Insight
[Employer Branding III] The key to landing and success sharing.
(Interviewer: Wei Yuanling)
As the epidemic eases and the industry gradually recovers, the world is facing a labor shortage, and all sectors are looking for ways to retain or attract new talent to continue to meet the future needs of their businesses, and a strong employer brand can play a key role. How can companies build and manage their employer brands to enhance employee loyalty and attract talent? To address this issue, we invited Mr. Ming Zhou, General Manager of Comstock Management Consulting, to share his rich experience in the industry and how he can help his clients face the market test from the perspective of a management consultant.
Employer Branding and Retention Matter
A company's value proposition in the marketplace is very important to young talent. A company's external image has a great impact on peers, and if a company's brand image is desirable and strong enough, it will generate a strong retention rate. Employer branding has a significant and intertwined impact on attracting and retaining talent, which is evident in internal employee satisfaction surveys, such as the one that asks explicitly, "Would you recommend your friends and family to come to work for the company? This can be used to assess the effectiveness of a company's employer branding.
Communicate with employees on the basis of the company's future development and share the results with them.
According to Ming, employer branding should use the "future of the company" as an incentive to attract good talent, which makes brand positioning and strategic positioning for the future all the more important. For example, many start-ups attract talent despite poor salaries and benefits because they recognize their positioning and have a high level of trust in their future. For a company, it is important to define its future-oriented brand positioning and ideas, to find out what can be done in the "present" to achieve the desired results in the "future," and, more importantly, to return the achieved business results to employees, to show them the possibilities, to bring common interests and benefits to all of them, and to make them feel a high degree of identification with the concepts, values, ideas, and behavioral requirements that are constructed, so that they will be willing to work hard for the future.
Enhance and strengthen the employer brand by clarifying future value proposition and maintaining differentiation.
The positioning of the employer brand must be clear about the future state of the company, the future value of the positioning and differentiation, and "start with the end in mind", so that the positioning can be clarified, and what needs to be done now to achieve the future goals can be identified. When the general direction is clear, then adjust the specifications or actions according to the time and space.
The role of external consultants is to assist in the process through tools, communication and cohesion, and clarify the relevant future development, so that the enterprise can always maintain the difference and continuity between the existing value differentiation, and go farther under the existing foundation, and properly sort out the conflicting points of concept, and point out the blind spots of the enterprise with rich experience and business sensitivity, and find out the key points that will make things easy to succeed.
Senior management must first build consensus, clarify division of labor and set goals.
Successful employer branding does not rely solely on the CEO to give orders, but rather requires a consensus among the senior management. If there is no consensus on the future direction of the company, they will pull each other's strings, and the degree of enforceability will be very low, reducing the "future" to a slogan. Senior management should seriously discuss the company's future differences and pace, and make regular adjustments and cohesion in the direction of "from the present to the future". If internal senior executives' discussions always focus on short-term performance/goal achievement, and they are not committed to the company's consensus and future, the effect will be greatly reduced.
Brand positioning needs to be accumulated over time to bring internal and external feelings, in response to changes in the market, employees, in the process of adjusting the senior management need to continue to build consensus, and external consultants can provide tools, techniques, and guide them to effective dialogue, rapid consensus, when the discussion fell into the blind spots of the past, to help them get rid of the old mindset and habits, and continue to move forward into the future.
Managers should be able to raise the bar and make changes in order to help their employees achieve the company's strategic goals.
Ming also mentioned that in the past 3 to 4 years, when facing the future brand positioning or transformation, the senior management of enterprises have gradually found that although the company's strategy for future changes is good, it is not effective in internal implementation, and they expect the HR team to intervene to make adjustments, and sometimes, when it involves the adjustment of the more sensitive concepts and behaviors, they will start to seek the intervention of external consultants to assist them. In view of this, Ming suggests that human resources should first be elevated, not just to cooperate with the organization and system, but to change the strategy and the future positioning of the company, and to return to the skills and techniques, the human resources team needs to learn better skills and techniques through professionalism, and the chances of success will be very high if they work together with the external consultants.
The Brand Manager works seamlessly with the Human Resources Manager to ensure a consistent experience for internal and external stakeholders and customers.
Ms. Sue Yang, General Manager of the Process Taiwan Office, also said: "A company's Chief Brand Officer or Chief Marketing Officer plays a key role in employer branding, and the involvement of this department helps integrate the knowledge of branding and HR departments to ensure a consistent experience for internal and external stakeholders, and to work together to build a unified and strong brand image, which penetrates the company's culture and values, and allows employees to become brand ambassadors of the highest value at a low cost. This allows employees to become the highest-value, low-cost brand ambassadors. Imagine, when employees feel pride and recognition of the company's own brand, it will help to promote the company's values, products and services, and will naturally influence the impression of consumers, partners and potential employees.
Employer Branding Expectations are Higher on the ESG Wave
Society's expectations of CSR are no longer limited to making profits and supporting employees. In recent years, companies need to have more effective practices in ESG, and job seekers, the general public, and government agencies all have certain expectations of employer branding, and the influence of a company in society is attractive to talents, and these elements will continue to intertwine to create a virtuous cycle.
(Mr. Chow Yau Man / Ming, Founder and General Manager, Comstock Management Consultants Limited)
(Upper left: Andy Chen, Marketing Specialist of Process / Angel Yang, General Manager of Process Taiwan / Julis Li, Honorary Advisor of Process / Julis Li, reporter of Process, happy to be photographed during the interview.
