BRANDING FOR THE LONG HAUL - Page 1 of 2

As a senior executive responsible for managing talent, you face a real danger today: the temptation to batten down the hatches and dust off the layoff manual. As we head toward the autumn of an economic slowdown at best and at worst the winter of another recession, all the attention could once again be on rightsizing, market efficiencies, plant closures and terminations.

This "new" round of problems could mean less time and fewer resources devoted to talent management.

But those organizations where senior executives focus on the fundamentals of talent management will be with ones that will manage through any season and emerge with an enhanced reputation in the talent marketplace.

Being perceived as a desirable organization for talented people to join stands as a great proxy measure for its overall success. Indeed, your desirability as an employer may well be a better predictor of your future success than the often-fickle attention of stockholders.

Back to Fundamentals

As a top talent manager, start by reviewing what talent means in your organization. Our definition of talent is a person or people who have specific skills, knowledge or attributes that add considerable value to an organization. They are valuable, sought after in the marketplace and are perceived as being in short supply.

The implications of this definition accounts for these conclusions: a. Talent will be in short supply for a long time to come. Demographic projections by the United Nations show that the that the supply of qualified talent is decreasing at the same time as demand is projected to rise by one third over the next 15 years. This will be of concern even as the economic cycle seems to shift. The 2001 Conference Board and Accenture survey of more than 500 CEOs around the world shows that competition for talent is the number one management challenge in Europe, and number two in North America. b. Talent is diverse - and becoming ever more so. Harnessing and managing that diversity is essential to retaining talent. c. Talent is transactional - and this can be good. The Free Worker mentality is now a business reality: Loyalty to organizations for the sake of loyalty is dying. The new meaning of retention is the agreement between an individual and the organization to continue to transact. The benefits of a transactional relationship are clear: an open, honest and transparent relationship between two parties that can be renewed on a continual basis and which has a very clear cost/benefit calculation. Talented people increasingly commit to lifetimes of projects and programs with their clear review cycles. There's a win-win for both sides on the assumption that the nature of the deal is explicit and agreed upon. d. Organizational structures and processes are not flexible enough to accommodate the altered psychological agreement between organization and talented individual. If the labor market has taken on a transactional mentality, and talent wants its deals to be refreshed on the basis of frequent reviews, are today's organizations built to cope with this? On the whole, we argue that they aren't. Everywhere HR processes are cops in the corporate gearbox of annual cycles and collective standards. This is anathema to fluid organizations that want to be ready to deal with a series of multiple transactions with sole traders who want to maintain and grow their individuality.

The Importance of Brand

What is an employment brand and why is it key to effective talent management?
In the context of this article, we treat "value proposition" and "employment brand" as synonymous. The Corporate Leadership Council defines and employment brand as "the reputation of a firm's employment value proposition in the labor market. It is based on the benefits [as well as costs] employees perceive a particular firm can offer and deliver on in the employer-employee relationship."

McKinsey, in The War for Talent, says "...to attract and retain the people you need, you must create and perpetually refine an employee value proposition: senior management's answer to why a smart, energetic, ambitious individual would want to come and work with you rather than with the team next door."

The concept of an employment brands provides us with one more fundamental: Recruitment is about more than getting new people through the door.

The nature of the labor transaction is that both sides enter into it on the basis of an offer being made and accepted. If parts of the transaction are not delivered on, then either side is able to break it as, increasingly, talented individuals are now doing.

The Need for Re-recruitment

Differentiation for an organization is the way that the employment brand is lived. It's the constant renewal of the offer that is one aspect of making the employment brands real and alive. We call it "re-recruitment."

As a talent manager, you must understand that the quality of your brand is critical both to the efforts you make to recruit talent, and to the work that needs to be done to retain them.
There are three key elements of an employment brand that potential applicants want to hear about, and that current employees want to experience and keep seeing refreshed and prioritized in their daily work. These are: a. The Deal b. Communities c. The Managers
The Deal: This is the offer that is made when the talent joins and which is continuously refreshed thereafter through each re-recruitment conversation. It's made up of competitive salary and benefits and the other systemic promises such as how the performance management system works, training and development support - all those things that previously contributed to the forming of the psychological contract.

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