The Edelman Trust Barometer is a fascinating annual survey reporting on how trust patterns vary across the globe and from year to year. The report – and I’d recommend you take a look at it – covers the degree to which we trust key stakeholders such as government, employers, NGOs and the media. This year’s is titled ‘Trust amid insularity’. It’s a key theme and one which has broad-based learnings, including our approach and response to employer branding.
In amongst the report’s key findings was the conclusion that, around the world, we are increasingly less likely to want to seek out and entertain alternative political views to our own. We are also significantly more likely to trust domestic organisations, compared to those headquartered overseas – in the case of the UK, by 25 percentage points. And when it comes to placing trust in an individual with a differing world view or culture, 70% of us are either unwilling or hesitant.
Rather than this being the stuff of dry, academic research, I don’t think it’s too controversial to suggest there’s a growing epidemic of insularity around us – shaped by a number of factors.
Insularity epidemic
Covid and its ensuing lockdowns were a major accelerator, whereby we found ourselves both literally and figuratively cut off from the world. For younger people, in particular, this happened at a critical and hugely influential moment. We spend significant amounts of time with our focus entirely on our mobile devices, to the exclusion of the outside world. Social media and its algorithms mean we are served content entirely consistent with the opinions we generally engage with – to the exclusion of other perspectives and world views.
Working from home brings with it many benefits – however, the comfort and security it provides can also distance us from the world outside. The cost of living and the closure of hospitality venues mean we are more likely to consume and entertain at home, rather than rubbing shoulders with the community around us. We make use of Kindle, Ocado and Amazon instead of bookshops, supermarkets and shopping centres. AI, too, exacerbates this – it can be so much easier and so much quicker, simply to gauge the views of our chosen AI for (always very polite, respectful and gentle) answers, advice or guidance, rather than risk the potential scorn, impatience or indifference of colleagues.
And why does all this matter from a talent acquisition perspective?
Career insularity
We have become more professionally insular in the face of the prevailing labour market over the last 3-4 years. Understandable caution in the face of increasing redundancies and decreasing vacancies mean we’re more likely to hunker down and stay put, regardless of any misgivings we might have regarding our current employer. We have become more career risk averse. Such risk aversity tends to extrapolate beyond our career aspirations – or lack thereof – we become wary about innovation, initiative and entrepreneurialism, for fear of failure and its consequences.
Our insularity means we view potential new opportunities with mistrust. What might we be letting ourselves in for? New systems, new processes, new culture, new colleagues, new hierarchies, new politics, new management styles? Does it seem worth the risk?
What’s the learning, then, for employer branding?
Is your business looking outwards in inwards?
If your business is to grow, if it is to harness a slowly awakening economy, it needs new talent, new perspectives, new energy. It requires an external perspective over insularity. Successful organisations are those looking externally, analysing marketplaces, consumer activity, competitor initiatives. Successful organisations are those encouraging their people to adopt a similarly external perspective and world view. What they don’t so much need is risk-averse, embedded, navel-gazing insularity.
The skills, approach and competencies that have seen a business survive challenging economic times, are unlikely to be the same ones that will see those organisations flourish.
The problem is around persuading the talent you need, currently employed within your competition, to consider you. And to consider you and the careers you offer a professional risk worth taking.
Employer branding has always had to cut through, always had to make its presence felt.
Today, however, it needs to do more, it needs to permeate insularity.
It needs to break through personal firewalls.
Breaking through personal firewalls
The importance of understanding the career mindset of your candidate audiences has rarely been so pressing. It’s a labour market with more questions than answers. That sense of doubt, uncertainty and mistrust is the root cause of this insularity.
Gaining a topical understanding of what external talent communities think of your organisation remains, therefore, a prerequisite. Not just what they think of you but where their mindset is. Of course, such communities will be looking for reward, recognition, progress and investment. But what they crave and what they lack is confidence. Confidence in their current employer, in the market, in their own potential and in their career marketability. Confidence to address career inertia.
What they want to see in you and your employer branding is the confidence that yours is an organisation with substance, with potential, with direction and with an external perspective. They want to be confident in your organisational confidence.
It’s time, then, to demonstrate through your career message some key themes.
What do you need to deliver to external talent markets?
- Exactly how are you innovating and being comfortable with risk?
- How is an external mindset rewarded within your organisation?
- What people stories are being shared that make the case for such confidence?
- What are clients saying about your business and your approach?
- How confident in your organisation are those clients?
- Just how is a more external facing approach benefitting not just customers, but your business and your people?
Many of the people your business needs are hiding behind personal firewalls, inertia and insularity. They’ll stay that way until they sense the confidence they currently lack.
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 