Article 2

HR – Branding
(ArticlesBase SC #3645505)

Introduction: Human Resource: Human Resource is increasingly receiving attention as critical strategic partner,

assuming stunningly different, far reaching transformational roles and responsibilities. Human asset is having most
important priority in the organization and it integrates all human resource policies and programmes the frame – work of
the company strategy. Human resources help in transforming the lifeless factors of production into useful products.

Branding:                                                                                                      
            Branding is endowing products and services with the Power of the brand. Branding is all about creating
differences. To brand a product it is necessary to teach consumers by "WHO" the product is, "WHAT" the product does
and "WHY" consumers should care. Branding involves creating mental structure and helping consumer organize their
knowledge about product and services in a way that clarifies their decision making and in the process provides value to
the firm.

Human Resource Branding:

            Branding in Human Resource has traditionally been a limited to the employment function. The Human Resource
Branding has become a concept of great interest. The importance of mastering the concepts and skills behind branding
has a greater implication for Human professionals. Now a day's more and more eyes are looking towards Human
resource as the call for need.
            Customers differentiate firms by their products. Marketers have traditionally used "The 4 Ps" (product, price,
position and promotion) to set the products of their firm apart from those of the competitor in the market place.
Employees now differentiate their jobs by HR branding .The 4 Ps of HR are People, Pay, Position and Prospects.
As the functions of HR started spreading across the organization, the services rendered by the HR department to the
employees can be treated as the same thing as selling services to the external customer. Hence, the HR department
should care about its brand identity.
For a company to be successful, it has to attract, motivate and retain the best and brightest, making it competitive in the
race. As organizations are complex, open systems, single interventions are not enough. The best organizations have
compelling people strategies that are perfectly aligned with the organization's business strategy. Once the people
strategy is aligned with the business strategy, you can begin creating a great place to work. The HR brand has to be
aligned congruently with what the company delivers to the employee, customer, public and shareholder.
            In today's knowledge driven economy, HR plays a strategic role in bringing in the right kind of people into the
organization. In a sense, HR is the first face of an organisation for a new prospective employee. Market research has
revealed that strong brands contribute to strong competitive presence. In this way, the HR in its new avatar, the
importance of branding HR follows quite as a corollary.
The brand 'HR' can be well built by concentrating on the factors, which directly or indirectly influence the expectations of
an employee. HR department should take decisions that would not discourage employees from being aligned to the
brand behavior.

The factors that impact the employer brand are: 

1. Reputation/ integrity 
2. Culture 
3. Recruitment / orientation 
4. Pay and benefits 
5. Work /Life balance 
6. Leadership and management 
7. Performance management, growth and development 

 Of these seven factors in the employer branding model, four have proven to be crucial for a large majority of high
performing employees. These are: 

• Culture 
• Pay and benefits 
• Leadership and management 
• Performance management, growth and development. 
Only two of these four factors form a crucial part of the employer brands of majority companies: 
• A highly developed culture and outstanding leadership 
• Management qualities.

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 Why an employee/employer prefer to brand their job:
 
Brand as a System
We can consider brand as a system. The brand system has four components which are inextricably tied and
interdependent.
 
Offer: It is the service or a group of services that the brand renders to its customers, and if the offer is complex or it is
difficult to explain, then it would be very difficult to communicate the offer to the target segment. Hence, the offer
should be clearly described for a brand to be successful.
 
Example: Compensation packages, Training programs, Employee assistance programs, a good working environment, etc.

Identity: Identity is defined as every thing that assists in attracting attention, setting expectations and making an
impression. Names, logos, slogans, advertising, packaging, vision and mission statement of the HR department make up
the brand identity. This provides information to employees to determine an impression on the HR department.

Experience: Brand experience is the aggregate of all the perceptions that result from the interactions with a brand. But
all the experiences are not equal. Employees assign different levels of importance to different facets of their experience.

Image: Brand Image is what people think of the brand. This is primarily based on the interactions with the HR
department.
We define a job brand as the employment value at the job-specific level. A good job brand clearly articulates and
demonstrates how a specific position fulfills on a company's brand
Promise to its customers and how a company's employment promise is delivered back to its employees for that particular
position.
 
A good job brand delivers a message to its audience communicating what is the job, what does it take to perform, how
does it deliver on a company's brand promise, and what does it mean to the people doing the job.

Job brands have the ability to:

  Increase candidate pipeline
  Differentiate your opportunity from the competition
  Attract new talent at the job level
  Increase performance through highly engaged employees
  Increase retention rates through better alignment with your culture
  Tell a compelling story that generates interest in your opportunity.

6 Steps to an Employer Brand Strategy:

 ·         Determine how employer branding is viewed inside your company

 ·         Define employer brand objectives and project scope
 ·         The relationship between HR, marketing, and communications
 ·         Discovering your employer brand
 ·         CEO and senior management engagement
 ·         Communications planning

Determine how employer branding is viewed inside your company

You should define what employer branding means to your company.
Your employer brand is "the image of your organization as a ‘great place to work' in the mind of current employees and
key stakeholders in the external market (active and passivecandidates,  clients, customers, and other key
stakeholders)." Employer branding is therefore concerned with the attraction, engagement, and retention initiatives
targeted at enhancing your company's employer brand.
If you take too narrow a focus on employer branding, it is likely to end up as a departmental project that's not aligned
with the overall business strategy. For example, if you believe employer branding is only about recruitment, it is likely
your organization will have already closed up shop on employer branding as a result of the economic downturn while
competitors who understand the concept are continuing to invest resources as part of a long-term employer branding
strategy to attract and retain talent.

Define employer brand objectives and project scope

Defining your objectives up front will save you time and money in the long run and keep your program on time and on
budget. Companies have different lifecycle stages and therefore will have different objectives at various stages. Your
objectives may be related to the whole employer brand program or a specific employer brand project (e.g. establishing
an alumni program or employee referral program). Your objectives may include integrating the cultures of two

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 companies during a merger, decreasing staff turnover rates, increasing volume of hires for a summer recruiting
campaign, improving candidate quality, or reviewing and updating your career website to appeal to graduates.

The relationship between HR, marketing, and communications

Ownership of the employer brand strategy is often a gray area that should be clearly defined so all key stakeholders
achieve consensus and are united in the objectives. To obtain both budget and buy-in, human resources often has to
drive employer branding through internal education and awareness building.

While some level of oversight or standards adherence is natural and may vary depending on the organization, the
employer brand is a long-term, strategic talent management endeavor. The strategy and messaging are designed to
attract/engage/retain talent, which clearly sets up a strong case for collaboration between human resources, marketing,
and communications (e.g. marketing/communications can offer some compelling strategic support such as website
analytics and target-market segmentation).

In instances where there is a lack of collaboration, power struggles ensue, projects can be delayed, and
creativity/strategy minimized to the detriment of the outcome.

Discovering your employer brand

The key to developing your employer brand strategy is to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the organizational
culture, work experience, key talent drivers (engagement factors), external perceptions, leadership vision, and
management practices. Operating from this position of intelligence supports the construct of a message platform that is
authentic, compelling, differentiated, and that will be internally embraced, appropriately received in the external market
and consistently delivered upon by the organization.

This can be supported through quantitative research (e.g. survey mechanisms) and qualitative research (e.g. focus
groups, leadership interviews, roundtable meetings). It's also an ideal phase to do some competitive intelligence
gathering and benchmark against available insights. In this era of increasing transparency, the organization's external
reputation can be considered through both external focus groups and/or some level of online reputation audit to
determine ‘what is being said' about the organization via web channels (blogs, social networks, and corporate rating
sites).

CEO and senior management engagement

It pays to have conversations about your employer brand with the CEO and senior managers in the early stages of
developing your strategy. The Employer Brand Institute's global survey found engaging with these key stakeholders is
very important in achieving employer branding objectives (see figure 1) and could be conducted using a roundtable
forum on employer branding. Areas for discussion could include:
1. How will a stronger employer brand support our business strategy — M&A's, growth, consolidation?
2. What kind of culture do we have? How consistent is it across geographical and divisional boundaries?
3. What behaviors are felt to be most characteristic of the organization? What are the moments of truth when your
organization is at its best (and worse?)
4. What is the most useful way of segmenting the employee population in terms of their cultural characteristics and
distinctive needs?
5. How consistent are the messages we are communicating internally and externally about our organization as a
place to work? How do we inform our vendors?
6. What are the most effective channels of employee communication, both top-down and bottom-up?
7. Which positions are most critical to our success and what are we currently doing/need to do to attract, engage,
and retain them?

Communications planning
There is a plethora of offline and online media channels available to communicate your employer value proposition to
your target audience, including web, print, social networks, events, PR, alumni events, etc. The rate of growth of these
channels can be mind-boggling and while their use may not fit the stereotype of a conservative company that has been
around for 100 years, it pays to test these sites for benefits or risk losing ground to your competitors. Who would have
thought three years ago a micro-blogging platform where only 140 characters can be used in communicating a message
would be used successfully by companies such as Zappos (the CEO has over 590,000 followers!) to communicate with
their target audience. Taking a strategic approach toward your employer brand will ensure your team is able to assess
these innovations as they appear while maintaining focus on the longer-term objectives.

The key is to test and trial these channels and arrive at a communications strategy that provides maximum impact and
efficiency for minimum investment. There is no point building a presence on Facebook if you don't allocate the resources
to respond to messages from the community that has joined your fan base!

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 Companies like Standard Chartered Bank and Phillips ensure a consistent brand is communicated globally through
recruitment communications with changes for local nuances such as language. This not only ensures clarity in brand
positioning; it saves on design costs and increases campaign speed to market.
Have a solid understanding of cultural diversity in communicating your brand to your target audience. Just because the
messages were tried, tested, and validate by your U.S. workforce doesn't mean you'll get the same level of buy-in when
suggesting to regional offices they use the same set of communication collateral. Your own workforce can be helpful in
determining what works best in their region and the assistance from a local vendor may also add value.

Benefits of Building a Brand for HR Department

1. It improves credibility and strengthens the bonds of trust between HR department and the employees.
2. It acts as a catalyst for pushing change.
3. It is communications shorthand for getting the message out.

Limitation:
1. Employees perception at all times is not same. 
2. There is no appropriate method for prioritizing things. 
3. People may not have proper knowledge towards branding. 
4. Marketing and branding always overlap and create confusion.

Conclusion:
Why do we go for brands? The answer is simple -.reliability. It's the popular brands which provide this reliability.
Attracting knowledge workers has become a Herculean task for the HR department. Only the best practices and the best
environment can assure their interest in working for the organization. The practices and policies of the HR department
and its outlook create a certain brand for the HR. The better the brand, better are the chances that will attract the best
talent. The focus in this review paper outlines all that are required to make HR the best brand.

Article 2

HR as Product: Be the Brand of Choice

Rethink Your Role as a Human Resources Department
From Judith Brown*

It is time for Human Resources practitioners to rethink their role and that of the HR department, not only for the
purposes of contributing to the organization's bottom line, but also for their own survival.

HR continues to balance the demands of several different roles: business partner, internal consultant, operational and
administrative expert and both employee and employer advocate. This may sound like business as usual, roles that
aren’t likely to create a mad rush of HR people arming themselves for the future.

In reality, however, they are new. Although the questions may be the same, the answers most assuredly are not. The
ongoing challenge is to establish new deliverables and to sustain strong partnerships with both internal and external
customers. The ability to see the big picture-and to deploy the resources to address the big picture-will be more
important than ever.

Determine Your HR Department's Current Reputation and Brand

If you were to ask your employees today, "What does the HR Department do?" would they mutter something
unintelligible to you and make a run for it? If that is the case, your human resources department needs to rethink its role
and do some in-house marketing, marketing research and public relations.

First, you need to ask yourself some important questions:

 Do you know what your HR department's reputation is among the employees? When HR is mentioned, do
managers picture savvy strategists, backward bureaucrats, or pleasant, people-pleasers?

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 Do employees understand and appreciate the importance of the HR department in furthering the organization's
mission and objectives?
 Does the HR department make an effort to market its services to the organization? If it does not, then it has the
reputation it deserves. You can, however, easily correct this reputation.

Talk to Employees to Learn the HR Department Reputation and Brand

The key is to open up conversations with all levels of employees, and present yourself in the role of facilitator instead
of enforcer. You have to get out of the HR office and into the world of your organization’s employees. Finding these
answers requires dialogue, which means that HR must communicate. That communication must consist of equal parts
of listening and promotion.

First, HR must listen carefully to what its customers need. Then it must promote what it has done and can do. HR
staff must educate the organization about its capabilities and potential contributions. No one knows your capabilities
as well as you do.

Employees, for the most part, still see HR as "those people who handle benefits and do interviewing." To position the
HR function for the next decades, every HR practitioner needs to take on a public relations role-starting with your own
employees. Think of yourself as a product and do some smart marketing.

The marketing of the HR department requires you to demonstrate your problem-solving skills, so others will know you
do much more than simply process papers. The best form of advertising is the actions you take. By your actions,
processes and programs, you can promote the HR department as a flexible, adaptable, solutions-oriented partner, a
resource to whom the organization can turn when it needs problems solved.

Article 3-

Employer Branding – A New HR Arena

Contributing Writer:  Rohit Minton,Assistant HR, Amicorp group. minton.rohit@gmail.com  +91 9845676315

This is a market oriented era. If you have a good brand value in market, you will get good response if not; it’s very
difficult to convince people.

From an HR point of view branding is very important. If your organization has a good brand image in the market, it
will help you in getting right workforce at right time and at the same time you will have a control over the employee
cost. An organization with no brand name has to shell out lots of money to attract and retain the right candidate.

Branding can be done in two ways: (1) External Branding and (2) Internal Branding.

Lots of factors may influence the branding strategy of an organization, like A) Nature of Business B) Nature of market C)
Target reception D) Budget flexibility E) Long term mission of the organization F) Organizational structure. Etc. These are
the few to count on but there may be many as per the business.

Branding Strategy

A) Nature of Business – Branding should be based on the nature of business. Like if an IT company goes for a fashion
show, it may not yield the same results as it would have got by going to IT Fair or something similar. A real estate
company may go for some road show on property market.

B) Nature of Market – It is always recommended to gauge the market before going for any project which involves
market risk Like if you are targeting to explore a Financial market or banking and at the same time it is marred by some
other factors like Inflation, you need to design your strategy which could help you in overcoming the negative trend.

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C) Reception Target – It’s always good to define the reception target or the audiences. If you are planning to sell Villas
and targeting the middle class, probability is very high that you will end up spending your time and resources in wrong
direction.

D) Budget Flexibility – Budget always plays an important role in deciding the strategies. If your budget doesn’t allow
you to spend a lot, its always recommended to partner in any event where other participants are not of your field and it
has got at least one participant who has got a good market value so that you can attract the crowd.

E) Long Term Mission of Organization – Also the long term as well as short term goals of the organization should be
kept in mind. If the organization does not have any long term goals in the target market or location, it’s always
recommendable not to go for branding or it is very much required go for a small, low budgeted branding event.

F) Organizational Structure – Organizational structure is also very vital part for deciding any strategy. Organizational
structure is the strength of any organization and any event or branding can be done based on that. Like if your
organization does not have lots of hierarchy steps, you can boast of Flatness and claim of equal behavior. And if you
have different layers, you can market the clear definition of roles etc.

External Branding –
External branding refers to branding which is done by using external sources and which may (or may not) require some investment
in monetary or other forms. Let’s see the different means of doing external branding.

(a) Use of Job Sites – As HR the first thing which comes to the mind is recruitment, so Job sites also offer good branding opportunities
through different means like Pop ups, pop ins etc. It’s always better to go for pop ins as most of web browsers come with pop-up
blockers.

(b) Banners – Banners are also a good mean for branding. Banners can be of both types’ means Online Banner and Street banners. By
Online banner, your organization name will be flashed on different web pages as per your choice and price. Street banners are good for
bigger requirements.

(c) Road Shows – Road shows are also an important mean for creating brand awareness. You can organize talks, presentations,
seminars etc. for attracting people towards your organization.

(d) Corporate Social Responsibility – Corporate social responsibility refers to corporate getting associated with society for some noble
cause. The association can be in any mode either getting associated with a Charitable Trust or a NGO or some other public venture.
Corporate can align and attach with any of these and share the stage. Always keep in mind that choose as per you organization status
meaning if you are a small firm, do associate with a medium sized organization and if medium you can align with either of these- large or
medium. Idea should be you get a nice coverage in the popularity cake.

(e) Public Events – Public events are one of the major ways of creating a brand image. An organization can participate in any of the
public event and assuring that it does not get disappeared in the crowd of many brands or big names.

(f) Newspapers – Branding can be done through newspapers as well. If you target the local public, you can go for advertisements
considering the individual day circulation, target readers, rapport of newspaper, type of newspaper etc. If you target only to employ
people for your workforce requirement, you can place job Ads which may seem expensive at the first glance but in terms of attracting the
correct workforce, it can do magic.

(g) Email – For mail ids related to job portals, you can create an auto reply which can contain brief description of the key aspects of
candidate’s and public interest and at the same time introducing your company to the public. It should be informative as well as crispy so
that the audience reads it and just doesn’t do Shift Delete.

(h) Tagline – Create a nice, attractive tagline or a punch line for your brand and give it a significant visibility in all your branding efforts.
The tag line should be in accordance with your organization values, goals, work etc. so that it reflects an overall image of the brand
everywhere.

(i) Align with celebrity – Aligning with a celebrity is also a good way of creating a brand image. But this may cost you big bucks and
ultimately increasing your cost dramatically. This is an expensive method of branding.

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Internal Branding –
Internal Branding is comparatively a cheaper way of branding. You can use your internal organizational staff for this purpose.
(a) Front Office – Always pay attention to your front office because first impression is last impression. It should be kept neat and clean
with a pleasant receptionist who always maintains freshness and welcomes the guests with courtesy.

(b) Stays Interview - HR can always conduct stay interviews in which they can interact with the employee and ask them regarding their
career prospects, there alignment with the company, there feedback regarding their concerned departments, etc. These feedbacks can be
analyzed and used for different purposes by which you can create an internal brand image of the country.

(c) Exit Interview – An exit always carries a fair chance of initiating the chain reaction among the employees so always be very careful
in analyzing the exiting reasons so that you can overcome the justified ones in the future.

(d) Employee Satisfaction – Employee satisfaction is always very important for any organization to grow. A satisfied employee is a
productive employee. If your employee is satisfied, you can relax because they will create a good and positive rapport for the company in
the market outside.

(e) Policy Information – Always design your policies very strategically. A policy should be designed in such a way that it holds good
even after a long period of time. A frequent internal policy change sends a message to the outer world that the company is not consistent
and knowledgeable and reliable.

(f) Customer Orientation – Customers are always the most important factors. Always keep your workforce motivated towards delivery
of customer oriented services. Customers can be of either type, internal or external.

(g) Employee Participation – Always try to ensure the maximum participation from the employee side, either in terms of internal
events participation or external events.

(h) Trained Employees – Always ensure proper training of employees before they are engaged in work. The training should be in all the
aspects like policies, vision, mission, organization. This will project a good picture of organization on the new employee.
These are few to count with but based on the requirement and strategy, the list may increase or shorten.