In the late 90’s considerable publicity was given in the HR and national media to the War for Talent – the increasingly global competition amongst companies large and small for comparatively rare, predominantly high-level skills. A combination of economic slowdown and international terrorism brought that war to a temporary conclusion.

As the global economy picks up, however, there is already talk of War for Talent 2. This is likely, in the UK at least, to be very different from the last struggle.

Despite the fact that the last three years have seen considerable job losses in manufacturing and high profile City, IT and communications jobs, unemployment continues at its lowest rate ever.

The relentless growth of the service sector has meant the creation of new and different types of jobs, which often require hybrid skills. There are already many skills that are considered to be in short supply. These are by no means always complex technical or knowledge related skills commanding high salaries. More often than not the elements that are most in demand are customer relationship skills coupled with adaptability.

With a considerable amount of pressure already in the employment marketplace, the predictions are that 2004 will see far greater competition for talent to fill comparatively low-level jobs.

Harnessing the power of the Employer Brand

One significant lesson that organisations learned from the first WfT was that if you had a reputation for treating people well and offered stimulating, secure employment with the potential to progress, you stood a far greater chance of attracting, recruiting and retaining good people.

This simple and logical fact is at the core of the need for companies to ensure that the various elements of their employer brand are in keeping with current best practice. It also means that any and all of an organisation’s communications need to reflect and promote the brand proposition.

While word of mouth is one of the most frequent ways in which an organisation’s employment reputation is communicated, there are also a variety of more overt communications channels that need to be co-ordinated to ensure that talented people are attracted to the organisation and to reinforce the feel-good factor in existing employees. These include corporate and third party web sites, national, local trade and technical press, brochures, posters, exhibition stands and presentations, and many more besides.

Increasingly, of course, organisations are adopting internet-driven candidate attraction, assessment and handling systems, which provide their own unique opportunity for communicating the employer brand proposition.

The choice of media will be affected by specific target audiences, marketplaces, budgets, locations, time-scales and availability. But the employer brand should always be front of mind to avoid making media decisions that might contaminate or contradict it.

While the development of a media plan and the creative approach go hand in hand, only when you have defined and understood the variety of factors that make the organisation unique can you develop the appropriate messages and design regime to communicate these elements in a truthful, believable, yet attractive and effective manner.

Those organisations which have recently undergone a significant employer branding exercise or even competed in an ‘Employer of Choice’ competition such as the Sunday Times Top 100 Employers, will have a clear articulation of their employer brand and an up-to-date understanding of the various elements that contribute towards it.

If, however, this is not the case, for the specific purposes of recruitment communications, it is sensible to engage a specialist agency or consultancy to undertake a review of the wide variety of relevant information you will already have available, such as annual staff surveys and image research.

It is also very worthwhile undertaking qualitative research amongst existing employees – particularly those with skills that are difficult to recruit for. And to gain a fully rounded picture it is also valuable to talk to groups of potential employees with the appropriate skills and backgrounds to establish their perception of the organisation as an employer.

Having established both the internal and external perceptions as well as the perspective of the management team it becomes possible to articulate the organisation’s existing employer brand as well as identifying the various areas, which may require some form of improvement. If this is simply a case of misconception, then improved communications should provide the solution. On the other hand, there may be a need for a more significant organisational change in policy or behaviours.

To make optimum use of the research phase, it is sensible to involve some existing and potential employee groups in the development, refinement and testing of communications concepts. There are a variety of different methods that can be adopted for this from simply using messages and visuals as stimulus materials to asking participants to score and critique carefully conceived concepts that are as close to the finished article as possible. One potentially effective, if time consuming, method is to provide participants with a blank sheet of paper and a handful of magic markers and give them a detailed brief to design their own poster, brochure or Home Page.

Such exercises are usually very stimulating for all concerned and invariably give the resultant communications an added stimulus and authenticity.

Natural Passion

One particularly good example is an exercise we undertook last year for the Ford Motor Company. As part of an overall review of the organisation’s recruitment communications materials, we were looking at the most relevant and attractive messages for their future graduate intake.



Integral to the broader research on perceptions of employees, we tested a wide variety of ideas, themes, headlines and images (all within corporate guideline’s, of course) amongst the previous years’ intake. Some were well received, some less so. However, one concept - Natural Passion - simply struck a chord with the participants. It captured the very essence of why they had joined the organisation in the first place, virtually everybody gave it 10 out of 10, even although it needed some slight tweaks in terms of language and tone to make it 100%.

The subsequent advertising campaign and linked brochure delivered a far better response than in previous years. Additionally, they also won the Times Best Graduate Recruitment Advertising and Brochure Awards which are particularly significant because they are judged by the 13,000 undergraduate participants in the High Fliers survey.

Transforming a legend

Staying with the auto industry, and indeed within the Ford Group, Jaguar, while sharing many of its parent’s finer qualities, has a very different culture. It is also an organisation which is experiencing considerable and constant change. It was important to Jaguar that their recruitment communications reflected both their heritage and their modernity, much as their latest models do. The phrase that was coined to sum up the endeavour of all those involved in Jaguar was ‘Transforming a Legend’.



An extensive research programme was conducted involving both internal and external audiences and reviewing their in-depth perceptions of the organisation as an employer. It became clear that the various different employment audiences to which Jaguar has to appeal require slightly different visual and textual approaches.
One linking theme, however, which stems from the way that some of their products are classified - by type, enables Jaguar recruitment communications to feature particular personal attributes that match elements of the employer brand. In the example here it is ‘determination’, while others reflect the range of behaviours that the organisation values.

These are but two examples where an employer branding research programme has been undertaken to help define recruitment communications. In both instances, the results reflected the first hand experiences of existing employees and repositioned the organisation in the eyes of potential candidates, yet fell within the overall corporate design guidelines.

The success of such exercises has meant that an increasing number of organisations, both large and small, public and private sector are investing in similar programmes.


Demonstrating the employer brand from the outset.

Of course, it is not just the communications aspect of the recruitment process that needs to reflect the employer brand. Every aspect of how prospective candidates are handled is worthy of consideration from the moment they make contact with the organisation through the selection phases to the subsequent offer or rejection.

Reviewing and refining each element of what is, for many, the first opportunity of sampling the organisations’ employer brand first hand, can pay dividends in terms of reducing drop-out rates or improving offer to hire ratios. Indeed, it is often very simple and economical changes here – such as making sure that whoever is taking the response has a basic understanding of the roles they are recruiting for- that make the difference between a successful hire and an expensive failure. In fact, making sure that your front line recruiters not only understand your employer brand, but are also some of its finest ambassadors is probably the single most important factor of all.

As the old adage goes, people join people. If you want the people joining you to have the right attitudes and behaviours, as well as all the materials and processes involved, the front line recruitment team must personify the employer brand.

Nick Holker is Head of Research and Strategic Planning at the specialist
employment communications consultancy - Work Communications