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It may be corn, but it's working for Kellogg's

Yikes! Just look at that scary guy. War criminal? Satanic dentist? Dodgy children's entertainer waiting to dip his fingers into the young 'uns fun bags? No. It is, of course, William Keith Kellogg, freaky cereal magnate, Arabian horse breeder, vegetable-botherer and one of the original proponents of the Employer Value Proposition.

It's all there in Wikipedia, so it must be true. W.K. Kellogg famously declared, 'I will invest my money in my people,' and went on to demonstrate how altruistic leadership in manufacturing can lead to commercial success. He even operated extra shifts during the Great Depression, just so as many people as possible had the opportunity to put fried squirrel on the table (or whatever it was they ate back then in Battle Creek, Michigan).

Now, Kellogg's is continuing his work in what looks like a good way. This last week they've had all manner of good PR about their summer hours policy, which the media has latched onto as evidence of responsible management in depressed times. Basically, Kellogg's is saying to its employees that, providing you've fulfilled your weekly hours requirement by then, then you can bugger off home at lunchtime every Friday.

It's not an original idea. Barkers, for one, used to do it a couple of years back. But it's managed to get Kellogg's excellent exposure in news channels and, I imagine, around the water coolers of every company in Manchester which doesn't offer a similar benefit.

Lesson, then: dream up something similar for your organisation. Think about the employer value proposition you want to communicate, then invent a policy that 'proves' you mean it. Want to be seen as age diverse? Then give free subs to the People's Friend for all. Want to foster a better work-life balance? Have the CEO walk around the office with an effing big dog at five every night chucking people out. You get the idea.

It needn't be original. And it'd probably better be cheap. But done properly it'll get you better and further-reaching PR than that latest microsite or bloody Twitter feed.

The one with the CIPD and the dirty girl

There's an episode of Friends in which Ross, enchanted by a bobby-dazzler of a blonde (Cheryl) accepts an invitation to go back to her apartment. But as soon as she opens the door he realises the relationship is screwed. Chez Cheryl is a terrible mess. There's crap and vermin everywhere.

Of course, what's happening here is that the writers are using Ross's dating life as a metaphor for the disparities between an organisation's candidate attraction and candidate relationship materials. (Obvious when you think about it.) What they're saying is this. The attraction stuff is often very slinky, charming and sexy - more than enough to get you through the door. But once on the inside, in the imperfect and slightly stained world of candidate relationship materials, things begin to look very different indeed.

Candidate relationship materials - aka 'downstream employer branding' - include job and people specifications, letters of invitation/regret/hold, interview areas, assessment centres, online testing and offer packs. And all these are usually crap for a couple of reasons. One: most decent people in HR think the management of these materials is beneath them and two: HR clonk-heads often assume that when the candidate has applied they don't need to be sold to anymore.

CRM has historically been an additional income stream for the better rec ad agencies - re-working anything within it that isn't consistent with the employer brand or fails to promote the EVPs. I once (once) worked with a retail client who completely got it right by asking us to re-write everything including their most basic application form, to ensure that the language within it was consistent with the copy directives laid out in their new employer brand paradigm.

Anyway, now the CIPD Recruitment Marketing Awards in partnership with The Guardian has latched onto the candidate relationship management piece and is offering a new award for best practice in the area.

This is laudable in theory, but, CRMAIPWTG judges, I can't help but feel that unless you take a great deal of care, this will lead to a pedestrianisation of the awards, which should  essentially be about marketing. So by all means give an award to an assessment centre or application process that shows marketing flair and uses creativity to generate better results for the business. But if you find yourself talking about the comparative value of psychometric approaches, feedback loops which helped reduce interview drop-outs and other technical HR yada, hopefully you'll just put those entries into a big envelope and post them directly off the Personnel Today Awards where they belong? 

 

Ingenuity gives Paddy more Power

Unless you're into betting you might not know much about Paddy Power, the Dublin-based bookmakers. Maybe you've stood on a high street stroking your chin and wondering whether 'Paddy Power' is an actual bloke called Paddy. Maybe you've seen their relentlessly risque advertising (example below) or read that they're often in conflict with the ASA and animal rights organisations. (Their Spanish site takes bets on how many ears will be taken off in bullfights.)

 

But take a look at the Paddy Power sites and you'll discover they're more robust a proposition than you may have thought. Recruitment-wise, they have a vanity URL (www.workwithpaddy.com), a graduate recruitment scheme, links to a Facebook page and most interesting of all, their 'Our Experience' section.

I don't think I've seen one of these before. It's basically a list (with logos) of the companies Paddy Power has hired people from. It's a pretty illustrious list, as it happens - Accenture, Google, Yahoo!, Innocent Drinks, Channel 4, and more.

Why's it there? They say it's to help us understand we don't need experience of the betting industry to apply. But I think there's something more to it than that: they rightly suspect that many people will be sniffy about joining what they perceive to be a chain of shonky Irish betting shops, and this is a nifty way of pointing out that the team behind them is actually a pretty classy outfit.

Find out more about their 'funny and often controversial' product advertising here.

What's your story?

If you haven't been following it, the bloke in the YouTube clip below is Daniel Evans, a 38 year-old pool cleaner who's just made it to the live finals of ITV's X  Factor. 

Play the clip and you'll see that Danny looks fine, sings well and seems like a nice fella. What he isn't is a superstar in waiting. So why have the producers put him through at the expense of other, more talented candidates?

It's largely because (although they won't admit it) Danny lost his wife last year just after the birth of their daughter. And this makes Danny prime real estate in terms of story. People are both intellectually and emotionally engaged with him, and so are interested in how his flirtation with fame works out.

It's another example of the power of story. Which begs the question: how are you using story for your candidate attraction campaigns? (By story I mean narratives that engage readers, maybe using characters and certainly 'plotlines' that develop.)

When you think about it, most recruitment marketing doesn't use story but talks about static elements. We discuss fixed values, precise benefits packages and value propositions that may be striking but have no real dynamic, or movement, to them. Sometimes it's far better to - excuse the cliche - talk about the journey or story of which the employee will become part: mentally cast them into a moving picture about what they'll do and how they'll advance during the course of their role.

Specifically, this could be a story about skills development and consequent promotion; more likely it will involve a dramatic exploration of the vision and values. In other words, a decent narrative about how precisely the employer will, with the help of the new recruit, positively impact the world.

Incidentally, my money would be on third-favourite Laura, whose slightly unscrubbed appearance puts me in mind of Amy Winehouse. Only a little - very little - less mad.

High Noon and the history of rec ad

A while ago I had an idea for explaining the differences between the three historic eras of recruitment advertising.

Think of the Gary Cooper character (Kane) in High Noon. The part where he's trying to recruit deputies to help fight the evil Frank Miller (and shoot him dead, tra la). With all the menfolk in the town gathered in the saloon, Kane can try a number of different approaches.

He can say: 'Who wants to be a deputy?' This is representative of the first era of rec ad (often referred to as tombstone or simple sits vac advertising). It's like a basic ad which just has the job title at the top of it, and no reason for anyone to apply short of being jobless.

He can say: 'Help me fight Frank Miller, and there's a chance he won't take your women and cattle.' This represents propositional advertising. The employer (Kane) is given his audience a reason to apply - a 'What's In It For Me?' message designed to engineer response from an otherwise uninterested (or passive) market.

Or he can hold up a deputy's badge and ask: 'Who wants one of these?' This is employer branding. All the propositions of the role - the status, the worthwhileness of community involvement, the protection of self-interest - have all been bound up in a shorthand form (the badge) that the candidate constituency has already come to understand and respect.

Next time: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the emergence of retention theory.

Sainsbury's: employer branding by default?

Every so often a TV commercial comes along that features an 'employee' of the advertising organisation - think Halifax, KFC and Kwik-Fit - that pretty well defines the employee experience for the multitude. Sainsbo's are the latest to take this route, with their ITV2-heavy 'Back To Work' campaign featuring 42 year-old single mum, Sarah.

Sainsburys - Back to..
Watch the ad...

Ignore the fact that Sarah is quite obviously Tricia from Corrie (harassed single Mum and, if I remember correctly, one time squeeze of dubious lothario Curly Watts) if you can. The question here is - is this a conscious effort to articulate the Sainsbury's EB as it pertains to in-store employees, or has (once again) HR been steamrollered by their more muscular siblings in the Marketing Dept?

Let's look at the ad and see what it tells us about working in-store at Sainsbo's:

1. They're more than happy to hire 42 year-old single mums.
2. There's camaraderie in the workplace. (Witness Sarah's wave to the guy pushing the trolleys, and her banter with the colleague at the end.)
3. It's somehow fun. ('I'm having a great time'.)
4. It's a good way to generate ideas for feeding your boisterous family on the cheap.

All this is fine, if pretty familiar fare for retail recruitment. And you can argue that it's stronger than what appears in the 'Great Place To Work' page on the Sainbury's site. There, you have to wade through all the HR-centric rhetoric about people policies, diversity and CSR before you get to the meagre employee-centric propositions about development, recognition and reward.

So, it doesn't actually conflict, but it doesn't marry up that much either. Perhaps it'll develop as the campaign continues. (Sarah gets to meet Jamie Oliver in the next installment.)

The point of all this: more people will develop an understanding of the Sainsbo's EB from this commercial (with its multi-million media spend) than from any of the rec ads, web pages and in-store bumpf the HR dept is producing.

So did HR and Marketing converse on this - and if not, why not?