‘I’m a guy who one-shots his coffee before it even cools down’. Fine words, albeit ones unlikely to be found in a health and safety best practice manual. And words are the stock in trade of the rapper. In this particular case, probably the world’s most successful and certainly most high profile rapper of 2012. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that these words come from none other than Gangnam Style’s Psy. The possessor of more than 25m downloads worldwide and any number of copycats. Psy, however, is perhaps not what we might expect of a rapper. Frankly, at 34 years of age, he might be deemed a little long in the tooth for his chosen profession. South Korea, his birthplace, has hitherto not appeared an obvious source of the genre. Similarly, his clothes and, dare we say it, his waistline, do not appear typical of the art form.
In the same week that Jatenderpal Singh Bhullar became the first Sikh to mount guard outside Buckingham Palace in a turban, Psy’s sense of diversity appears very relevant given the release of the 2011 census results. And some of these results are fascinating and insightful. The percentage of people in England and Wales who consider themselves Christian dropped from 72% to 59% over the last decade. The overall population rose 7% during the same time frame with 55% of that rise accounted for by immigration. 86% of the population described themselves as white, down from 94% previously. London, in particular, is the most ethnically diverse region in the country – more than a third of Londoners were born abroad and nearly 25% are not British citizens. White Britons within London are now a minority. And one in six of the overall British population is now over the age of 60.
The learnings for employer branding? It’s increasingly vital that an organisation approaches the calibration of its employer brand through a diverse and cosmopolitan lens. Current employees, target candidate audiences and customer groups will not have the same age, ethnicity or gender make up they perhaps did ten years ago. However, organisations who have not revisited their employer brand for some time risk being viewed as less inclusive, less relevant and less engaging for key and emerging talent pools.
And just as workforces are becoming more diverse, so too are the technologies used by this workforce. Earlier this month, Unisys produced an instructive piece of research which touched on the huge rise of consumer or non-standard devices being adopted by organisations and enterprises. Some 17% of employees are adopting the policy of ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD). Accenture’s CIO has witnessed an increase of external devices showing up on his network from 20,000 in 2009 to more than 100,000 today.
Whilst this will bring both challenge and opportunity for IT network managers across the world, it is increasingly looking like a major attractor for early career talent. Cisco suggests that 40% of graduates would happily accept a lower-paying job that, at the same time, provided them with greater flexibility over device choice and social media options. The extent to which this talent pool will compare the consumer technologies with those offered by a potential employer is looking like a major recruitment differentiator. Those organisations that approach the war for talent with a technology offering inferior to what a graduate might access from the comfort of their own home might find themselves increasingly out-gunned.
Whilst we might not enthusiastically share Psy’s woefully reckless approach to beverage consumption, it’s hard to argue with one of his later lines praising – ‘A guy who has bulging ideas rather than muscles’. Organisations who want to create an attractive and aspirational employee experience need to be mindful of the increasing breadth of that same employee base. If this experience, from either a professional or technological perspective, is narrow or perceived to be so, then their employer brand is likely to be impacted significantly. And right now is absolutely not the time to be in possession of a damaged, insular or narrow employer brand – according to KPMG and the CBI, more firms than at any time in the past three years are back this month to pre-recession hiring numbers and practices. And the trajectory of these findings is astonishing. In June this year, just 16% of organisations felt this way, in December, this percentage had risen to 61%.
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 