For People Like Me

I remember doing some employer branding research a year ago as part of a pitch to a large betting company - they had a very powerful consumer brand, so strong in fact that often candidates would judge the company based on what they did rather than what they offered.
Some candidates just saw them as a gambling company and didn't want to work in that environment. The client spoke about this as a real challenge for them specifically in the technology workforce and it prompted me to try and add value to conversation by finding out what they could do to separate their consumer brand from their employer brand.

One of the best articles I came across was "Using branding to attract talent" ( The McKinsey Quarterly 2005, Number 3). The research spoke about how one of the top priorities for technology candidates (graduates in this case, but I think it applies to candidates beyond that category) in considering a company is whether that company convinced them that it was 'for people like me'. In the case of the client we were pitching to, it appeared to us that that was the crux of the issue - candidates didn't realise that there were people like them in that organisation.
The article goes on to describe tools that you can use to engage, communicate and convince candidates of the fact, ranging from mass communication tools such as direct marketing to more individual experiences such as workshops and events.
We sent this article to the client and in the end one of the things they decided to do was run a series of technology workshops to demonstrate the technology pedigree of the organisation. Whether it worked in the end I guess depends on how well the workshops were run and presented, but it was still an innovative and concrete thing to do in order to establish their employer brand for the technology positions.
In the technology industry here in Dublin, one of the challenges for the local, growing, technology companies is how can they convince candidates that they are 'for people like me' when they are in competition with the global brands (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon etc).
These global brands naturally attract high calibre candidates. The answer .... you just got to try harder to convince them. And how do you do that, well, first of all begin by reading that McKinsey article!
(We've started a new LinkedIn Group Employer Branding Ireland, so for those of you interested in this topic we'd love to have your contribution!)

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