With two key potential roadblocks – December’s General Election and the greenlighting of Brexit – now apparently side-lined, the UK economy feels as though it has some quiet traction and substance behind it.
And this is reflected in any number of recent employment and recruitment indicators.
The ONS this week pointed to a record employment rate of 76.5% for the most recent recorded quarter. There was a 208,000 increase in employment that quarter of which the vast majority were permanent workers and three quarters, interestingly, were women. The number of vacancies in the economy, having fallen for much of the last 12 months, rose 7,000 to 810,000.
The last decade has seen a steady decline in the public sector workforce. However, the CIPD suggests this is now being reversed. In line with the government’s ambition to boost investment in the sector, a net 21% of public employers suggested they would be raising headcount, which represented the second consecutive growth quarter. Healthcare, public administration and education are driving such growth apparently.
KPMG and REC’s new jobs report from earlier this month reported the first back-to-back increases in permanent jobs for a year. Indeed, the number of roles hired across the country rose at its steepest rate since March 2020.
This was echoed by both Manpower’s latest study and the British Chamber of Commerce. The former suggested that 69% of employers were now struggling to fill vacancies, whilst the latter reported an even more marked 72% were indicating recruitment difficulties in 2019’s final quarter.
All this despite somewhat anaemic economic growth, swirling political doubt and confusion and the unique and unchartered waters of Brexit and its repercussions.
Perhaps then it’s little wonder that IHS Markit reported in early February that household confidence across the country was at its highest since the relevant index’s records began 11 years ago. The index now stands at 47.6, driven there by to a clear-cut election result, economic growth prospects and an apparent firming in house prices.
And confidence tends to breed confidence. If people feel confident in the economy, they feel the confidence to make big ticket purchases. Such confidence applies too to the jobs market. Rather than keeping their heads down as they would during times of potential redundancy and upheaval, people feel emboldened to seek salary increases or job moves – and, in some cases, both.
We can observe such confidence coursing through the consumer branding work of a number of organisations.
I love that Cadbury’s have removed their logo – in fact very nearly everything – from certain selected Dairy Milk bars. The idea is that by removing the words from their packaging, they are encouraging us to share a few words with the 1.4m older people who suffer from loneliness in the UK and particularly the quarter of a million who often go a week without speaking to anyone. The intention is admirable but the confidence in their brand to strip out the logo and copy, to suit a certain situation and context, is palpable.
It’s certainly not the only example. Apple have been getting fast and loose with their logo recently in order to promote their openness and inclusivity. Under the theme of ‘Join us. Be you’, Apple has created a very simple film using some wildly diverse and beautifully rendered animations of their logo, to a simple voice over which welcomes ‘…those who sing off key, against the beat’.
I’ve been watching some of the England South Africa cricket matches over the last few weeks. One of the highlights was the third one day international between the two sides. With proceeds going to a breast cancer charity, both sides donned either an entirely pink kit or one with pink featuring prominently. Interestingly, not only were the great majority of spectators similar attired, but the match sponsors, Momentum, a usually dour South African financial services player, happily adapted their own logo and rolled out a rather fetching pink version.
And a big thanks to Tom Chesterton at Tonic, who drew my attention to the recent work of Burger King. Rather than adapt their logo, the burger chain deliver messaging closely and nimbly linked to social and cultural events. Responding to the growing irritation of Brooklyn residents to tourists visiting the already iconic steps that Joker descends in the movie, Burger King are offering locals of the New York borough free Whoppers. Talking of Whoppers, Burger King adorned London buses with the poster ‘A Whopper on the side of a bus? Must be an election’ late last year.
Rather than keep a white-knuckle-tight rein on their logo and messaging, such organisations have the confidence to relax their branding parameters to suit the occasion. Google, for example, deliver different doodles (adaptations of their logo) several times a week – this month has seen it re-design its logo around Lithuanian Independence Day, the Irish Elections and a day celebrating the world and work of Else Laske-Schuler – the latter being news to me as well, I confess.
To abuse Oscar Wilde, consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
Do we, then, cling faithfully, blindly to consistency in our employer branding work? When was the last time we took a risk, did something different, controversial, even humorous with such work?
Through the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Insta, we – and our recruitment audiences – are bombarded with memes and images – many laugh-out-loud funny. They tell a story. They conjure up a moment. And we respond and react and remember.
Do organisations adopt a similar nimbleness with employer branding messages? Or do we lack the confidence to deviate from consistency, apparent professionalism and our perception of the brand?
Brands are hugely tangible, hugely valuable assets. Interbrands’ annual table which attaches a figure to our pre-eminent brands suggests that Apple’s alone is worth $234bn, with Google some way behind, but still worth a tidy $164bn.
But rather than preciously guard such brands and identities under corporate lock and key, Apple and Google socialise and democratise them. They are confident enough to adapt their logos and idents to suit the environments in which they appear.
Because of such confidence, Apple and Google work their message around the context, rather than expect the context to work around them. Judging by the ever-increasing value associated with their respective brands, this sort of approach appears to be enhancing rather than damaging their brand and its worth.
There’s a quote doing the rounds from Ira S Wolfe’s ‘Recruiting in the age of Googlization’ – “You are not imagining that change is more disruptive or occurring faster. Therefore, sticking to your plan is no longer a good idea”.
Having a consistent plan, a consistent message and a consistent theme is only likely to deliver depressingly consistent resourcing results.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results,” according to one Albert Einstein. We have a labour market which is both steadfastly tight and challenging and yet one which is changing constantly. One example? There will be 300,000 fewer UK employees in the workforce under the age of 30 between 2018 and 2025 and one in three of all workers is now aged over 50.
Employers have to reach out to a broad and broadening church of audiences – gig and contingency workers, interns, graduates, apprentices, experienced hires, returners, boomerangs, etc. Such diverse communities are likely to have different levels of understanding about an employer, their employer brand and their enthusiasm to join them.
There seems little value, then, in delivering them a careers message which is obsessively consistent and rigid.
With the growing number of specialist Heads of Employer Branding and EVP, there should be the realisation that messages have to land with audiences. And that these messages need to work around such audiences, and not expect the opposite to happen.
There’s an inherent audience and market awareness in what the likes of Burger King, Apple and Cadbury’s are doing. They are confident enough in their own brand (and their own audiences) not to be enslaved by it.
It feels as though employers have both a growing opportunity and pressing need to demonstrate branding confidence, flexibility and finesse in the face of a talent market with choice and option.
Recruiting in 2019 was unlikely to have been straightforward. Well, guess what, the market for talent in 2020 is tightening once again – there is more competition and less audience for your messaging.
Perhaps the only thing we should be doing consistently is consistently asking questions about our brands, our talent audiences and our attraction messaging.
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 