Chapter 1
Introduction

Josh Bersin

You can judge a company by the people that it keeps. Great companies attract and keep great talent. Talented people choose to come and choose to stay because they feel their pay and opportunities are better than any other organization they might consider. But for the best companies, there is also an X factor. In the same way that leading companies strive to deliver uniquely valuable products and services, they also seek to shape a distinctive organizational culture and brand identity. The shared behaviours and beliefs that define this culture can deliver significant competitive advantages. A strongly shared sense of culture and purpose can drive extraordinary levels of motivation, loyalty and performance. A crystal-clear focus on a handful of key qualities, like creativity or simplicity or agility, can likewise provide your organization with capabilities that others will find difficult to match. This powerful combination of differentiating capabilities and distinctive cultural identity helps to attract the ‘right’ kind of talent. It generates employee pride, advocacy and commitment. It also helps you deliver unique products and services. The question is: how do you define the qualities that make your organization special? And, once defined, how do you communicate, shape and measure these qualities? For many of the world's leading employers, the answer to this question is employer brand management.

When Simon Barrow and I published The Employer Brand in 2005, there was only a handful of companies applying brand thinking to people management in the integrated way we suggested.1 The hypothesis was simple. We believed that applying the best of brand management to people at work would bring many of the same benefits that this discipline had brought to the attraction, engagement and retention of customers. There was not a hard and fast business case at the time, but the hypothesis clearly resonated with a great many people. If you're clear and consistent in setting out the benefits of working for your organization, and if you deliver an employment experience in line with these promises, then you're more likely to develop a positive employer brand reputation, and attract, engage and retain the right people. Whether organizations found their own proof for this argument or not, a significant number of leading companies have since adopted some form of employer brand management thinking.

WHY THE NEW BOOK?

I have a confession to make. When Simon and I wrote The Employer Brand, we didn't know a great deal about how employer brand management worked in practice. We were experienced in consumer brand management, recruitment advertising, internal marketing and communication, but the more integrated application of these disciplines to employer brand management was largely theoretical. At the time, we found the most advanced application of the thinking (though not necessarily the terminology) at Reuters, care of John Reid-Dodick and Anne Marie Bell, and Tesco, care of David Richardson and David Fairhurst. Since that time, I've had the privilege of working alongside a considerable number of organizations who have put this thinking into practice, and have learnt a great deal more than I knew, or foresaw, in 2005.

The environment in which employer brand management now takes place has also changed significantly since the spring of 2005. This was the year that the first video was uploaded to YouTube. Facebook, founded the year previously, was still called ‘The Facebook’ and had yet to expand beyond university students in the USA and Canada. LinkedIn, founded in 2003, had been around a number of years longer, but was still a long way from hitting its stride. There was no Twitter until March 2006. The growth in importance of these social media channels has had a major effect on the way organizations communicate and it may well have an even greater ongoing influence on the way people work. As Deloitte concludes in its 2014 ‘Human Capital Trends Survey’: ‘Tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and others are changing recruiting into a strategic function focused on marketing, branding, new tools and technologies.’2 I have made an attempt to capture the most effective current practice in social media marketing, some of the changes this is beginning to bring about in the way people are managed at work, and what appear to be the most significant future trends.

WHY SHOULD COMPANIES INVEST IN EMPLOYER BRAND MANAGEMENT?

Over the last few years, the Boston Consulting Group and World Federation of People Management Associations (WFPMA) have conducted a number of research projects exploring the relationship between people practices and performance advantage. In their 2012 study they surveyed 4288 HR and non-HR managers in 102 countries on their current HR capabilities and strategies, and then compared these findings with the financial performance of each company.3 Their overall findings confirmed that good people practices confer a performance advantage, but the correlation between specific practices and key measures of business growth were particularly relevant to the contents of this book. As Table 1.1 illustrates, the four most impactful people management practices were either directly (in the case of employer branding) or indirectly (in the case of many organizations' approaches to recruitment, on-boarding, retention and talent management) linked to some form of employer brand management.

Table 1.1 The impact of HR capabilities on financial performance

Source: 2012 BCG/WFPMA proprietary web survey and analysis

Note: Revenue growth and profit margin are defined as categories in the survey. For analysis, categories are transformed into category means; extreme categories are transformed into −20% or +20%. For each topic, we compared average revenue growth and average profit margin of respondents who chose “5” (high capability) against those who chose “1” (low capability).

The other factors in this study that demonstrated a lower correlation with performance were: Managing diversity and inclusion; Managing change and cultural transformation; Actively using web 2.0 for HR and managing associated risks; Strategic workforce; Delivering critical learning programmes; Managing corporate social responsibility; Transforming HR into a strategic partner; Health and security management; Managing flexibility and labour costs; Restructuring the organization; Managing work–life balance; and Managing an ageing workforce.

DEFINING ‘EMPLOYER BRAND’

This is a useful place to start, but in many respects it is frustratingly imprecise. ‘Employer branding’ represents the most tangible form of employer brand management, representing the consistent application of the brand logo and other elements of visual design to identify and differentiate the brand. However, this represents only one aspect of brand management. Of greater importance is the systemic management of the broader range of elements that shape brand experience and reputation. In other words, while employer branding can be described as a discrete activity, employer brand management describes a higher level approach to coordinating people management activities, with important implications for how recruitment, on-boarding, talent management, performance management and leadership development takes place.

The term employer brand has been defined in a number of different ways. Most definitions fall into three categories:

1.  Defining the employer brand as a promise. For example, The UK's Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) defines employer brand as ‘a set of attributes and qualities – often intangible - that makes an organisation distinctive, promises a particular kind of employment experience, and appeals to those people who will thrive and perform best in its...