The employer brand impact of, er, impact

Interesting, if not entirely unexpected news last week from the Resolution Foundation, suggests that up to a third of young people face living in rented accommodation for their entire lives. If a lot of generalities associated with such individuals tend to the vague and specious, they are, incontrovertibly, generation rent. The same report suggests that 40% of millennials remain renting by the age of 30. Interestingly, those not able to buy include a significant number of family units with children – up to 1.8m from a figure just a third of that 15 years ago. More anecdotally, the financial challenge in London, in particular, to getting on the housing market seems daunting.

What’s particularly interesting about this development from a labour market perspective touches on the traditional relationship between home purchase and employment. Just as mortgage providers have typically demanded proof of two years of continuous employment and sight of an applicant’s last three pay slips, on the other side of the table, a key professional driver and motivation for employees has been the capacity to secure a foot on the housing ladder through the income and stability that permanent employment has typically signified.

Putting aside for now the associated theme of the gig economy and its influence on home ownership, such a relationship can no longer exist for young employees. Home ownership anywhere near a city such as London feels an increasingly unlikely prospect for younger employees.

If such a prospect, then, no longer functions as a key employment motivator, what has filled this void?

In a word, impact.

This week, City AM reported on the Shaper’s Survey from YouthMatters and the World Economic Forum. In a long piece about the importance of employers understanding what inspires the generation taking their first steps into employment, the impact word featured prominently. The millennial generation right across our continent wanted a ‘sense of purpose or impact on society’ and ranked this more highly than salary and benefits. Similarly, the capacity to have an impact on a company’s purpose was also highly rated.

And this sense of impact was echoed by that regular gift to every blog writer, Tesla’s Elon Musk, this week, when, central amongst his tips to create a more productive workforce, was the quote – ‘Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious that you aren’t adding value’.

For Mr Musk, if you’re not having an impact doing what you’re doing, stop and do something else.

And impact was a key output from a fascinating survey from Tech London Associates in the same week. Engaging with more than 250 London-based IT leaders, the survey found that 51% felt public perception of trust in the sector is down. Inspired in part by the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica woes, the survey sought to understand what measures could be done to address this slide in trust.

The lack of trust seems entirely predictable and understandable given the recent Congressional squirmings of Mr Zuckerberg. However, this does not mean it is not entirely frustrating, particularly given the resourcing needs of the digital sector. In the same survey, 90% of the same tech leaders felt that organisations within their sector were making a positive social impact and increasing equality and social mobility.

Tech’s challenge? Its inability to successfully demonstrate such positive impact, according to the survey.

(The scale of brand damage wrought by the scandal can be demonstrated in a 2017 survey in the US which suggested that 79% of people agreed that ‘Facebook is committed to protecting the privacy of my personal information’. That figure now stands at 27%, which frankly seems a little high).

If having the ability to make an impact both as an individual within the workplace and as an organisation within the sector is of growing importance, there has rarely been an occasion in the past when this has been more of a prerogative for employers. If they are unable to construct a workplace that provides the opportunity for their people to have an impact or, indeed, to articulate this sense of impact to external candidate audiences, then the challenge they face has rarely if ever been so marked.

The most recent ONS statistics were insightful to the point of alarming. Unemployment fell by 16,000 to a rate of 4.2% – the last time it touched such a level (and this was when the workforce was significantly smaller) was 1975. The UK workforce is some 427,000 larger than a year ago. I’m guessing many of us thought recruitment was tough 12 months ago. Well, it’s that much tougher today. The percentage of people in work is now 75.4%, the highest since records began in 1971.

Think about this for a moment. If you’re old enough to have known the War for Talent in 1997, the dot com boom of 2000 and the incredibly frothy labour market of 2007, just before the crash, you’ll know how much of a challenge recruiting was then.

Very simply, today’s employment landscape is much more daunting. And that’s without the increasing influence on labour movement of Brexit.

And my favourite snippet of information from the most recent ONS report? The percentage of UK employees who voluntarily quit their jobs in the last quarter of 2017 (the most recent on record) was at its highest since early 2007.

So just as the challenge facing your employer branding has potentially never been as marked in terms of talent attraction, you are likely to be looking at more and more of your existing people considering their options. And they have plenty.

And, however you choose to land communications around what sort of impact great people can have within your organisation, your audience will be anything but gullible and naïve.

The Reputation Institute suggested this week that UK brands are facing the most significant trust crisis since the global recession of 2008.

Amongst not entirely unexpected findings, such as organisations like Uber and Ryanair taking something of a reputational beating, trust in all brands ‘to do the right thing’ declined by a sizeable 10% over the last 12 months. Even more telling was the finding that the propensity of a consumer to give a brand ‘the benefit of the doubt’ fell by 13% over the same period.

We talk as an industry about being authentic. And rightly so. Such an objective, however, has never been so important, nor so potentially out of reach. The same study suggested that just 36% of UK consumers thought that brands were being genuine about the claims they were making in their marketing – another 12% dip on the previous reading.

So, what are the learnings for talent acquisition? We need to understand as clearly and as topically as possible what motivates both internal and external people audiences from an employment perspective. Because basing this on history and past experience won’t work. Unlike past generations, the carrot of house ownership feels distinctly distant. If the relationship between employment and mortgage is dissolving for Millennials, what has replaced it?

Just as sectors such as tech and digital have to re-articulate the sense of impact they make to important constructs such as social mobility, employers need to both provide this sense of impact for their people and articulate evidence of how these same people are making such an impact.

And all at a time when audiences have never been to critical of and sceptical towards brands and their claims!