If you read my last article about The Talent Brand and Value Proposition, you already know the value of a strong talent brand that is aligned with your consumer brand. Companies that achieve strength and alignment between the two do better than companies that don’t. If you’ve worked your way through establishing a strong talent brand and value proposition, you’re ready for the second half of the battle, which is the talent branding process.

Now that you (and hopefully everyone else in your company) understand your talent brand and how important it is, what do you do to communicate it, maintain it, enhance it, and leverage it into impactful results?

In one survey of 2,000 senior executives related to employer branding activities (source), 61% of the respondents said they had developed their value proposition (that first half of the battle) and 74% were beginning to make use of social media to communicate their talent brand. But most companies are only in the very early stages of doing this – only a third had any dedicated employees posting content and responding to users in an ongoing way. And only half of the respondents are attempting to measure their social media activity in this regard. This is one area where your company can get on the forward edge of the curve.

And while that external communication is important, don’t overlook the need to be constantly communicating it internally to your current employees as well. Any number of organizations (McKinsey comes to mind) have conducted research showing that if you aren’t constantly engaged in this internal communication of your talent value proposition and talent brand, your people are gradually becoming less engaged and more likely to move on to other opportunities.

Make no mistake, just the communication piece of your talent branding efforts require significant amounts of time and resources. Make the necessary commitments, however, and you’ll enjoy a great pay-off. In fact, the companies that are making the most of their talent brand tend to have full-time staff solely devoted to the monitoring, assessing and refining of their talent brands.

How do you monitor your talent brand internally over time for measurement and benchmarking purposes? Why, with a survey, of course! If your company already engages in significant employee feedback, organizational culture and/or climate surveys, all you need to do is add in some questions that specifically address aspects of your talent brand and its value proposition.

Take cosmetics company L’Oréal as an example. Here’s the text from the company’s YouTube careers channel:

A thrilling experience, a culture of excellence.

At L’Oréal we empower people who are ready to take bets, think out of the box, defend their convictions, be resilient and leave their own mark. They are offered early responsibilities, numerous opportunities and fast-track careers.

Here are the questions I would ask its employees on a regular basis as a way of measuring its talent value proposition.

To what extent do you agree or disagree that working at L’Oréal is a thrilling experience?

___ Completely agree; ___ Somewhat agree; ___ Somewhat disagree; ___ Completely disagree

To what extent do you agree or disagree that L’Oréal embodies a culture of excellence?

___ Completely agree; ___ Somewhat agree; ___ Somewhat disagree; ___ Completely disagree

To what extent do you agree or disagree that L’Oréal empowers people to take bets, think out of the box, defend their convictions, be resilient, and leave their own mark?

___ Completely agree; ___ Somewhat agree; ___ Somewhat disagree; ___ Completely disagree

To what extent do you agree or disagree that L’Oréal offers employees early responsibilities, numerous opportunities and fast-track careers?

___ Completely agree; ___ Somewhat agree; ___ Somewhat disagree; ___ Completely disagree

Those are just some ideas, and hastily formed survey questions. You would normally want to tease them out into more questions rather than asking about multiple items in each question, but you get the idea. You might also be interested in seeing how L’Oréal uses social media in its recruitment efforts to get some ideas for your own talent branding efforts. My next article will go back to the talent value proposition to make sure you understand what’s involved in crafting it.

 

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.