Jason Blais: From the Recruiting Front Lines

Recruiting Front Lines: Employment Branding: Increase your employee retention by attracting better candidates.

Earlier this month, I presented a workshop at the 13th Annual Maine HR Convention. The topic was creating an employment brand to attract better candidates. Here are a couple excerpts of that presentation. If you’d like the 6 page summary of this information, please send me a request to jblais@jobsintheus.com, or if YOU are “Linked In”, you can shoot me a request through that site.

Today, we’ll focus on just one area affecting employee retention: Attracting the RIGHT Candidates for Your Organization. Simply stated, if you recruit and hire the right people, it will be easier to keep them satisfied within your organization, and thus retain their services long term.

Employment Brand Defined
In this session, we’ll talk about creating and leveraging a “brand” to increase your recruiting success. We’ll identify the strategies that are used in marketing and advertising to attract customers, and apply them to the goals of attracting the best possible candidates. So, instead of building a consumer brand focused on selling your products to customers, your goal is to develop an effective employment brand focused on promoting your business to attract the best possible candidates for your culture.

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When an employer can establish, communicate, and reinforce an effective employment brand, they will realize an increased stream of applicants better suited to their work environment, which in turn leads to an increase in employee retention. Later on, we’ll address some of the key factors that influence an employee’s decision to stay with an employer.

A brand can generally be defined as the sum of all characteristics and distinguishable features associated with a good or service – its unique personality. Brands are comprised of logos, images, slogans, and features of the good or service, along with all the supporting communication and promotion of these items. Simply put, a consumer brand should be built around the customer experience; therefore, an employment brand needs to be built around your employee’s experience.

Identifying Your Unique Employment Brand

Establishing an effective brand in the consumer market requires a company to understand what drives consumer behavior. Likewise, in order to establish an effective employment brand, a company must understand what drives employee behavior.

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Review your surveys and identify the top 10 traits. From this list, work with peers to remove traits that your competition for employees would also have. For instance, if you had ‘flexible’ as a top 10 trait and you know that your competitor offers far greater flexibility in the workplace, remove that from the list. Once you have identified the most unique three to five strengths of your employer “personality”, or Unique Employment Proposition (UEP), you’ve got your foundation.

The next step is to identify the types of employees that you want to attract with your brand- your “target market”.

Do you have experience with building or implementing an employment brand? I’d love to hear how it worked, or any feedback you have on the process…

I see everyday that the companies that put more time, energy, and creativity into attracting the best candidates are always the most successful in their recruiting efforts. Branding your company as the employer of choice, and promoting all the unique qualities that you offer as an employer will help you attract people that will fit into your culture, and therefore be happier and more productive employees… Give it a try, I think you’ll agree.

Okay, okay, it’s true…. I should know better by now and these little things shouldn’t bother me any more, but I have to just vent for one moment. Today, I’m spending my second day at the 13th Annual ME HR Convention in Rockport, ME. I rec’d a call from the manager of the gulf coast territory, and needed to send a file to him via email… Unfortunately, I had to VPN in to my office to get the file, then send it remotely from here. GREAT technology… when it works well. I had no problem getting in and finding the file, composing the email and hitting send… then I hit the wall. I had hit send/receive, and the first function that Outlook performs is to receive. I had 175 emails to receive totaling 10MB. It took 45 MINUTES to receive the files through the VPN connection!!! Ouch… As a result, I missed my morning session of the conference, which is why I have the time right now to write a quick note to the recruiting front lines.

If you are not familiar with the ME HR Convention, this is an annual professional development conference for human resources professionals, and it’s done impeccably well. The event begins at noon on Tuesday, and runs into the afternoon on Friday, which may seem like a long professional conference. The reality, though, is that the content is so in-depth and dynamic that it provides hr professionals with a terrific opportunity to meet and network with others, learn great new practices and initiative to improve their workforce, stay up to date on legal issues, and bring great intellectual capital back to their place of employment. Sessions are given by professionals in all aspects of HR and cover all areas- from dealing with complainers in the workforce, to FMLA regulations, to new compensation strategies to increase productivity. I’ll give a better recap shortly about this event, with some more detail about what I learned, as well as a summary of the presentation I gave. For now though, let me just say that this is one of the best weeks of my professional year. I usually participate in 3 days of the conference each year, and return to my work place with a greater perspective of our business, and energized, motivated, and prepared to bring positive change to our environment in some manner.

There was much talk from vendors about the slowdown, and a great deal of discussion about the generational workforce challenges. Overall, ME is less impacted by national economic factors than others (our highs aren’t as high, and as a result our lows aren’t as low), so business is still moving forward. In fact, I just checked on JobsInME.com, and there are now more than 10,000 current job openings posted, with more than 9,000 being regular and just over 1,000 being temp. These may be record highs for our business, and it’s important to recognize that the permanent jobs postings are still strong.

Well.. almost time to go staff our booth, promote our service, meet incredible HR heroes, and reinforce relationships with the great people and businesses we serve.

So today, I’m sitting back just behind the recruiting front lines… today’s report is coming from the war-room, and the view is of the strategies, competencies, and challenges facing HR professionals in Maine.

First, for those of you who had sent me some inquiries over the last month, thanks for noticing that the blog had not been updated… at least that means that some people were checking in! As it turned out, I did not put up a single post in April, which is a shame, I think, considering the frequency and quality of events that happened last month. Ah well… no sense in looking back…

As it turns out, the report from the recruiting front lines is good and bad right about now. What was shaping up to be an economic slowdown, has now become an official recession in Rhode Island, the first state to feel the pain. Also, the national unemployment rate stayed level from March at 5%, still a half a point higher than last year during the same month. However, in the regions I look at, the picture is different: check out these Year Over Year unemployment rates for March 07 v 08:

             State              |  March    |  March    | rate change(p)                           |   2007    |  2008(p)  |          ------------------------------------------------------------------------Alabama ........................|     3.4   |    4.1    |       0.7   Connecticut ....................|     4.4   |    5.3    |        .9          Maine ..........................|     4.6   |    5.0    |        .4Mississippi.....................|     6.4   |    6.0    |       -.4Rhode Island ...................|     4.9   |    6.1    |       1.2Vermont ........................|     4.0   |    4.6    |        .6     

Notice that on MS had a decline in unemployment, though it’s still at 6%.

LA and NH don’t appear on this chart because YOY they had less significant change. However, check out this rise in unemployment for LA from Feb 08 to Mar 08 – just one month:

            State              |  February |  March    | rate change(p)                           |    2008   |  2008(p)  |          ------------------------------------------------------------------------Louisiana ......................|     3.7   |     4.5   |        .8     

And of course, NH is maintaining a very different story from the rest. In March, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in NH was 3.9% up from 3.8% in Mar 07. While that number is still phenomenally low, it does match the highest jobless rate since June 2004.

Well, there’s my data for the day. Not the brightest climate, but we all have to deal with things as they currently are, not as we wish them to be. And to that point, the changing labor market is having an impact on the world of job hunting and recruiting. Here’s what I’ve been witnessing and/or hearing along the recruiting front lines in the northeast and along the gulf coast:

• Less jobs are being advertised
• More and more employers are holding off hiring or advertising based on uneasiness about the economy.
• Social service organizations are feeling the pressure of state budget tightening (see any days news in RI over the past two months for great supporting evidence), which may mean reduced state funding.
• With the slowdown, the A talent pool is less likely to change jobs, opting to take a conservative approach- a bird in hand, as it were.
• It’s harder for the unemployed to find work, based on the increased number of unemployed competing for the same jobs coupled with the slowing of growth for new jobs.
• Supply of qualified candidates is not moving (maybe increasing, but just a little), while demand is also not moving (most likely decreasing just a bit).
• The key to a business’s vitality is making sure they have the very best people on the bus, particularly when the number of seats may be shrinking, therefore the importance of attracting the right people is growing exponentially.
• In just a few more months, we’ll be electing a new president, and regardless of people’s politcal leanings, EVERYONE seems to be hopeful that the changing of the nameplate on the oval office door will lead to a stronger economy with new growth opportunities.

What do you think about those bullets? Agree? Disagree? Am I missing any major points regarding how the economy is impacting the acts of find jobs or finding candidates? I’d love to hear your feedback!

That’s the report from the Recruiting Front Lines for this week. This week, our company will be at two business expos, two job fairs, one trade conference, and two annual state hr conferences across the northeast and gulf coast. We’ll have plenty to report next week!