Personal Branding is a very fashionable topic today. More than that, it’s a deep trend that is overdiscussed because of its yougness. A day will come that it will be so obvious that no-one will feel like arguing anymore. The purpose is to manage one’s reputation and professional brand in order to :
– those who are looking for informations about someone find what’s needed to assess his skills, his ability to do hold a defined job.
– this person appears as the “right person” when recruiters are looking for a defined profile without having any name in mind.
This may also help freelances to find missions but let’s admit it’s more about an applicant to recruiter relationship.
Being one of those who think that a good recruitement is more about bringing together people and companies who really fit the one with the other instead of making a selection, I think that the other side of the relation has to be improved too : the one that helps applicants to have a better undertanding of the company. Recruitment is like waltz or rock n’roll : you’ll never dance very long if you don’t get the right partner.
The current crisis that makes so many people look for any kind of job musn’t make us forget major issues that will happen in the future.
First, companies still need to hire. If the crisis causes adustments on fragile business lines and industries at the end of their lives, many businesses still need a minimym amount of new comers, specially newly graduated people because they still need this kind of people for specific jobs and overlooking an age group is an HR time bomn.
Second, because one day they’ll have to re-start hiring. And learn how to seduce people again. The whole in a world that won’t believe, more than ever, impersonal discourses and lack of transparence.
Last because many industries and companies are now loosing their appeal and that’s not when the labor market will improve that things will be better for them. It will just be the opposite.
It’s a traditional employer brand issue. I know. But we have to admit that very few companies really did something while the question of the employer brand vs. new candidate’s expectations and pratices born from the net has been discussed for years. So it’s really time to bring answers.
There’s also another global phenomenon that has to be taken into account : the employer brand is not as far as it used to be from theb global brand. The time when having four discourses, one for customers, one for candidates, one for shareholders and one for employees, is over. That means that the employer brand is more and more linked to the “business brand”. A bad product can impact attractiveness. Bad sales and marketing practices ? The employer brand suffers too. And when employees are not happy at work and say their employer is a “bad” one, it becomes harder to sell. The convergence between information chanels made possible by internet makes that it’s not possible anymore to deliver contradictory messages. People react at the same time as shareholders, customers, citizen, candidates… And it’s becoming more and more true as global responsability is becoming a stronger value in society.
The consequence ? As I was told last week by a friend of mine, companies will have to spread uniformly their values, their identity through their product marketing, their employer marketing and their corporate marketing. The whole while have open and transparent discussions with their audience. What implies they have to do very hard work on themselves, then on the convergence and the socialization of the messages.
This will be one of the major issues for tomorrow’s companies, 2.0 or not. In my opinion it will force corporate functions that have not been used to working together to collaborate and co-build a common message and set of behaviors.
Good luck.
corporate branding, marketing, marque-employeur, personal branding, Recrutement, Ressources Humaines,marque
