When employer branding goes bad – how toxic employment reputations can destroy careers

Although the treacherous and uncertain economic times of the last four or so years have probably applied something of a brake, we live in an era of portfolio careers. Statistics vary, but US metrics suggest that employees can change jobs as often as every 2.3 years.

However, working on a project for a multi-national global success story, I have been fascinated by how many people at the top of that organisation are lifers. Some have clocked up over 30 years with the organisation. They must be keeping the carriage clock industry going single-handedly.  But how does this play to early career professionals and graduates considering joining the organisation? Does it imply a lack of career progression for young ambitious individuals whose development is potentially blocked by these lifers? Or indeed, is it simply a confusing and off-putting anathema to people who see their first three to five years not as the start of a long and rewarding tenure with that organisation, but as a means of teeing up the rest of their career elsewhere.

TMP’s regular touchpoints with university campuses suggests that an employer’s capacity to set up the rest of a graduate’s career is a key positive differentiator. A graduate’s first job, then, is not an end in itself but a means to a whole different employment end.

But what happens if the opposite is true?

The appearance on the CVs of most of us by the likes of PWC, Apple, Google and Deloitte can only help with future career mobility. However, not all past employers add the same polish and shine to a CV – some can have an entirely different effect.

Research from corporate finance firm, Imasinsight, suggests that many former RBS employees are struggling to find work, with just one in nine of 132 registered on the FSA’s database able to find a new role over the course of this spring. There will clearly be a range of reasons behind such statistics, however Imasinsight is clear that the employer brand of the 84% state-owned bank is behind the reluctance of many organisations to take on people apparently tarnished by their employment association with RBS.

So not only are these people not working for RBS any more, the toxic nature of the bank’s employer brand has blighted their CVs. This suggests a plummeting downward spiral for the organisation. If early career professionals and financial services talent suspect that time with RBS is not setting up the rest of their career but actually having a starkly negative impact on it, the bank will struggle to hire exactly those people it needs to boost its recovery. We have seen clear evidence of this at the top of the bank, with any organisation even considering working now with ex CEO Fred Goodwin publically pilloried and Johnny Cameron, their former head of investment banking, now banned from working in the City. It is now having a similar effect further down the organisation.

There are plenty of examples of organisations whose employer brand drives corporate success, facilitates recruitment activities and creates massive internal advocacy. At the same time, there are plenty of other firms whose employer brand is something of a neutral factor – not working hard enough, not being managed with sufficient vigour and whose articulations are vanilla and undifferentiated.

However, perhaps the most telling indication of the power of an employer brand is when it actually negatively impacts on business objectives, detracts from hiring initiatives and even goes as far as destroying careers.