business strategy, you can begin creating a great place to work. The HR brand has to be aligned congruently with what the company delivers to the employee, customer, public and shareholder.

            In today’s knowledge driven economy, HR plays a strategic role in bringing in the right kind of people into the organization. In a sense, HR is the first face of an organisation for a new prospective employee. Market research has revealed that strong brands contribute to strong competitive presence. In this way, the HR in its new avatar, the importance of branding HR follows quite as a corollary.

The brand ‘HR’ can be well built by concentrating on the factors, which directly or indirectly influence the expectations of an employee. HR department should take decisions that would not discourage employees from being aligned to the brand behavior.

The factors that impact the employer brand are:
1. Reputation/ integrity
2. Culture
3. Recruitment / orientation
4. Pay and benefits
5. Work /Life balance
6. Leadership and management
7. Performance management, growth and development
              Of these seven factors in the employer branding model, four have proven to be crucial for a large majority of high performing employees. These are:
• Culture
• Pay and benefits
• Leadership and management
• Performance management, growth and development.
Only two of these four factors form a crucial part of the employer brands of majority companies:
• A highly developed culture and outstanding leadership
• Management qualities.

Why an employee/employer prefer to brand their job:

 

            Brand as a System

We can consider brand as a system. The brand system has four components which are inextricably tied and interdependent.

 

Offer: It is the service or a group of services that the brand renders to its customers, and if the offer is complex or it is difficult to explain, then it would be very difficult to communicate the offer to the target segment. Hence, the offer should be clearly described for a brand to be successful.

 

Example: Compensation packages, Training programs, Employee assistance programs, a good working environment, etc.

Identity: Identity is defined as every thing that assists in attracting attention, setting expectations and making an impression. Names, logos, slogans, advertising, packaging, vision and mission statement of the HR department make up the brand identity. This provides information to employees to determine an impression on the HR department.

Experience: Brand experience is the aggregate of all the perceptions that result from the interactions with a brand. But all the experiences are not equal. Employees assign different levels of importance to different facets of their experience.

Image: Brand Image is what people think of the brand. This is primarily based on the interactions with the HR department.

We define a job brand as the employment value at the job-specific level. A good job brand clearly articulates and demonstrates how a specific position fulfills on a company’s brand

Promise to its customers and how a company’s employment promise is delivered back to its employees for that particular position.

 

A good job brand delivers a message to its audience communicating what is the job, what

does it take to perform, how does it deliver on a company’s brand promise, and what does it

mean to the people doing the job.

 Job brands have the ability to:

•  Increase candidate pipeline
•  Differentiate your opportunity from the competition
•  Attract new talent at the job level
•  Increase performance through highly engaged employees
•  Increase retention rates through better alignment with your culture
•  Tell a compelling story that generates interest in your opportunity.



6 Steps to an Employer Brand Strategy:

 

• ·         Determine how employer branding is viewed inside your company
• ·         Define employer brand objectives and project scope
• ·         The relationship between HR, marketing, and communications
• ·         Discovering your employer brand
• ·         CEO and senior management engagement
• ·         Communications planning

Determine how employer branding is viewed inside your company
You should define what employer branding means to your company.

Your employer brand is “the image of your organization as a ‘great place to work’ in the mind of current employees and key stakeholders in the external market (active and passivecandidates,  clients, customers, and other key stakeholders).” Employer branding is therefore concerned with the attraction, engagement, and retention initiatives targeted at enhancing your company’s employer brand.

If you take too narrow a focus on employer branding, it is likely to end up as a departmental project that’s not aligned with the overall business strategy. For example, if you believe employer branding is only about recruitment, it is likely your organization will have already closed up shop on employer branding as a result of the economic downturn while competitors who understand the concept are continuing to invest resources as part of a long-term employer branding strategy to attract and retain talent.

Define employer brand objectives and project scope

Defining your objectives up front will save you time and money in the long run and keep your program on time and on budget. Companies have different lifecycle stages and therefore will have different objectives at various stages. Your objectives may be related to the whole employer brand program or a specific employer brand project (e.g. establishing an alumni program or employee referral program). Your objectives may include integrating the cultures of two companies during a merger, decreasing staff turnover rates, increasing volume of hires for a summer recruiting campaign, improving candidate quality, or reviewing and updating your career website to appeal to graduates.

The relationship between HR, marketing, and communications

                    Ownership of the employer brand strategy is often a gray area that should be clearly defined so all key stakeholders achieve consensus and are united in the objectives. To obtain both budget and buy-in, human resources often has to drive employer branding through internal education and awareness building.

While some level of oversight or standards adherence is natural and may vary depending on the organization, the employer brand is a long-term, strategic talent management endeavor. The strategy and messaging are designed to attract/engage/retain talent, which clearly sets up a strong case for collaboration between human resources, marketing, and communications (e.g. marketing/communications can offer some compelling strategic support such as website analytics and target-market segmentation).

In instances where there is a lack of collaboration, power struggles ensue, projects can be delayed, and creativity/strategy minimized to the detriment of the outcome.

Discovering your employer brand

The key to developing your employer brand strategy is to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the organizational culture, work experience, key talent drivers (engagement factors), external perceptions, leadership vision, and management practices. Operating from this position of intelligence supports the construct of a message platform that is authentic, compelling, differentiated, and that will be internally embraced, appropriately received in the external market and consistently delivered upon by the organization.

This can be supported through quantitative research (e.g. survey mechanisms) and qualitative research (e.g. focus groups, leadership interviews, roundtable meetings). It’s also an ideal phase to do some competitive intelligence gathering and benchmark against available insights. In this era of increasing transparency, the organization’s external reputation can be considered through both external focus groups and/or some level of online reputation audit to determine ‘what is being said’ about the organization via web channels (blogs, social networks, and corporate rating sites).

CEO and senior management engagement

It pays to have conversations about your employer brand with the CEO and senior managers in the early stages of developing your strategy. The Employer Brand Institute’s global survey found engaging with these key stakeholders is very important in achieving employer branding objectives (see figure 1) and could be conducted using a roundtable forum on employer branding. Areas for discussion could include:

1. How will a stronger employer brand support our business strategy — M&A’s, growth, consolidation?
2. What kind of culture do we have? How consistent is it across geographical and divisional boundaries?
3. What behaviors are felt to be most characteristic of the organization? What are the moments of truth when your organization is at its best (and worse?)
4. What is the most useful way of segmenting the employee population in terms of their cultural characteristics and distinctive needs?
5. How consistent are the messages we are communicating internally and externally about our organization as a place to work? How do we inform our vendors?
6. What are the most effective channels of employee communication, both top-down and bottom-up?
7. Which positions are most critical to our success and what are we currently doing/need to do to attract, engage, and retain them?

Communications planning

There is a plethora of offline and online media channels available to communicate your employer value proposition to your target audience, including web, print, social networks, events, PR, alumni events, etc. The rate of growth of these channels can be mind-boggling and while their use may not fit the stereotype of a conservative company that has been around for 100 years, it pays to test these sites for benefits or risk losing ground to your competitors. Who would have thought three years ago a micro-blogging platform where only 140 characters can be used in communicating a message would be used successfully by companies such as Zappos (the CEO has over 590,000 followers!) to communicate with their target audience. Taking a strategic approach toward your employer brand will ensure your team is able to assess these innovations as they appear while maintaining focus on the longer-term objectives.

The key is to test and trial these channels and arrive at a communications strategy that provides maximum impact and efficiency for minimum investment. There is no point building a presence on Facebook if you don’t allocate the resources to respond to messages from the community that has joined your fan base!

Companies like Standard Chartered Bank and Phillips ensure a consistent brand is communicated globally through recruitment communications with changes for local nuances such as language. This not only ensures clarity in brand positioning; it saves on design costs and increases campaign speed to market.

Have a solid understanding of cultural diversity in communicating your brand to your target audience. Just because the messages were tried, tested, and validate by your U.S. workforce doesn’t mean you’ll get the same level of buy-in when suggesting to regional offices they use the same set of communication collateral. Your own workforce can be helpful in determining what works best in their region and the assistance from a local vendor may also add value.

Benefits of Building a Brand for HR Department

1. It improves credibility and strengthens the bonds of trust between HR department and the employees.
2. It acts as a catalyst for pushing change.
3. It is communications shorthand for getting the message out.

Limitation:

1. Employees perception at all times is not same.
2. There is no appropriate method for prioritizing things.
3. People may not have proper knowledge towards branding.
4. Marketing and branding always overlap and create confusion.

Conclusion:

Why do we go for brands? The answer is simple -.reliability. It’s the popular brands which provide this reliability. Attracting knowledge workers has become a Herculean task for the HR department. Only the best practices and the best environment can assure their interest in working for the organization. The practices and policies of the HR department and its outlook create a certain brand for the HR. The better the brand, better are the chances that will attract the best talent. The focus in this review paper outlines all that are required to make HR the best brand.

About the Author

M.Sekar,

Head – Business Management,

RVS College of Arts & Science ( Autonomous )

Coimbatore -641402

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