Employer Brand & Gen Y

Welcome to Discuss HR, the HR blog written by Human Resources UK. 

We welcome another new writer that you’ll recognise from previous guest posts.  Paul Goring completes our Gloucestershire trio with a fantastic piece on employer branding. (Ed Scrivener)

Employer Brand & Gen Y

Regardless of the state of the labour market, we all know that attracting and keeping the top talent in any sector is still tough. The phrase Employer Brand has been around since it was first coined in I guess the 90’s and as Minchington (2005) said, it is all about ‘the image of your organisation as a great place to work,’ which is all fantastic as a concept until you start to look more closely at what that means and ask questions like; for who, how much will changing things cost and what is the bottom line business benefit?

So perhaps you know that your Employer Brand needs your attention and that the business needs to accept that people choose employers for a range of reasons...blank piece of paper time; What is it like to work here? The first and biggest question of the whole piece I think because you are now going to have to introduce the idea of generational preference because different people of different ages or generation types choose employers and more importantly stay with employers for very different reasons?

I will come clean; my focus professionally in this sphere was on Generation Y, working for a big pan-Global insurance business I was asked to help the business answer the huge question of ‘how do we attract and retain sufficient top level talent from the top schools globally’ this meant understanding, talking to, researching and reaching out to Generation Y and specifically looking at what they really want from an employer and what might encourage them to hang around for a few years.

The list of ‘must have’s’ for that top talent globally was indeed a revelation. Using a mixture of focused Exit Interviews, round table discussions and travelling to many careers events around Europe the list became very consistent in its content.

What did Gen Y want from an employer? Well salary was not at the top of the list; quality training, career mobility, flexible working, information and environment all featured in their top ten and we did something about them all because they were all things that could be focused on and worked into our offering and indeed most existed already but were not being communicated well enough or in the right way.

So you move heaven and earth to change the way that your future talent sees your business in terms of your Employer Brand but what do the Gen X and Baby Boomers that you employ already think about that? Is it possible for you to develop your Employer Brand and not impact the people who work for you and do a great job but who also want and need different things from you as their employer and who would define a ‘great place to work’ very differently from Gen Y.  What about your non-Gen Y candidates too? How can you possibly be all things to all men...

The crux of the problem I believe.  I think that www.employerbrandingtoday.com have some very interesting things to say on the issue and appealing to the right people in the right way without trying to appeal to everyone is one of their key messages. Your EVP (Employer Value Proposition) is a unique set of offerings, associations and values that should be cross generational and coalesce into your Employer Branding both looking outwards and inwards to be truly congurent and effective; there is no point saying something to candidates that you would not be prepared to say to your current staff.

The process of reviewing, understanding and honing your Employer Brand and then allowing it to evolve and be informed by what staff and candidates think is alot tougher than it appears because afterall how easy is it to create a ‘great place to work’ anyway?

Read about Paul and our other authors here

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Discuss HR is the HR blog written by members of Human Resources UK, the 10,000 member strong LinkedIn group dedicated to the HR professionals in the UK.  Discuss HR is published twice weekly and looks to take an insightful, informative and sometimes irreverent view on the world of HR – all with the purpose of generating a discussion.

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