Enter “recruitment” or “employment” branding, also known as internal branding. It may not seem like a necessary focus in these days of economic stagnation, reduced expectations by employees, and the highest U.S. unemployment rate in more than seven years. And indeed, there are many companies such as Comdisco Inc., where a nascent employer-branding effort that was started in 2000 has stalled because the company laid off hundreds of people and filed under Chapter 11 in bankruptcy court a year ago. “We won’t be doing anything in terms of recruitment branding in the foreseeable future, if ever,” said Mary Moster, a spokeswoman for the Illinois-based technology-services firm.

That’s why ITT Industries Inc., for instance, makes employees the focus of all of its US$ 5 million a year in branding efforts, including featuring an employee named Lu Shuping on the cover of its current annual report. The New York-based company features engineers in its ads in trade magazines and on its website, and engineers represented the company when they rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange a few years ago.

“We want to really emphasize that we have great engineers and that they’re the foundation of the company,” says Tom Martin, senior vice president of corporate relations. “We found our voice as a company through our employees. Our slogan is: ‘engineered for life,’ which really speaks to the engineering talent in the company. But when we talked with stakeholders, we found that we’re very well known for making durable, reliable, highly engineered products, and the relationships that engineers had with our customer base was the most vital linkage that we found.”

Unisys has crafted its business specifically around server technology, so that’s the focus of its recruitment branding as well – in recruiting advertising, at career fairs and even in its annual report. “We’re following the same strategy with our employment brand that McDonald’s does: ‘Here’s what we do,’” said Guaglianone. “And we’ll stay consistent with that message across the board. But it takes time.”

One bonus is that there are synergies to be had between Unisys’s recruitment brand and its corporate brand because one of the primary targets of each is to have young, ambitious IT professionals. “If you establish a positive image of the company when a student is in college, you set yourself up as a thought leader, and that will carry on with those people,” Guaglianone says. “And ultimately, some of those students will become CIOs.”

BASF tries to use its “making things better” theme appeal to prospective employees as well as consumers and other constituencies. “When you come to work for BASF, this is what we’re going to expect from you,” O’Connor said. “And for this audience, we take ‘better’ in a very broad sense: that our products are, in fact, better; that they’re more ecologically friendly. We operate on the assumption that any bright, forward-thinking potential employee is going to be concerned about that.”

Naturally, just as the promise of a consumer brand ultimately is tied in with how well a company’s goods and services actually perform for customers, so employer brands are inextricably linked to what it’s actually like to work for a company. That’s an even more sensitive point these days than a couple of years ago after the thorough discrediting of stock options – the hottest recruiting tool of the late ‘90’s – because so many companies have ended up underperforming or even failing.

So at Pfizer Inc.’s pharmaceuticals group in New York City, where the company emphasizes “respect for people” as its employer-branding position, a new “back-up” child-care center at headquarters underscores the company’s commitment to help out its employees with sick children. And at Illinois-based Household International Inc., the development of its Complete Reward employer brand has come hand-in-hand with beefing up benefits such as child care and a concierge-type program the company calls Life Balance, which helps employees locate resources such as elder-care companies or even local merchants who offer particular major appliances.

“We want to make sure that we’re articulating from the time they become employees, and as their career progresses, that ‘opportunities plus results equal rewards’ at Household,” said Sylvia Alston, director of employee communications for the company, which hired 7,000 people last year. “It flows through everything that prospective employees receive, through our website, print materials, recruiting videos that are shown at career fairs. And they see it resonating when they become an employee, at orientation. It summarizes the brand promise of being a Household employee. And it reminds them that, if they’re a top performer, they have a chance to develop a career that will earn world-class rewards because of the results they deliver.”

When it comes to communicating the wonders of the company and the employer brand to employees and recruits, 81 percent of communications and marketing executives favor traditional outside print and broadcast media, and 77 percent favor internal printed materials, according to a survey last year by The Conference Board, a not-for-profit business-research outfit in New York City.

But more and more employer-brand programs center around, or are integrated with, the Internet, partly because it has rapidly emerged as the medium of choice for the recruitment industry; 66 percent of the executives in the Conference Board sample were using Internet campaigns for recruitment or internal branding. SAS Institute, for instance, tries to engage employees in a steady stream of web-based communications, including internal newsletters and links to reports about the company in news media and by securities analysts. “We don’t even use the print medium any more,” says SAS’s Hamashima.

At the same time, few companies have established ways to measure the impact of their employer-branding efforts – only about one-fifth of those surveyed by the Conference Board. Unisys, for example, can only vaguely posit that “most students in our target audience now can identify us, whereas two or three years ago, that was a hit-or-miss proposition,” according to Guaglianone.

But ITT Industries polls employees every two years and, two years ago, found an improvement to 76 percent, from 70 percent in 1998, in the number who felt pride in their company. The survey also saw a 15-percentage-point improvement in favorable feelings about how the company rewards and recognized employees. “Part of that relates to the situation of each individual,” concedes Martin. “But part of it comes from making them more of the heroes of our brand.”    

[7-Oct-2002]