
Branding V
(December 23, 2002) - Have
you ever heard a dumber idea than "Employer of Choice"? Our rough
translation is "we want everyone in the world to send us their resume, we
want everyone to want to work here." A quick search of Google shows
about 800 companies that claim to be an EOC.
Well, no you don't want to be the EOC. And, you
should feel free to roll on the floor laughing at anyone who does. The stated
desire to become the EOC means "we do not know enough about the kinds of
people we want to attract."
The truth is that you know a fairly large number
of people who you hope will go to work for your closest competitor. You may even
have people on your payroll who would make life better for everyone if someone
else were their personal EOC. There are plenty of really wonderful people who
you pray will not waste your time by trying to find a place in your company.
Ambiguous goals result in performance failure.
Unfortunately, when we all learned to avoid
labeling and stereotyping by using the phrase "people of color" (that
was a good thing), we appear to have given the HR jargon factory the authority
to mint new, linguistically twisted and meaningless phrases like EOC. These are
the same people who use language like "I have issues around that" when
they mean "I'm concerned about that."
If you are a software company, you don't want to
be the employer of choice for bricklayers. If you are a local establishment, you
don't want national status. If you are a hospital, you have no need to be
interesting to R&D Engineers.
On the other hand, you may wish to be the most
desired place to work for certain subsets of the population. That's where the
questions of branding, communication, traffic development and candidate pool
development become critical in employment design and your 'employment brand'.
The notion that HR is responsible for managing 'desire' outside of the company's
walls is sure to raise concern in the head-shed and the marketing department.
Every company is capable of changing some of its
dynamics in order to become desired by a targeted demographic subset. Being more than you need to be is an unjustifiable expense, so,
precision is the watchword. The real question is "who are your dream
employees and what do you want them to dream about?"
- John
Sumser