Your employer brand – landing its message or disappearing into the ether?

Earlier this week, the Prime Minister, Theresa May pierced her self-imposed summer silence with a pronouncement that she intended to lead the country into the next general election, scheduled for 2022. In a way, she had little choice, but the response from all around her, friend or foe, was witheringly under-whelming at best.

Still, she might draw some compensatory cheer from the fact that she had managed to land her message, even if very few people seemed entirely enthusiastic. Landing a message was something that she failed to do by some measure in June’s general election, largely explaining her surrender of a handsome parliamentary majority. She is not alone in such failure – with her predecessor, David Cameron, managing to pluck defeat from the jaws of referendum victory 15 months ago, as he led a lacklustre Remain campaign with little in the way of a positive, memorable message.

Both a hung parliament and an inglorious Brexit are, then, the results of individuals and organisations failing to deliver a key memorable and compelling message.

Perhaps it’s no wonder that messages disappear, go astray and fail to land. The volume of messages we are all exposed to is genuinely bewildering. Referring to the most recent ‘What happens on the internet in a minute’, there are 4.1m YouTube videos watched, 452,000 Twitter messages sent and 900,000 Facebook logins. Every sixty seconds. Every single sixty seconds.

That’s a lot of noise, a lot of competition and a lot of capacity for messages to evaporate.

And that’s exactly what employers cannot afford to experience in today’s talent market.

Again, there is no shortage of noise and competition.

The most recent ONS figures from the middle of August showed a record number of people in work – 31.75m – unemployment falling by another 57,000 last month, with just 4.4% out of work. Equally troubling for employers, candidate availability in July for both permanent and temporary workers, fell sharply in the month.

It is a pattern unlikely to improve any time soon. A new study courtesy of the Observer, suggests that almost a million EU citizens working in Britain are either planning to leave the country or have already made up their minds to go as a result of Brexit. The survey goes on to show that 55% of those with PhDs and 49% of those with postgraduate degrees were either planning to leave the UK or were actively considering it.

So, given the failures we’ve touched on earlier, which organisations have achieved successful cut through?

Not for the first time, it’s hard to look further than Apple. Looking for a Distributed Systems Engineer, the company probably ignored all recommendations from its agency and embedded the ad for the role deep within its own website.

The listing was tracked down by ZDNet security editor, one Zach Whittaker, who posted the screen grab on Twitter. On finding the listing, he was congratulated by the message, ‘Hey there! You found us’.

Ironically, by hiding their recruitment messaging away from its audience, Apple succeeded in reaching exactly that same incredibly in-demand community. Once again, one of the few organisations with less pressure on them than most to land messages correctly, does just the opposite.

The same might be said of Elon Musk.

He was in the press twice in the last week with successful examples of cutting through the noise and landing his message.

The success of Tesla, in terms of sales, market capitalisation and cachet is little short of staggering. Much of it down to the awareness of Musk to the times we live in.

Receiving a Tweet from a Tesla customer at 1:47am suggesting an enhancement to the parking protocol on his cars, it took Musk all of 24 minutes to reply, ‘Good point. We will add that to all cars in one of the upcoming software releases’.

No prevarication, no excuses, no blame, just appreciation and a determination to listen to his customer base and respond.

He also did something similar with an all-employee email on the subject of internal communications within Tesla. The email simply gave permission for anyone, regardless of seniority or department, to be able to talk to anyone else, including himself, with an idea, a suggestion, an improvement.

‘You can talk to anyone without anyone else’s permission. Moreover, you should consider yourself obligated to do so until the right thing happens…we obviously cannot compete with the big car companies in size, so we must do so with intelligence and agility’

It’s hard not to like Mr Musk.

I’m hoping too that Mars are able to cut through the noise of competition and deliver a compelling message to early career talent. They certainly have the substance and the proof points.

This week, the Times ran a series of articles about Past Marsters or Martians – the alumni of the Mars’ graduate schemes. One of the featured alumni – and there were many – was Justin King, the previous CEO of Sainsburys. He attributed much of his subsequent success to what he’d learned in the challenging and exposing environment of Mars.

“Mars knew that good people would leave if a better opportunity came along,” he said. “That is why many people are still in touch as there was never any bile or resentment when people left.”

In terms of having a message to land, it’s hard to think of better substance and evidence of what spending 3-5 years at the graduate employer can do to build and develop a career.

And landing a message should not be confined to attraction communications alone. Glassdoor published a list late in August of those organisations whose interviewing process was received most favourably by candidates.

Such organisations as Airbus, Yell, Hiscox and Easyjet made up the top four. They were praised by Glassdoor for “efficient, effective and innovative interviewing and hiring practices”. At a time of shrinking candidate availability, the capacity to deliver an applicant experience which is prompt, positive and value adding has rarely been as important.

Interestingly and to further emphasise the point, of Glassdoor’s three key judging criteria, those who ‘offered clear communication on the candidate’s status and next steps in the process’ featured highly.

Recruiting organisations need to ensure they have a message and one that is successfully delivered to its audiences both initially and throughout the hiring process. An authentic, compelling organisational EVP should be in evidence through the candidate’s decision-making process.

Whether we’re voting, buying a car or considering changing employers, we crave certainty. We look to politicians, those we’re buying from, those we seek to work with and want the reassurance of a positive, credible message. In the absence of such clarity, perhaps it’s no wonder that 40% of employers (despite doubts over the economy) are operating at full capacity because successful recruitment is such a challenge in the current landscape of noise, competition and doubt.

What is your employer brand saying about your organisation, if, indeed, it is succeeding in saying anything at all to those audiences with whom you need to engage?