Overcome the Skills Shortage with Branding

The “skills shortage” is in the news and likely to stay there. What it means for employers is that the present rate of expansion in most industries will increase the level of competition for much-needed skills in the marketplace, and as skilled employees leave a business they’ll be harder to replace.

This translates into increased expenses for employers — first, to communicate their employment opportunities, then to attract desirable candidates, and finally to retain them and prevent their being poached by other businesses.

There are simply not enough people obtaining skills in most areas of employment through education, training and experience to create a pool of talent from which employers can pick and choose. Yet, nothing could be worse for a company in the throes of expansion than to have to accept second-best levels of ability when trying to drive growth.

Employers are rapidly learning to adopt a positioning or “branding” for their recruitment activities that will parallel their activities in the broader marketplace. By doing this they become more visible and attractive to a higher standard of candidate when seeking to fill critical positions.

These branding efforts have been successful to a degree, but their impact depends largely upon how accurately the businesses have identified their prospects and what appeals most to those prospects when it comes to discriminating between employment opportunities.

Just as with consumers shopping in the broader marketplace, employees know they have a choice of sources from which to select their next employer. Success will come to those businesses who treat candidates for key positions like customers — people to be wooed and “sold” on the company’s offering, then retained through high levels of service and adequate resourcing.

It’s no secret that some employers are more liked by their existing employees than others. Almost every industry is covered by one or more surveys that show what employees think of employers in that industry and that rank employers in order of preference.

Vault, Inc. of New York was recently called “The best place on the Web to prepare for a job search” by Fortune Magazine. Vault’s career content and services include researched and continually updated “insider” information on over 3,000 companies and 70 industries.

Subscribers gain access to exclusive employee surveys on thousands of top employers. Their online library includes such titles as the Vault Guide to the Top 100 Law Firms, Vault Guide to Finance Interviews, and Vault Guide to the Top 50 Consulting Firms.

These surveys are accessible for a fee to candidates in a wide variety of industries, and are used as a guide to find the real “employers of choice” when seeking a new position. Employers can also use them as a means of identifying their own rankings and determine which businesses represent their greatest competition for talent.

Where these surveys become useful to employers in a marketing sense is when they can be aligned with consumer market research and a comparison made between the consumers’ perceptions and the employees’ perceptions of the business. Candidates are most likely to receive their impressions of the company from consumer sources, and employers need to know if the brand is viewed consistently inside and outside the company.

Every employer needs to ensure that their brand is presented consistently to both its customers and to its employees, and that the perception of their brand held by its employees is a positive one. This will, in turn, help ensure that they are viewed favorably by candidates seeking employment.

The same branding elements that succeed with customers should be applied to all recruitment efforts, from the advertising that’s done to the questions asked during the selection process. Increasingly important to candidates in the modern era are corporate values and the ways in which they are translated into the company’s operations.

The skills shortage is very real and its effects will steadily increase over the next decade. Every growth-oriented business, regardless of size, will need to have a consistent branding that is as positive in the eyes of candidates for positions as it is in the eyes of consumers if it hopes to replace departing employees.

Copyright 2005, RAN ONE Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from www.ranone.com.