FOR INNOVATION
A sense of
community lies at
the heart of each
brand.
For many individuals in these brand communities, this felt sense of
belonging is as important as the quality of the organization’s products
or services. Brand power emerges from community and shared values.
There’s good reason to apply what we’ve learned about
marketplace brands to the workplace.
If an organization’s brand can attract a marketplace community that
embraces and shapes the values that the brand represents, why
shouldn’t we view an organization’s workforce as a parallel brand
community in its own right?
This is the premise of talent branding, which takes a different tack
than the employer brands’ familiar from HR practice for a decade or
more.
For the most part, this approach molded itself on the market-facing
perspective of packaged goods brands. A talent brand should be
authentic from the inside out.
Employer brands generally paid little attention to their native corporate
cultures or the notion that unique values, held in common, can boost
an organization’s performance. The employer’s generalized perception
of the preferences of its target segment, i.e. its potential recruits, were
permitted to dominate how the organization positioned itself as a place
to work.
C ase in point:
In the heady days of the dot-com bubble, recruiters generalized that
the casual workplace with its laissez-faire approach to schedules,
attire, and workplace décor—would appeal in a big way to technical
professionals, and especially to Web-savvy twenty-somethings. Before
long, even staid and established companies were hyping their workout
rooms, their air hockey lounges, their pet-friendly policies, and so on.
Where these environments authentically embody the top-to-bottom
spirit of the company—at Google or Monster.com
—this made perfect sense.
But for many companies, this positioning proved inauthentic and
forced, a flimsy affectation that wouldn’t stick. In their scramble to join
the Net revolution, organizations were inadvertently screening out their
earned attributes, the distinct operating values and self-defined sense
of community that made their workplaces—and their workforces—
special.
A talent brand differs from nineties-style employer brands in that
it anchors its appeal in the unique attributes that an organization
offers, not in what it presumes i