HR Insights Blog

In building a strong employer brand that is more than just a label, the first question to be answered is: ‘Do HR and Executive Management really create the conditions within the organisation that will attract, engage and retain top talent?’ The second question would be: ‘How can we positively influence the perception of these conditions among talent within as well as outside the company?’ To answer these questions HR could learn from marketing by adopting HR market analytics, which can provide insights to managing talent in a structured way.

The Top Employers Institute believes it is time to take both HR and employer branding to a next level. It’s no surprise that some of the best-known high-street brands are also some of the best ‘employer brands’ too. While companies such as Google, Apple, eBay and Sony all regularly top polls for having the most recognised consumer brand, they are also the companies ordinary people most aspire to work at if offered the chance.

By investing in their Employer Brand, Top Employers invest in engaging and recruiting happy people. Stimulating happiness is not a soft relict from the seventies, but turns out to be one of the key indicators for high performing companies.

The move of the world towards smart phones came far more quickly than anticipated, skipping almost a generation of evolution in between. China is the largest smart phone market today and the fact is no more a surprise that a majority of these users use smart phones for activities that range beyond making mere phone calls, as apps today constitute a very big percentage of smart phone usage.

Social media is becoming more and more pervasive and has already been entrenched as a tool for external marketing. But what about internal communication? New research shows it might be groundbreaking there as well.

Marketing people will not necessarily be pleased with such a statement, but let’s think about it for a moment; if you can convince your customers to promote your products, why not try to convince them to promote you as an employer?

As advertising spend the world over declines, employees are stepping into the gap as the new brand ambassadors for their companies and investment in HR is becoming paramount. brandambassadors-mindthegap Trust in business doesn’t work the way it used to. Consumers no longer want to be told what or who to trust; they want to discover it for themselves. And with the rising influence of social media, crowdsourcing and citizen journalism, a generation of consumers are now empowered to interact actively with brands and make up their own minds.