Moving targets – your employer branding audiences have never been so broad and diverse

Growing up, as I largely did, in small town Yorkshire, passing one’s driving test was a rite of passage to be tackled as close to the onset of your 17^th birthday as was humanely possible. It was simply a social necessity. Public transport was infrequent, indifferent and non-aspirational – Mrs Thatcher’s quote (apparently sadly mis-attributed): “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure”, may now seem ludicrously archaic but back then it did strike something of a chord.

Not today.

Our relationship with the car is changing. Private and personal use and ownership are not something everyone aspires to. In the US, the University of Michigan reports that in 2014, just 24.5% of 16-year-olds had a license, a 47% fall from 1983, when 46.2% did. For slightly older teens, the picture remains the same, 69% of 19-year-olds had licenses in 2014, compared to 87.3% in 1983. The picture is little different closer to home – the number of UK 17-20 year olds taking driving lessons has declined by a sizeable 21% in the last nine years.

And, at the same time, the last five years has seen a 30% increase in the amount of car sharing in both Germany and the US.

The automotive marketplace, now challenged by the likes of Tesla, Google, Apple and potentially Dyson, is having to evolve both in terms of the format of the cars it produces but also how they are powered.

But change they are.

The retail clothing landscape is also under-going significant change in terms of customer behaviour. Following Next’s first profit fall in eight years reported just this week, Kantar indicated that the overall value of UK retail sales dropped 2% last year.

Again, this has a lot to do with customer behaviour. The nation’s shoppers are becoming less seasonally focused and are buying clothing when it suits them (ie. when sales are on and prices are low) rather than when it might suit the retailer. As if to underline this, in 90% of the trading weeks in 2016, more than half the retailers in the fashion market had some form of sale going on.

Whilst the likes of Next and M&S are struggling, players such as Zara and Uniqlo, typically more nimble and fast moving, with ranges and lines that change quickly, are thriving and avoiding an overly seasonal approach to looks and promotions.

What are the learnings, then, for employers and recruiters?

If the likes of Tesla and Zara are responding to changing customer needs and desires, to what extent do we listen to external talent pools and modify messaging and propositions to suit them? Perhaps not as much as we might, it would appear.

Two examples.

A study this week from Business in the Community and the City & Guilds Group outlined a major barrier to young people joining the workforce. The study asked a number of 16-24 year olds to evaluate the recruitment advertising of 65 organisations (who in total employed 1.2m young people) aimed at early career audiences.

The results were hugely insightful.

66% of those participating did not understand the nature of the role they would be applying to on the basis of what they were reading, whilst a third of them could make little of the jargon and acronyms contained within the advertising. There is a lovely film asking members of the study to give their, somewhat inaccurate, views on what terms such as fulfilment service, KPIs and SLAs mean.

This would be quietly amusing if the study didn’t conclude that such language was creating a barrier to effective engagement – as well as having a negative effect on the self-esteem of such young people.

It also brings into question the extent to which those hiring organisations understand their audiences and appreciate how best to engage and communicate with them. Organisations that hurl meaningless jargon at such talent pools seem to share much common ground with those automotive organisations continuing to promote diesel and those clothing retails wedded to set and structured seasons.

They fail to take today’s audiences into consideration. Because today’s audience is unlikely to be exactly the same as yesterday’s.

And this was perhaps the key outtake from employer branding research I have just concluded working alongside Sam Monteath. We collated the views of just short of 100 UK talent acquisition professionals and published our findings two weeks ago.

Alongside a number of other fascinating outtakes, was the view that the key people challenge an organisation’s employer brand is faced with in 2017 is recruiting from talent pools that employers have not engaged with before.

With external audiences fragmenting and employers having to recruit both younger people than ever before (particularly in view of next month’s events) as well as more mature professionals and with diversity of background, culture and mindset increasingly more important, does their employer brand have the nimbleness, insight and sensitivity to engage with the audiences it now has to? Or is it better suited to engaging with yesterday’s talent communities?

Your employer brand has to reach out successfully to a much more diverse series of talent pools than ever before – if you don’t know them and they don’t know you, you’re not reaching out.

Just as Zara’s proximity to its customer base and its ability to react and respond is a key factor in its success, the same levels of understanding and empathy should apply to talent audiences.

The same study suggested that around 45% of employers have not invested in audience research within the last three years and more.

Your talent audiences are younger, older, more digital, more dispersed, more diverse and more in-demand than ever before – if you’re going to successfully reach out to them, you better know who you’re reaching out to.