I found this article on “Employment Branding” when I stopped to do some tinkering with this blog on Technorati, and I was immediately fascinated.

We’ve all heard by now that there’s a desperate shortage of skilled people in most sectors—recent graduates don’t count—but I don’t know if we realized the extent of the desperation and the degree of introspection it’s causing. The summary of this latest craze in the recruiting world: “we need to look like places that skilled people want to work.” Now, this is the kind of clever, unexpected thinking that I love to hear. The bulk of the article itself is a list of benefits that come from looking like a good place to work, which are largely very obvious.

The best part, though, is the comments. Namely the second—”How?”—and the third—”First, become a place where skilled people want to work. Then, show people.” As one of those skilled IT people, I wish it would go like this. My inner cynic is afraid that the first comment is more accurate, though:

[...]In my eyes, this represents the future of employment branding – a progression from placing overarching values on a website or marketing brochure to actual targeted value proposition management (VPM) initiatives that are supported by the Sourcing function of corporate recruiting units. Targeted VPM is what I’m seeing actually occur within ‘Candidate Development Teams’ . . . it’s just the marketing messages (employment branding tools) used to support the recruiting effort are more overarching than targeted.[...]

Really, why do I enjoy dissecting stuff like this? I lost interest in what was being said at the first sentence, but read on with the assumption that something useful might be gleaned from how whatever it was was being said.

Wow. “Targeted value proposition management initiatives.” This is one of those long, “smart-sounding” noun clumps that William Zinsser loves. Although it seems to mean trying to figure out how much money to offer a prostitute, that’s not quite it. Thanks to google, I now know that a “value proposition” is a summary of why what you’re marketing has value. So I suppose targeted management of them would be the act of making your proposition look valuable to your target market. Since in this case the target market is people who might work for you, this phrase takes “making yourself look like a good employer” and removes all the verbs.

Now, the Taoist principle of non-action is well and good, but this comment simplifies to “the future of employment branding will be employment branding.” I would feel like I’d wasted my time reading this if it weren’t the product of a recruiting manager who will inevitably share some professional traits with people who will offer me employment and try to make me want to offer my skills, ideas and time. And what this person has shown me is fancy marketing talk with no content, and I can’t help but be concerned that his value propositions would be the same thing.

Now, I’d like to give some ideas from the trenches. On valid-sounding assumption from poster #1 that corporate image work like statements of corporate values are part of employment branding, I’m going to use a pick from a Google search for “corporate values” as fodder. The one I clicked on first was for Williams-Sonoma, and it has the stock crap that I’d like to point out. If you are reading this and happen to be an ultra-busy recruiting manager, I suppose you may skip the list, because you’d obviously never make these mistakes, nor would anyone in your company.

1. Williams-Sonoma is not in the business of enhancing the quality of life at home, it is in the business of selling home furnishings. Furnishings, in turn, do not improve quality of life. A fancy couch may make you look rich, make your home more tempting to burglars, increase your insurance premiums and just maybe let you feel a brief glimmer of satisfaction that you got one before your friends did, if that is indeed the case. What would impress me: a company that admitted what it did without trying to sound saintly.
2. The environmentally friendly stuff is obviously tacked on because people suddenly care about the environment. Why is it obvious? First, because it appears below the part about making superior returns for shareholders, which violates the otherwise consistently implied least-to-first ordering. Second, because they’re all two paragraphs long, while the others are at most three sentences. This makes the entire thing look like an opportunistic marketing document.
3. About that last-to-first ordering thing I mentioned: if Williams-Sonoma honestly puts product quality ahead of shareholder returns, even implicitly, their shareholders should be suing them. If their primary goal isn’t to make money, then I doubt their viability as a business and probably don’t want to work for them. After all, I take jobs because I want money for my expensive couch—otherwise I could find dozens of better things to do¹.
4. A note about the overall composition: the first half of the document are bold statements, and the last environment related ones suddenly sound like an official cover-your-ass statement that typically gets made after some sort of PR disaster, with ridiculous verbiage and non-words like “healthful.” If Williams-Sonoma are so “People First,” maybe they could improve the “quality of life at home” of a few poor English majors by hiring them to write their freaking marketing documents. Maybe they would rewrite their “Environmental Paper Procurement Policy” as a part of the “Recycling” point below it. Maybe it would read “We will only use recycled paper. We like trees.”

Be honest, and be clear. Everyone has seen friends or parents who were loyal to a “good, honest company” get unceremoniously, coldly, even humiliatingly dumped, often without the pensions that they worked most of their life for. You may be a good, honest employer, but the last three decades have set people’s expectations to about zero. If you can’t express that goodness and honesty unpretentiously and plainly, no one will believe you, least of all the smart people that you want to hire.

1) Writing, painting, drawing, playing guitar, playing piano, joining a band, taking a walk, watching a good documentary, cooking, enjoying dinner with friends, snorkeling, travelling, hiking, programming video games, playing video games, learning a new instrument, learning more about harmony, reading a good book, cuddling, listening to music…

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 12th, 2008 at 8:00 pm and is filed under Smart-Sounding Babble. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.