David Kippen, Ph.D.'s Blog

Don’t get me wrong. If you came to me with water, coal, and mediocrity – as one day you might – and I transmuted these to wine, gold, and “employer of choice” status you would pay me handsomely. And so you should. At best, ad agencies are alchemists that transform an employer’s reality into a viable employer brand. It is pure magic. For me, the problem does not lie in the process of conjuring itself – I too consider myself a magician of sorts – but in the cultural trance that the magic subsequently induces. By way of illustration consider the “mind share” of being recognized as an employer of choice.

The whole business of promoting employers as employers of choice is – from where I sit at least – looking less and less like a good idea for the majority and more like an oligopoly for relatively few lauded organizations, ad agencies, and publishers. I’m okay with that and so should everyone else, provided we are all clear about what is really going on. Branding is big business, remember. And, as one of the minor conjurers, I make no apologies for my role as a willing participant in the rituals of recruitment communications. That includes pushing to position my lesser known clients alongside the Genentechs, and the Abbotts, and the Googles, and the AETNAs, and the Verizons, and the ad infinitums. After all, for a guerrilla marketer, social validation is as powerful a tool for the minnows as it is for the sharks, maybe even more so.

So, what’s wrong with being top-of-mind as an employer of choice? Nothing at all. In fact, if you can be one then you should. But after many years of doing this recruitment communications/employer of choice thing, I have a number of niggling doubts:

1. What can we do for those 90% or so of American employers who could never be designated as an employer of choice – no matter who is pulling rabbits out of the hat? Some employers, some jobs, and some locations just stink. You can put lipstick on a pig but it will remain a pig. And yet others are too dysfunctional as staffing organizations to ever fully realize their potential as a branded employer of choice, or are too strapped for cash to pony up the ante. It happens.

2. I don’t know of any ad agency that has been empowered to walk the corridors of client organizations and rebuke recruiters and HR managers for being plain stupid and/or negating their efforts to brand the organization as an employer of choice. When I see an employer run unbranded ads willy-nilly and in all the wrong places; when self-authored resumes are the ticket of admission to a process more like a scary ride at a county fair than a positive life-changing experience; when their recruiters don’t even acknowledge applicants’ phone calls or emails and secretly hold them in contempt; when their hiring managers fail at effective interviewing and selection; and – to top it off – the ever-hopeful are rejected with form letters to be opened by unwitting loved ones, well, I wonder how to even begin the brand discovery process, a boardroom discussion that sounds like, “So, tell me – exactly – why would I want to work for you?”

3. How do our clients stand out from the crowd when employer of choice thinking is a herd mentality? If those 90% of American employers feel they need to combat the big guns of the “best companies to work for”, how will they achieve it by standing in the line of fire? What is more, if an employer feels compelled to participate in any kind of marketing rah-rah, which means succumbing to peer pressure I fear, surely they run the greater risk of ending up among the top losers?

4. Ta da! So, now you are fancied as an employer of choice. You are top in your class. Now you have three thousand resumes flooding in every day through your newly branded web site – mostly from unqualified wannabes – but are you ready for all the attendant problems of processing, indexing, archiving, and searching all that data? On the bright side, as an employer of choice, finding recruiters to hop on over to lend a hand should be easy enough, surely?

5. The downside of being up on a pedestal is that there are countless others waiting for you to fall off. Yes, being an employer of choice is a veritable balancing act. Number forty-six today. One hundred and eleven tomorrow. Ranked here, but not there. But hey, don’t fret. That’s what we magicians are for.

There may not be any easy answers to these questions, but I can’t help thinking that if we were all less focused on being recognized as an employer of choice, and more focused on becoming one for the sheer beauty of it all, these questions might not matter much any more. On the other hand, if being acknowledged as the cat’s whiskers somehow validates your very existence as an employer, or results in some tangible shareholder return, you should strike now while the iron is hot. Make your mark and make the impression deep. As the struggle for talent intensifies, prospective and current employees will be more swayed by the simple things that guide their choice of employer, namely: “What’s in it for me?”

© Copyright 2006 Amitai Givertz.