Career site development - P&G

How P&G refreshed its employer brand communication strategy to make a more personal connection with Gen Y

P&G understands the importance of employer branding and continually invests to ensure its employment proposition is well understood. As you’d expect from a company that lives and breathes brand marketing excellence, P&G also seeks to ensure that it moves with the times and finds new ways to reinforce and refresh its employer brand. This drives candidate awareness and a significant number of applicants each year, exceeding 800,000 in the 2010-11 hiring season. The growth in the numbers applying to P&G during this period was particularly satisfying in the emerging markets, where in the past it has been difficult to move the needle. Another indication of the success of P&G’s employer brand marketing has been its top 10 ranking among engineering students in Universum’s Most Attractive Global Employers, following a period when it was consistently in the 20’s.

In the same way that P&G builds a strong core positioning for its product brands over many years, the company has consistently built its employer brand marketing around the core promise ‘A new challenge every day’. However, to ensure that this message continues to resonate with the high potential students that make up its core target group, the Global Talent Supply team at P&G have also sought to maintain a close eye on the changing behaviours and aspirations of this Gen Y audience, and adjusted their communication strategy accordingly.

In 2008, alongside the evidently widespread adoption of social media, the Global Talent Supply team recognized that the way in which potential Gen Y candidates were evaluating employers was beginning to change. They noticed that young people were increasingly looking for more personally engaging content, and connections with individuals ‘on the inside’ who they could converse with in a more immediate way. Given this trend, they concluded that the company could no longer rely on GEN-Y talent to seek out their existing career websites and materials.

In response, P&G embarked on a new employer brand communication strategy, combining a more personal angle on the ‘new challenge every day’ promise, and a more social approach to the way that this message was distributed.

In terms of messaging, P&G introduced a new recruitment headline: ‘We hire the person, not the position’. This served to address the lingering misconception that P&G hires worker-drone ‘proctoids’, and emphasize the more diverse and characterful nature of the individuals who thrive within P&G. To bring this to life, the Talent Team then reached out to hundreds of employees and invited people to share their personal stories. The story profile below provides a typical example.

“When Erdal says he’s climbing the walls, he’s not having a bad day. He’s doing what he loves to do best – practicing parkour, the art of overcoming obstacles as swiftly and efficiently as possible. And at work we’re happy to say, he’s just as quick…

At P&G every job has certain individual qualifications but we’d much rather focus on the special qualities and overall quality of the unique individual applying”.

To help distribute this new message a more socially connected way, P&G created a new website, experiencepg.com, which features video story profiles, and provides links to a much broader range of personal content and connections via Facebook, Linked-In, Twitter and YouTube. The aim of this was not just to connect people to a website, or communicate a narrow brand message, but deliver richer, more immersive and engaging insights into what makes P&G employees tick.

While many other leading multi-nationals have tip-toed nervously around the edges of social media, P&G have fully embraced its potential to present its employer brand credentials in a more personal and engaging way and build stronger connections with its core target audiences. From our perspective, the strength of P&G’s employer brand communication is that it truly demonstrates the challenger mindset it both promises and looks for, and with this kind of commitment to constant brand renewal, we foresee them staying at the top of the employer league tables for a very long time to come.

“In helping us to shape up for this challenge, TMP Worldwide proved to be an excellent partner. They not only brought us the necessary expertise to get it done, but also the kind of ownership and commitment that gave us confidence that our needs would always be met with the highest quality output” Scott Read - Associate Director, Global Talent Supply, Procter & Gamble

If you’d like to discover more about applying similar employer brand management practices to your own organization, please contact: Kurt.dudycha@tmp.com

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