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How to create an employer brand and instill it throughout the employment lifecycle
Your employer brand should be a distinct and compelling way to express what makes you unique as an employer, highlighting the employee experience you offer. Find out how Philips researched its position in the employment market to create an employer brand that reflects its corporate reputation.
THE GLOBAL ECONOMY MAY have slowed from the heady days of the late 1990s, but the competition to attract and retain the best employees hasn't. One company that's highly active in the fight for talent is Philips, one of the world's biggest electronics companies and Europe's largest, with 161,500 employees in more than 100 countries. Indeed, with its commitment to becoming a leading solution provider in the areas of healthcare, lifestyle and technology, there's a good case for arguing that hiring and keeping the best people has never been more important. The question, of course, is how.
Work on finding the answer began in 2002. In view of the ongoing war for talent, recruitment was naturally one of the key processes we investigated. Our global recruitment redesign program had shown that the quality of service could be improved in meeting the needs of both candidates and the business. We also realized that we needed to pay more attention to talent recruitment instead of focusing on the issue only when vacancies emerged. We wanted to manage the inflow of talented people into the company talent pipeline more proactively.
Chasing out inconsistency
We identified early on that we'd been inconsistent in our positioning and messaging and therefore our communications with prospective employees. We weren't addressing them as "one Philips," and we weren't reaching the targets we'd set ourselves to attract and retain the best talent.
Our traditional way of working was for every country to look at recruitment from their own perspective. This had led to different processes that meant Philips was being positioned differently in each labor market. The objective for the project team was to find a solution that created consistency without preventing tailoring, while also improving service quality and operational efficiency.
Selling Philips to prospective employees
From the start, we took the approach of considering recruitment as a sales and marketing function, and thinking...