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- Steve Hemsley
Jo Long, Expectations! Recruitment Services
Of course you want to represent your clients in the best light, but digging deeper into their employer branding can be a win-win for both parties, discovers Steve Hemsley
Every organisation thinks theirs is a great place to work, but if its employer brand is weak, the best talent will look elsewhere to build their careers.
Recruiters play a key role in conveying a company’s reputation through social media, joint PR and marketing, and events such as trade shows and recruitment fairs.
However, they can only do this if they embed themselves in their clients’ organisations so they can accurately reflect an employer’s corporate culture and brand values to potential hires.
It’s a scary thought but a recruiter can make or break a client’s branding message.
Jo Long, director at Gloucester- and Cheltenham-based Expectations! Recruitment Services, says recruiters can boost their clients’ brand by becoming an extension of their HR function and subsequently an ambassador for the company.
“In effect, we become their marketers, PR and business development affiliates specifically for recruitment,” says Long. “In today’s competitive recruitment market promoting a company’s brand to a high calibre candidate is just as important as putting forward a suitable candidate to a company. Candidates are more likely to move jobs if it is the right job in the right company.”
EPS develops case studies for clients and uses them in its own marketing and press releases to spread the word about particular employers. It also joins clients on their stands at trade shows and at recruitment exhibitions.
One client that works closely with the agency is HETAS, the government-approved body responsible for biomass and solid fuel domestic heating. It connects its website to Expectations! so that all recruitment enquiries are sent directly to the agency and dealt with quickly, and a joint PR campaign is planned. The HETAS brand needs a high profile because there is a chronic skill shortage within the technical and engineering sector in Gloucestershire.
Idea sharing
Another recruiter spending time getting to know its clients intimately to boost their employer brand is creative and media sector specialist Purple Consultancy, which is embarking on its own re-brand this year.
Managing director Toby Thwaites says the most forward-thinking clients regularly invite recruiters to share their ideas about how their employer brand can be developed to attract talent. His team are often seen in the offices of global brand management company Interbrand and 4G telecoms giant EE, for instance.
Agencies will often work with in-house recruiters to promote an employer’s brand but Gary Franklin, co-founder of The Forum for In-house Recruitment Managers, says agencies must take the initiative.
“They need to gather information and ask questions to find out how an employer works, what their organisation is like and what specific industry challenges they are facing,” he says.
Franklin believes many agencies pay lip-service to relationship building to promote the client’s brand and their involvement rarely extends beyond an initial phone call to canvass for business.
“Agencies that do want to build relationships with their in-house recruitment partners have seen the light,” he says. “They appreciate that this way of working can benefit the agency and the in-house team. It can result in on-going and repeat business from an employer and offers a fantastic springboard from which to attract other clients who similarly want to build strong and sustained partnerships.”
Reputation is everything
Toby Thwaites, Purple
BigChoice Group has 15 years’ experience in youth recruitment and in producing content from clients that will appeal to a young audience. Its research of 1,000 students revealed that 68% of them are swayed by employer brand.
The company recently worked with global financial services company Credit Suisse to raise its brand awareness among students at UK universities. It created a fast app game called the ‘Head2Head Challenge’ designed to be fun while creating awareness and knowledge of the business and the brand. The game reached more than 67,000 students.
“Many employers are starting to move away from having a corporate brand image and a separate employer brand message which can cause confusion, particularly in the graduate recruitment industry,” says Amanda Thomson, managing director of the recruitment division at BigChoice Group. “Take Centrica for example, this is a brand that many students and graduates are not familiar with, but British Gas on the other hand is a strong brand that everyone knows. On the other hand employers that have a unified brand within the graduate sector are: PWC, Deloitte, Shell, and HSBC.”
One company helping employers generate more value from their relationship with recruiters is de Poel whose clients include Argos, Warburtons, Wolseley and charities such as The Children’s Society. De Poel is the UK’s number one procurer of temporary agency labour, providing a vendor neutral recruitment service.
CEO Matthew Sanders says that in the agency worker market an employer’s brand reputation can take a beating if the relationship with the recruiter is not robust.
“Newspapers love human interest stories and a scoop on workers who are being mistreated or unethically paid. But it isn’t the recruiter’s name in the headline, it’s the client’s,” says Sanders. “Unfortunately many businesses are at risk of having their name dragged through the mud. Like the recent corporate tax-paying scandals, many recruiters are relying on quite tangential interpretations of the law, which means that their temporary workers are getting a raw deal.”
Sanders urges employers to examine closely their recruitment supply chains through both financial and ‘ethical’ audits. “That way these businesses will be protected when stories of unhappy workers hit the media.”
Ann Swain, CEO at the Association of Professional Staffing Companies (APSCo), says there must be a high level of understanding between the recruiter and the client to ensure brand messages are conveyed consistently. “The image recruiters present to each potential candidate should be an extension of the standards the applicant will expect from the employer on every level,” she says.
A recruitment consultancy is often the first ‘direct’ conversation between an employer and its future talent, and the huge element of trust involved when an employer asks a recruiter to promote its brand must not be underestimated.
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