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You want absolute clarity about the current jobs market?

Nah, not going to happen. 

It’s pretty easy to take a quick look at some of the key relevant indicators and end up feeling rather queasy. The Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) for the services sector – some 75% of the entire economy, fell for the fourth month in succession to 47.9. Any figure below 50 indicates an economy in retreat. Equally unlikely to prompt a hearty laugh was research from APSCo which suggested a 24% decline in vacancies in London between Q1 and Q2 this year. Yes, 24%.

However…

Look elsewhere and the picture feels somewhat different. Research from REC earlier this month suggests that employers ran active ads for 2.25m jobs in the week to July 9. A figure up 53% on the equivalent month in 2022. Different research from the same source suggests that UK employers’ confidence in their hiring decisions strengthened in their most recent reading, between April and June this year. There was a net balance of +7 of those optimistic businesses over those with more negative sentiment.

Hope that clears things up.

The other noteworthy stats over this period reported earlier this week from Broadbean indicated that applications for UK jobs declined by a huge 30% in June compared to the previous month. There were 2% fewer vacancies but there are clearly other factors influencing such a huge decline. Firms too, according to REC, were also forced to leave jobs open for longer periods.

Is this the start of the usually quieter summer period or are potential candidates increasingly concerned about the economic outlook and wary about making a potentially risky career move?

What’s perhaps clearer is the sense of pressure on many TA and EB professionals. On a daily basis, the green Open to Work icons are appearing on LinkedIn. This does not feel like an easy market for the industry. And yet we’ve been here before. Every recession in living memory – the Lawson one of 1990, the dot com crash of 2000, the global financial crash of 2007-08, the pandemic, as well as the one we currently find ourselves in – have provoked redundancies within the sector and its supporting industries.

“I’ve been through all the financial downturns this article mentions. Unfortunately, nothing has changed. TA & EB teams ultimately have to drag the organisation out of it, once they get their jobs back. And the cycle starts again, albeit at a lower starting base. When will senior financial stakeholders realise the reputational and talent (read financial) damage. We, as an industry, have to be better about making our own case”, Andy Hendon, Global EB Consultant (Formerly of Syneos Health & KPMG).

There’s plenty of talk that this will be a shallow recession – if it is one, technically, at all – and that Q4 should see some form of both economic and employment recovery. But what can TA and EB professionals do in order to make sure that, come the next downturn, they are not facing a similar fate? 

How can the profession create more resilience?

Here’s some thoughts, certainly not exhaustive.

Outline to senior stakeholders the employer brand reputational damage associated with making short term, hasty headcount decisions. It’s not hard to remember which organisations behaved in an exemplary fashion during Covid, and which ones did anything but. The same point exists here. If 2024 does prove to be a year of economic and employment resurgence, then what are the implications of making redundancy headlines now, particularly amongst the TA and EB community? 

“We are already seeing TA teams being let go as recruitment freezes are in play for some organisations. Without doubt, they will all have to be rehired in a year or so when the inevitable uplift happens. As a volume employer, we have seen retention vastly improve, which in part is down to the investment we have made in our people but furthermore due to colleagues looking for more stability in uncertain times. Gen Y and even Gen Z, who struggled so much in Covid, are now of working age and I expect they want to feel their feet on solid ground for a little while.

Applications for us have been falling month on month and whilst some of it is seasonal, the reality is that people are sticking with what they know. So, whilst we have seen a large reduction in vacancies, candidates are much more difficult to attract which means there should be greater emphasis on employer brand and talent attraction and certainly not less.

 Again, we need to make the case internally that recruitment challenges do not simply go away when the economy struggles, they just evolve,” Adele Swift, Talent and Attraction Manager, Toolstation.

(A study by Charlie Trevor of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Anthony Nyberg of the University of South Carolina found that downsizing a workforce by 1% leads to a 31% increase in voluntary turnover in the next year).

“At the back end of 2022, organisations were keen to contain costs as they slammed the brakes on their hiring.  Some teams then went on to cull their internal teams to reduce costs further, even though all of their hiring data suggested that was not the right thing.  As we head into September, we’re getting more inbound enquiries asking how our model might work for a Q4 ramp-up, ahead of hiring back their own team in Q1/Q2 2024.

How does the profession make a stronger case for itself when things go south in the future? By proactively outlining a strengthening labour market and making plans now as to how to address this. Get ahead of things, don’t wait”, Martin Dangerfield, CEO, immersive

What has your investment in EVP and EB delivered over the course of the last year? what money have you saved through direct hiring over third party use? The work you’ve done on your candidate experience, what difference has that made to your talent pipeline and what money has been saved as a result? The employee experience, how has that impacted retention? And even employee referrals? But don’t tell me, show me the spreadsheet. 

“I believe we can safely say that EB is here to stay and being embraced by organisations across the globe. Your EB has an intrinsic value – just as a corporate brand does – which will be damaged by headcount cutting. We don’t make this point nearly loud enough” Andy Hendon, Global EB Consultant (Formerly of Syneos Health & KPMG).

One of the many key learnings from both the financial crash of 2007-08 and the pandemic was the relatively speedy return to hiring. Many organisations made swingeing headcount cuts, including across the TA community, only to find themselves needing to hire again rather quickly. Doing this with either no TA team or an extremely depleted and de-motivated one is not a recipe for success.

Make the point very clearly that leaving recruiting to non-recruitment specialists, in the event of the TA team being decimated, creates real vulnerability, reputational damage and potential litigation. This is a highly specialised and nuanced field, in which mistakes relating to diversity, inclusion and bias are all too easy to make. 

Making redundancies is simply too late now. Harvard Business Review makes the case that redundancies should be made quickly, in the sight of declining economic activity, so that appropriate planning can be made. At the fag end of a flat economy is too late. And if we’re being super cynical, it’s easier to remember which organisations made the more recent cuts, rather than those who did so several months ago.

“It’s been a bit of a roller coaster in terms of employer brand and EVP work for us this year, with real fluctuations in terms of activity. Q3 has certainly felt quieter, with projects being delayed and even cancelled. The talent attraction challenges our clients face are still there and, indeed, escalating, but short-term budget reductions over the longer-term employer brand creative development are not seen as their priority! And this is the crux of the challenge the industry faces. Branding, employer or otherwise, is a long-term strategic investment, not a tap to be turned on and off.”  Mike Heal, Managing Director, WDAD Communications.

What have been the big successes in terms of hiring this year? What have those people you and your team have brought on board added to the business? What products, services and innovations have these people delivered? Consider your key talent rivals, are you net up on hiring from those organisations, compared to losing employees in the opposite direction?

“Despite the partnerships that EB should create, it can feel as though Brand, Marketing & Communications teams are seemingly more immune to difficult market conditions than TA & EB teams? History tells us these latter teams are targeted first to reduce costs. Which begs the question, does the company brand/services differentiate the organisation or is that down to the people that provide them and the skills they deploy? Surely, it’s difficult for a business to plan ahead without a talent pipeline and a blinkered view to future employer reputation?” Andy Hendon, Global EB Consultant (Formerly of Syneos Health & KPMG).

Research from the University of Colorado between 1990 and 1998 demonstrated that the negative stock market returns of those firms making cuts was greater than the financial benefits resulting from those redundancies. Those firms downsizing performed more poorly than those avoiding such cuts.

There are so many talent intelligence metrics out there – you’ve already waded through several at the beginning of this blog! We’re still suffering from a sizeable post-Brexit and post-Covid hole in the workforce. Make use of such metrics, build a case which makes it abundantly clear how challenging the market is. Make yourself and your team indispensable. 

“This is a good opportunity to make your candidate journey a slick one. How easy is it to apply to you? What experience do candidates come away with? What impression is this experience giving? Still asking for cover letters – maybe in a difficult marketplace, now is the time to stop? Be sympathetic to the market”, Julie Griggs, Director of Reward, People Insights and Performance, The Open University.

Your organisation is likely to have spent time and reputation building and communicating your values. How do such values appear if people are now disappearing at pace? Do they still stand up? Are they still authentic? You could make the same point about your EVP. You’re likely to have invested in this within the last two years – does it continue to feel authentic if suddenly firing takes precedence over hiring? 

We’ve touched on previous downturns and recessions. They’re little fun to work through. They engender worry, distraction and even paranoia. But they don’t last forever. Indeed, they are over surprisingly quickly. Take the pandemic. Nothing any of us had previously experienced. Apocalyptic. The end of days. All true, except for the fact that the recruitment market was highly competitive just months after the initial lock down. Make this case. What will it cost you in terms of resourcing costs, internal morale and external reputation if you’re shedding staff in August and seeking to hire in January?

“If you’re not actively recruiting, it’s a good opportunity to turn your focus inward.  Focus on the talented colleagues you’ve got and how to retain them.  Be cross-functional, work with your reward colleagues on the attractiveness of your benefits – are you shouting about them?  Work with your OD colleagues on spotting the colleagues who could be likely successors, support in workforce planning.  You can play a key role in ensuring your existing great people remain your existing great people when the job market improves”, Julie Griggs, Director of Reward, People Insights and Performance, The Open University.

I’m sure this happens anyway, but make it very clear how tough hiring is. Although we’re living through an economy apparently clinging on, there are an awful lot of live jobs being advertised. Potential candidates are staying put, waiting out the downturn, not pressing the send button on their applications. 

Just some thoughts, some possibly more practical than others, and I’m sure there are plenty of other options out there. Be interested in hearing your own views.

Somewhat ironically in this digital age, fewer and fewer things are binary. Sexualities, politics, nationalities, economies, you name it, there’s rarely been more fluidity, more grey areas, more flexibility. 

And that’s largely how we find today’s current labour market. 

According to the KPMG/REC permanent placement index, the most recent reading suggested a fall from 44.2 down to 43.8 – whereby any figure under 50 indicates a contraction in the number of permanent hires being made. The ONS suggested that live vacancies across the UK experienced a 5.5% monthly decline to April this year – the 11^th consecutive drop. And the unemployment rate increased by 0.1 percentage points to 3.8%. On a far more anecdotal basis, the volume of green ‘open to work’ indicators on LinkedIn appears to be in increasing rapidly. 

But that’s not the whole story. 

There’s far more nuance to the labour market than we might think. The latest ONS stats quoted above also point to a UK employment rate of 76%, an increase of 0.2 percentage points on the previous quarter. There was a 23,000 increase in the number of payrolled employees – and today’s figure is up more than 1m from pre-pandemic levels. There was also a small decrease in the percentage of people being made redundant. And, although declining, there remain more than 1m live vacancies across the UK economy.

It’s a Schrodinger’s cat of an employment picture.

In essence, we have a UK labour market in which people are struggling to hire and in which others are struggling to get hired. 

We also have a market in which many organisations will be both rolling out the employee welcome mat to new joiners, whilst simultaneously ushering others towards the exit. 

So, if your organisation is both making hires and letting people go, what are the implications for your employer brand? 

Potentially, hugely confusing and, as a result, hugely damaging. 

Your standing and reputation as an employer will be impacted significantly by the way people depart your organisation. Are internal communications blithely ignoring the fact that this is happening? Or is there honesty, sympathy and transparency that this is happening? Are those people leaving your organisation being provided with assistance, with respect and consideration? 

More important, what strategic communications are accompanying such headcount reduction? Has your organisation simply gone into survival mode, battening down the hatches? Pretending it isn’t happening? Is it simply making redundancies as a result of corporate peer pressure and market expectations – Google, Meta and Twitter are doing some similar, so there’s an expectation that everyone must? 

Or is there an end goal in sight? Is there a positive purpose to such activity? Are the redundancies part of a pivot into new business streams and different markets? If those people left within the business can understand that tough decisions have been made, but that there is thinking and strategy behind such decisions, then they will find it easier to get behind them. 

Such thinking should equally apply to external candidate communications. Candidates need to be fully aware of the environment in which they might soon find themselves. There will always be candidates who will be apprehensive of and uncomfortable about an organisation going through change and upheaval. At the same time, there are candidates who view this as a time of opportunity and possibility. That their skill set matches the new trajectory of an organisation. That they feel they can make a real contribution to where their new employer is going and are excited by the pivot or new strategy.

“We’re seeing this confusion in conversations we are having with clients and prospects.  So, overall hiring numbers are clearly down, but what we are definitely hearing is that attrition is still a challenge.  In many cases, there is evidence of pent-up demand with organisations experiencing challenges in their ability to deliver to their customers because they can’t hire people to fill the attrition gap.

To say this confuses the hiring message is an understatement.  On a hiring freeze but with an obvious demand and good candidates available in the marketplace to fill that demand with the result that some TA teams are talent pooling, some, but not all, struggling to know how to communicate with the candidates they ultimately will hire one day, if not today,” Martin Dangerfield, CEO, immersive.

Clearly, existing employees will also see such external candidate messaging. They will expect honesty and authenticity. They will expect that such messaging reflects what they have been told via internal communications. 

Similarly, those people who have just left your organisation should be able to take away from such communications that their old employer is going in a different direction and that their experience or skill set will be better channelled elsewhere. 

Senior leaders also have a real responsibility during such times. They may truly be excited about where their organisation is headed but they need to demonstrate the empathy and proportionality reflective of what has happened. Large bonuses and director’s retreats to exotic climes are unlikely to play well.

“It does feel like the industry is caught in the headlights at the moment. 12–18 months ago internal recruiters and TA specialists were in high demand, whilst today the picture is somewhat different. The gloomy economic forecasts at the beginning of the year appear to have spooked the market. But the economy and consumers appear more robust than expected, so we feel that employers need to position themselves for a relatively resurgent Q3 and Q4,” Mike Jefferies, CSD, WDAD.

Businesses have always reinvented themselves – Twitter started life as Odeo, a means of finding podcasts, Nokia’s origins were that of a Finnish paper mill, and Instagram was a location-based check-in app call Burbn. And they will continue to do so. They might change radically or incrementally. Their employee requirements will change in terms of numbers and skill set and location. AI is another factor in an organisation’s changing and evolving relationship with the nature and size of its employee base. 

“Let’s not be coy here. When a company says they are financially restructuring, that means, for HR/TA, a reduction in budgets and, therefore, headcount as non-client-facing support functions.

Meetings to discuss where the axe will fall are invariably driven by the easiest and cheapest options, not strategy or capability. Budgets are then met. Business continues.

Companies that provide honest dialogue and appropriate support, help to promote positive talent messaging. But all too often companies are driven by blinkered senior decision makers that don’t take into consideration current and future talent requirements,” Andy Hendon, Global EB Consultant (Formerly of Syneos Health & KPMG).

Delivering difficult, nuanced and sensitive messages is critical during periods of change. Critical for keeping existing employees engaged and motivated. Critical for ensuring that those departing leave with dignity and a positive feeling about their old employer. And critical for those people needed for an organisation’s new direction. 

And if you think that it’s easier to keep the corporate head down and to simply not communicate, then it’s probably the time to do just the opposite.

For better or worse, we’re always comparing. And such comparisons are so much easier to make today. We want to know what our neighbours paid for their house? Was it more or less than we stumped out? Not a problem, easily done. We want to know where are friends are staying on holiday? Is their hotel, weather, food, views better than our own? A simple check on the social media of our choice and we know. And the likes of Instagram make it all too easy to understand how we dress, how we look, how we’re ageing in comparison to those around us. 

One of the major technological advances over the last ten years has been consumer comparison sites. If we want to compare mortgage rates, hotel prices, flight availability, insurance deals, healthcare outcomes, grocery prices, we’re only a couple of clicks away. We inhabit today a far more transparent world. The truth is out there like never before. There’s rarely a shortage of relevant stats, metrics and tables. We know how our sports team is faring, we know how local schools are doing and how well our pension is performing. Not so much in absolute terms, but particularly in comparison to their respective peer groups.

In theory, it has never been easier to make an informed, insightful choice. And if, sometimes sadly, we’re usually stuck with our football team, that’s not the case with our choice of insurance company, bank, holiday destination or car. 

Nor, for that matter, our employer. 

How often do organisations compare their candidate offering with the market? 

How often do they create topical levels of understanding about their applicant journey and how it might stack up alongside those offered by their industry or locational peers? If I’m a candidate, I’m likely to be considering not just one new employer but a handful. And I’ll definitely have some key considerations and criteria in mind when I come to compare like with like. I’ll want to know about salary levels and respective packages. I’ll want to know how those different organisations are performing. I’ll want to understand some practical things around location and commute.

“I speak to many Heads of HR who claim to have “a great candidate experience”.  My answer is always “Compared to whom?”  That’s when you see the cogs turning and the realisation that maybe we are getting ahead of ourselves a little.

The huge issue with not comparing your company’s candidate experience with others trying to hire the same talent is that you end up not only with false positives (thinking you are doing well, but in comparison you are not as competitive as you think), which result in complacency, but also false negatives, where you think you are doing poorly, but given the perspective of comparison, you could be doing ok, resulting in wasted effort, focus and budget, trying to fix something in which you are already better than your competition”, Steve Gard, Founder at BenchmarCX – “The Candidate Experience Comparison platform for employers”

Along with such important considerations, two hugely interlinked elements will form a key part of my decision-making process. The image, reputation or brand of those employers. And the sort of candidate experience I come across. Interlinked, because the experience I come across as a candidate will significantly influence that organisation’s employer brand or reputation. 

Candidates, particularly strong ones, looking around at employment options on their own terms, are no different to consumers. Just as they will do their own research on the experience they encounter as a customer, on speed, on efficiency, on the communications they receive in making a purchase, they’ll make similar comparisons during their job search. 

They will be looking at you and your careers in relative rather than absolute terms.

“As AI improves over time, I am confident that, with automated technology, so too will candidate experience. My team are big on personality, passion and their ability to impart insight and knowledge to deliver a great candidate experience. For me, that means giving the candidate enough insight into the role, the highs but also the challenges, enabling them to make an informed choice about whether to pursue the role or not. Transparency and integrity are really important values that help deliver the best candidate experience. We often find that even when candidates have not accepted a role with us, they will remember the experience and return to us at a later stage.

I know organisations that measure candidate experience through NPS or their own systems. Our ATS enables us to measure candidate feedback, however we have not enabled it yet, as we need to be confident that we have the resources to act on and deliver improvements, but it is something we are looking at for the future.

You’re absolutely right, it would be great to measure and compare candidate experience, as I really do believe that it can make or break a candidate’s decision to engage with an organisation. It is as simple as this”, Adele Swift, Talent Attraction and Recruitment Manager, Toolstation.

However, the big difference between the various comparison sites and metrics touched on above and the candidate experience provided by employers is transparency. 

How well do you, as an employer, understand both how candidates perceive the process and experience they go through when engaging with you? And how does such an experience compare with the offering of your competitors? 

How much more or less value adding is your candidate experience?

Is tech adding to or detracting from such an experience?

How well or otherwise do your candidate communications function and land?

How slick and efficient is the experience you provide?

And all such answers need to be compared with what the competition is doing. 

It’s little point shortening your time to offer, for example, by x days if that remains two weeks longer than your talent competitors. 

Whilst there may well be tangible differences between one employer and another within a particular sector, those differences – likely to relate to culture, to progression, to DEI – are only genuinely understood by employees, rather than candidates. Therefore, in the absence of lived and experienced differences, a candidate can only compare what they encounter – the applicant experience. What they see, what they take from candidate communications, speed and efficiency, culture, respect, consideration, passion, how engaged the people they come across are, represent what they will think of you. 

“I don’t disagree with what you are saying about candidate experience and the availability of greater sources of information. But the key is measurement and tracking comparative improvements. And comparison with competitors can involve a great deal of analysis. However, the importance of talent intelligence is growing all the time.

All too often, companies rely on the likes of Glassdoor, which as we know, comes with a price attached and perhaps lacks objectivity.

From previous experience, ownership for candidate experience tends to sit with TA teams. When EB becomes involved, this can present challenges”, Andy Hendon, Global EB Consultant (Formerly of Syneos Health & KPMG).

For those candidates, your employer brand is your candidate experience. And because they are likely to be engaging with a number of employers, they are able to compare such experiences. To create rankings and league tables. 

What’s vital, then, is to understand how the candidate experience you currently provide to applicants compares to your employment peer group. Where are you on that league table?

I’d also suggest that we make such comparisons more during tougher times. If a customer is making a significant purchase when finances are tight, their research into the transaction will be forensic. The same logic applies to strong candidates making a career move during an uncertain labour market. 

Very simply, providing a candidate experience that compares favourably to your talent competitors is a competitive advantage. 

Equally simply, do you know how the candidate experience you are currently providing compares?

As we touched on during our previous blog, this is a confusing, often contradictory labour market. Many indicators suggest it remains extremely buoyant – 1.1m vacancies across the UK; the most recent Report on Jobs indicates a healthy hike in vacancies and an increase in the demand for staff; the ONS suggests that the latest quarter saw a reduction in redundancies compared to the previous three months; and the service sector enjoyed its best month for more than a year according to the PMI.

But we don’t have to look far to reveal statistics that suggest a far less healthy UK labour market. Candidate availability, according to the same Report on Jobs rose for the first time in more than two years (which, admittedly, speaks both to redundancies and to renewed candidate optimism). Ayming, the HR consultancy, produced a report in mid-April suggesting that 26% of all UK employers were going to reduce headcount. And HR vacancies are down 35% annually. Inflation shows no sign of inching below double-digit figures, never mind getting anywhere close to the Bank of England’s 2% target. And, anecdotally, but perhaps as telling as any cold, hard metric, a regular look at LinkedIn indicates a growing number of TA professionals who are suddenly open to work. 

So, it’s not entirely beyond the reach of logic that you are currently working for an organisation that has/is/will be making some tough people decisions. 

The challenge with such activity is that markets, optimism and sentiment change at pace. One minute your organisation is making some tough but unavoidable decisions around headcount, the next, the market is picking up and you’re back to a ferociously competitive candidate marketplace. Worse still, you’re back to a ferociously competitive candidate marketplace, armed with a damaged and unconvincing employer brand and reputation. 

So, what is the advice for those with management and curatorship responsibilities for their organisation’s employer brand in such times? Several things.

Firstly, it’s important your employer brand messaging and its rationale is up to date. If it’s looking unlikely that this will be invested in during the course of 2023, then when things do merit a reinvestment, your content and its messaging is likely to be perhaps just a year out of date. Conversely, if you haven’t updated your content, even your EVP, for a little while, then it risks being several years out of date when candidates start taking a fresh look at your careers content and information. 

Personally, I think honesty goes a long way. Take a look at what your current employer branding messaging is saying right now, particularly from both a candidate and an employee perspective. Was the content produced during early 2022, with the economy thriving and with candidates having choice and options? Some of the optimism and bullishness relevant to that time perhaps today feels a little out of place – both to cynical candidates and to concerned employees. Even more so, to those people potentially leaving your business. 

It’s time to get on top of your Employer Brand. Get a step ahead of your competitors (who will undoubtedly target you), support retention of quality talent, provide clear and consistent messaging to manage your future employer reputation. In the current unpredictable Talent market, employer reputations can be won, tarnished or lost. Emerging technologies will only add to the ease that talent investigates and networks with their peer groups, which companies they would consider and ultimately commit to”, Andy Hendon, Global EB Consultant (Formerly of Syneos Health & KPMG)

And a practical point along those lines. Your people featured on your careers site and attraction messaging – are they still your people? Or have they left for the competition or, perhaps worse, been victims of downsizing? It doesn’t make for great optics if they’re still being used to help carry and advocate your employer brand. 

“In difficult times and economic downturns, it is usually Employer Branding and Talent Acquisition teams that get left in the wake of this. I strongly feel that this is a short-sighted view and those businesses that invest in refreshing their Employer Brand and keeping their TA team onboard are those that make the biggest gains when the markets pick up”, Matt Dean, Talent Acquisition Manager – Operations, Post Office.

Take the time to evaluate your talent analytics. What channels are working and which do you sense are declining? Just as markets shift, so too do audience habits. But don’t trust intuition, look at the metrics which both your attraction messaging and your talent pipeline are producing. With perhaps less day-to-day attraction, it’s a great time to analyse the fundamentals – how could you improve the candidate experience you’re delivering? People are going to be more cautious and careful when they next look for a job – your applicant process needs to reflect that.

“The issue with Employer Brand is that many organisations perceive EVP to be a cyclical project to be delivered every 3 to 5 years and the budget is allocated accordingly, so content remains static around attraction. Where in reality it should be constantly evolving in line with the economy, the labour market, competitors, your organisational performance and any other factors which impact. Organisations who get this will have Employer Brand as a constant on the monthly agenda”, Adele Swift, Talent Attraction and Recruitment Manager, Toolstation.

Don’t lose sight of your external candidate audiences. What do they think of you? Do they sense you’re more badly impacted by economic headwinds than is really the case? Do they see you as an employment risk too far? What confidence do they have in your ability to navigate a challenging time? If you don’t know what the market thinks of you and your economic sea-worthiness, then it’s hard to address those concerns when you next come to focus on your employer branding messaging. You may be answering a question no one is asking.

Similarly, by keeping close to the market, you’re in a better position to sense a pick-up in confidence levels. Given how fundamentally Covid impacted, amongst other things, the labour market, confidence returned surprisingly quickly. Many organisations found themselves on the back foot as competition for candidates shifted from being non-existent to all-consuming apparently overnight. 

(It’s important to bear in mind too that headcount decisions aren’t always binary – some organisations will be simultaneously hiring and firing at the same time, awkward and ambiguous as that feels).

The latter point is important when business cases are being formulated. You may be struggling to secure budget right now, but making the case for how quickly markets shift and the difference great employer branding makes should help come Q3 and Q4 and certainly for 2024. 

And making the case for what employer branding and its EVP DNA creates and enables (both as regards external candidate markets as well as internal employee audiences) is critical. It might make the difference as to how well a team fares during a period of cost cutting.

“To say the current economic environment is confusing is an understatement. It’s clear that it’s not easy to know whether to hire now or hold off. It’s clear that attrition is still a factor.  Despite all the gloom, employees are still leaving, causing holes in the organisation. This has an impact on getting the employer message right.  Fighting attrition is a different message to backfill hiring, which in turn is different to hiring for growth. Managing brand has never been so difficult and a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t going to cut it”, Martin Dangerfield, CEO, immersive

Finally, it’s entirely likely that organisations emerging from the current challenges (whether such challenges relate to the economy or factors such as ChatGPT) will pivot significantly in order to either thrive or survive. It’s important, then, that employer branding messaging reflects this new, emerging organisation, with potentially different goals, missions and objectives. As always, employer branding and its associated EVP should look forwards rather than backwards. They should be painting an attractive picture of what new joiners and existing employees can help shape, rather than what has gone before. 

The question that all candidates – passive, active or otherwise – ask themselves. And particularly right now.

Is this a labour market in which I have the confidence to up and leave my current role or which the devil-you-know appears the better option? Looking at the available evidence, there’s plenty of contradictions.

On the plus side, on the should-I-go side, there remain more than 1.1m vacancies across the UK. Unemployment may have edged up slightly, according to the latest ONS figures, but at 3.8%, this remains historically very low. At the same time, there was a 0.2% increase in the number of those in employment. A report this week from the BCC suggested that 60% of British businesses are looking to hire, unchanged from the end of 2022. 

Let’s look at the counter argument, the should-I-stay option. The number of vacancies touched on above has declined in each of the last nine months. The economy is spluttering by, registering next to no growth – and will deliver the worst performance across the G7 this year, according to the IMF. Inflation remains stubbornly in double-digit territory. And there’s no shortage of high-profile redundancy programmes impacting major organisations. 

If that represents the briefest macro analysis of the push and pull factors influencing whether an individual is considering making a career move, what about those relating to personal and professional drivers? What aspects of our day-to-day employment experience are most likely to see us consider pastures new or, conversely, inspire our loyalty? 

The retention premium will be influenced by a number of factors. Is an individual progressing? How do they respond to the prevailing culture? Do they feel invested in? How do they perceive current reward and remuneration levels? Do they align with the sense of direction and trajectory of their current employer? Do they feel that the flexibility they are enjoying is influenced by the length of their tenure? And will this tenure mean they are in a better, more secure position financially should redundancies loom?

And what are the factors likely to push someone towards the door? Money is likely to be a significant factor. Although average wage increases over the last 12 months reached 5.9%, this still represents a sizeable decrease in real terms, given inflation. Not without reason, people feel it is easier to trouser a healthy salary increase by moving employers, rather than staying put. There’s also the sense of excitement and possibility of a new challenge, a new team, a new brand. (This sense of excitement is even more marked if a new prospective employer is reaching out with a positive message, in contrast to the internal efforts of their current workplace).

Granted it’s something of a generalisation, but do employers risk creating a scenario, given the current ambiguity across labour markets, of seeing those with ambition, drive and a comfort with risk happy to take their chances and leaving?  Whilst those who stay are more likely to be doing so out of fear, caution and an apprehension of what an employment move might bring? 

“Post-pandemic, the labour market became so challenging that it wasn’t just top talent getting tapped on the shoulder, it was all talent. Vacancies shot up, applications came down, candidates had more choice than ever before and resourcing teams had to seriously step up. This year is feeling a little different. Retention continues to improve month on month, in part thanks to what we’re doing internally but there is also an element of people feeling less confident about taking the leap. What resourcing teams mustn’t do is breathe a sigh of relief and rest on their laurels. We know these things are cyclical, so now is the time to maintain momentum around building the brand, seeking new channels to engage with candidates and that all important dialogue with emerging talent”, Adele Swift, Talent Attraction and Recruitment Manager, Toolstation.

Do you risk keeping hold of those people who have no choice other than to stay with you?

Which presents a very tangible reason for using EVP-based messaging for internal audiences just as much as for talent attraction purposes.

And why? A report last week from Ayming suggested that 26% of UK employers were considering making headcount cuts this year. Amazon, Twitter, EY and McKinseys are all making layoffs. And last week brought news of Bain & Co, the management consultancy, delaying post-graduate start dates and incentivising those to whom they have made offers to disappear off for the year. 

“What a difference twelve months makes! The market has moved from its most challenging, with record levels of vacancies, to one with significantly less confidence.

With that in mind, Employer Brand has become even more important and EB teams have had to pivot to not only answer the question ‘what’s in for me’ from external audiences, but also re-energising and re-connecting with internal audiences, answering the question ‘what’s in it for me to remain and evolve’. Your EVP needs to be a basis for internal as well as external engagement, to support ongoing work to engage current employees with the direction of travel and reduce the risk of a gap between the expectation created amongst new hires and the lived experiences they find when they arrive. It’s even more important to take the opportunity that this time has presented to build on the above, in preparation for when the market starts to pick back up. You can’t afford to be behind the curve.” Craig Morgans, Acquisition COE Leader at Direct Line Group.

2023 is likely to be a tough employment market across many sectors. But trying to save money by cutting back on internal people messaging is both apparently logical and transparently illogical. 

“Logically, you would imagine both aspects go hand-in-hand, but certainly our current EVP project briefs and outputs have a definite focus on the attraction piece. Getting good talent into the funnel seems to be the priority, which isn’t particularly surprising, but at the same time it does overlook an increasingly obvious channel and audience”, Mike Heal, Managing Director, WDAD.

Not mapping out your organisation’s direction, ambition and purpose will only add to the fear of those likely to stay whilst validating the decision and determination of those looking to leave. 

Delivering a great EVP to external people audiences should help attraction. Not delivering a great EVP to your current workforce will not help retention. Particularly in the mind’s eye of those people who see an ambiguous market as an opportunity. 

Such people might also contrast the confident and clear messages of the competition with the silence, apparent lack of direction and confidence and opacity of their current employer – and act accordingly.

You have created your EVP using the experiences, ambitions and stories of your current people. You should definitely use that sentiment and narrative to facilitate hiring, to create a strong, compelling external impact. You should equally use such messaging to reinforce why you remain a great place to work for your current workforce. About why staying also offers excitement, challenge and a rich career experience. Particularly now.

Losing great people – the sort of people who will soon start making a difference for your competition – is unlikely to be an optimum strategy for coming through the next choppy twelve months. As Mr Strummer pleads later on in the song, ‘Come on and let me know now’. Articulate why great talent should stay with you, just as much as you are telling their external counterparts why they should join.

How do we all see 2023 unfolding from a talent acquisition perspective? Are we feeling optimistic or does recent news such as Amazon shedding around 18,000 jobs fill us full of dread and foreboding? It appears there are any number of imponderables. Inflation could have peaked and could be on its way down. However, all we need is for the Ukraine conflict to grow even messier or for China to flex its muscles in Taiwan’s direction, and oil and gas prices are likely to shoot back up. Are more organisations going to see the recession we are undoubtedly already in as a means of creating greater return-to-the-office leverage? How are organisations balancing 1.1m UK vacancies with inflationary debt and pay increase expectations? 

Lots of coulds and maybes and a whole absence of clarity. 

Which is rather similar to candidate perceptions of the labour market. Whereas much of 2022 was viewed as an opportunity to move employer, with little prospect of redundancy and gain a hefty salary increase, there’s much more nuance and doubt around right now.

What is less in evidence today is candidate confidence.

If candidates, or potential candidates, look at the labour market and come to the conclusion that they are better off staying where they are, particularly in view of financial redundancy implications, should we overly surprised?

Every career move carries with it risks, as well as opportunities. It would be entirely logical for candidates to be focusing on the former rather than the latter right now. 

If hiring organisations are, therefore, to communicate a sense of confidence to external talent audiences, how do they do this with credibility and honesty?

Employers need to demonstrate openness and realism about the current market and how they are working to address it. Simply ignoring what is happening and pretending all is well, is unlikely to inspire either confidence or trust in potential hires. 

If an organisation recognises the challenges it (and the rest of the market and the economy) faces and maps out a pathway and a strategy to address such challenges, as well as making it clear that new hires will play a key role in such a strategy, then this speaks to honesty, empowerment and, again, confidence. 

If their EVP is aligned to such a strategy, then ever better. Playing an active role in addressing a challenging market and being part of a recovery play should appeal to candidates who relish accountability, possibility and enablement. Business as usual in the current market feels both passive and doomed to failure. 

Ageing, backwards-looking EVPs also hint at a lack of investment in both existing people and potential joiners. 

“This really resonates.  I am delighted to say that at NG, we spent much of 2022 reviewing and refreshing our EVP. With this and also with the work we are doing on our workforce planning – now looking at least 5 years ahead, we are indeed being future focused and using our employer brand to attract candidates with the skills and interest to help us achieve our net zero goals, as well as representing the communities we serve. It does take a different approach and in some ways being more daring than we have been before. Another key piece of work for us is around the re-skilling of the current workforce so that no-one is left behind” Catherine Schlieben, Group Head of Performance and Development and CPO for National Grid Ventures

An organisation’s current employer brand is also a lightning rod of confidence. There will be candidates looking at, for example, some tech players genuinely wondering whether what looked like an attractive move six months ago, still feels like such a sure bet. That’s why employer branding messaging is crucial to instil confidence in both internal and external people audiences. 

What else might inspire candidate confidence? Training, development, coaching and career pathways. One entirely predictable victim of cost cutting tends to be an investment in people. But employees want to grow, want to take on new responsibilities, want to achieve potential. If a new prospective employer offers neither training nor the time to take advantage of such training, this does not speak to confidence in the employee base. 

“As we leave behind 2022 and what could be best described as a turbulent twelve months, we now enter another year facing uncertainty. What’s immediately clear is that despite the recent news of job shedding, the challenge to engage with the right talent remains within a talent-scarce market.

The last twelve months presented talent the opportunity to secure new employment, for significant increases in salary and hence there’s been a great deal of movement within the market. However, if we continue to face into more challenges in the labour market, it’s undoubtedly going to impact candidate confidence.

At DLG, we’ve spent the large part of 2022 deep in research, insight, and validation of our EVP. Our ultimate ambition was to define and develop an authentic, future-focused, and aspirational EVP/Employer Brand, which is both distinctive and credible in the market externally, but also one which lives and breathes throughout the employee experience internally.

Moving forward, when it comes to candidate confidence, we need to provide a very transparent lens into our organisation and what being part of DLG can offer potential talent”, Craig Morgans, Acquisition COE Leader at Direct Line Group.

Organisations can portray confidence or an absence of it, too, simply in the way they recruit. If an employer provides a candidate hoops a plenty to jump through, multiple interviews, duplication of information provision, long periods of silence, then are we truly surprised when such a candidate either quits this process or simply takes the offer of a more nimble organisation? An organisation which has managed to convey confidence in their business, in their decision-making processes, their culture and in the candidate themselves?

Such an agile, candidate-aware process is also likely to see new joiners enter the organisation brimming with confidence and possibility, rather than wondering if they have made the right decision and what they might have let themselves in for. 

If a candidate is looking for a reason to join a new organisation – or, indeed, a reason not to join – then the candidate experience they come across and the culture it conveys can be the source of candidate confidence or the death of it. 

The percentage of premature departures is another indication of whether an organisation successfully conveys confidence to its people. Do line managers realise the responsibility they have in instilling confidence in new joiners that they have made the right decision. Or do such line managers have the impression that recent hires should feel lucky simply to have a job given the recent prevalence of redundancies?

How present does an organisation feel? Is it, and its people, suddenly absent from industry events? Is it participating in conferences and awards evenings or does it give the impression of having withdrawn? Given the current climate, people, and by definition, potential hires, will be very aware of such absences and draw their own conclusions as to how confident they feel about an organisation and its prospects. 

Finally, there is little substitute for hearing and seeing just how confident employees are about an organisation. Via interviews and careers site videos, are people speaking with credibility and balance about the next six months? Are they acknowledging challenges but, at the same time, relishing those same challenges, keen to address them? If candidates feel the answer is yes, then their own confidence in a potential new employer and the move itself can only benefit.

The profile of five figure redundancy numbers, at the likes of Amazon, will have caught everyone’s eye, particularly those with a mind to change employers. They will consider their own two-year plus service and the relative protection it affords. Ask yourself, whether your messaging, your processes and your people are conveying confidence to such candidates, or just the opposite.

As we start to rake over the dying embers of 2022, there’s an unavoidable realisation that it’s come around again, that it’s that time of year once more. Eating our body weight in mince pies? Check. Weighing up the delight in being invited to work Christmas parties against the existential dread of actually attending them? Definitely. Considering a range of utterly unfeasible New Year’s resolutions? Yup. And lists. Lists, lots of them. I spent much of the weekend reading through the list of books I’d failed to read this year and which movies had passed me by. 

So, in amongst the list of lists, let’s make the case for one relating to EVP. What factors and trends have most impacted EVP over the last year and what are its opportunities and challenges for 2023?

If there’s one key theme likely to impact EVP more than anything else, it relates to confidence. There’s little debate that we are already in rocky economic times and more of the same undoubtedly lies ahead. Spend any time on LinkedIn and you’re immediately struck by the volume of posts and stories relating to layoffs – impacting both tech and talent acquisition professionals. And whilst the number of live vacancies across the UK remains comfortably over the million, these are anxious times for many. 

How will EVP and its practitioners respond? 

Will a challenging economic outlook mean that EVPs become harder to justify? That budgets shrink? That the relevant teams tasked with curating EVPs contract? That organisations retain an outdated EVP way after its shelf life has expired? 

There’s certainly potential for that. However, EVP has the opportunity to become more confident and more proactive. To make the entirely justifiable case that its outcomes and outputs extend much further than talent acquisition. That by getting EVP both right and topical, it can enhance organisational engagement, pride, purpose and tenure. That it is playing a role in reducing labour turnover and the costs, morale and customer engagement that accompany it. That it is enhancing an organisation’s fairness, equality, inclusion and equity initiatives. That, by improving an organisation’s candidate experience, it is supporting corporate branding and reputational positions. 

Becoming a more confident concept will ask much of how an EVP is measured and evaluated moving ahead. Sad and entirely misleading though it is, organisational leadership can often feel that recruitment is an entirely straightforward function. And with redundancies increasing, such leadership will feel more and more justified in such a conclusion. What could be easier than hiring in a recession? 

By evaluating an EVP purely on its talent acquisition capabilities and contribution, this rather plays to such views. How hard can hiring be in a recession? Sure, the metrics suggest an EVP is helping drive recruitment, but then it would, right now, wouldn’t it?

Better then to make the case as to how much money an EVP is saving in terms of addressing premature departures. (The US’ SHRM calculates that it costs between six and nine months’ salary to replace a departing employee). 

Not so much its role in hiring per se, but what such new talent is enabling for a hiring organisation. (According to Lattice, some 38% of organisations had to turn work down as a result of staff shortages earlier this year). 

Reducing labour turnover and increasing hiring make for positive hiring metrics, they also make for a very clear bottom line contribution. Potentially making for a much stronger business case right now. 

What I’m also starting to see is more desire to portray an organisation’s employees and new hires alongside either customers or service users. Making the relationship between what such employees enable and the difference it makes to their customer and user base. This is being done via photography and video. Increasingly, it speaks to real partnership and real differentiation. It also emphasises the very direct contribution the TA team make to customer relationships and, by definition, business and organisational success. 

What other changes might we associate with EVP moving forward? 

An EVP never functions in a vacuum. Its impact is being constantly influenced by competitor activity and the effects of the market. And the past three years have seen any number of the latter. 

No EVP could come through the initial phases of the pandemic unscathed. How an employer engaged with and cared for its people during lockdown and furloughing arguably shaped their employer brand for the next couple of years. Some organisations reacted with empathy, consideration and care. Others appeared to adopt the opposite position. The labour market then became hugely competitive – influenced as it was by workers leaving the UK because of Brexit and leaving employment because of Covid and its implications. We are now seeing the market change again. Double digit cost of living increases, and GDP growth going in reverse, with a recession either with us now or awaiting us in the New Year. 

Again, the labour market changes once more. 

In the past, an EVP has tended to respond to a triennial cycle. The research, discovery, articulation and communication of it has lasted broadly three years. Three years in which the market has evolved and moved along, as has competitor activity, as well as those people responsible for the EVP. It can often feel like a project for an incoming TA lead. A box, albeit an important box, to be ticked. But in committing to an EVP which will last 3-4 years, how relevant and effective does the EVP remain, particularly towards the back end of that period? 

We simply don’t know unless we are measuring it and measuring via the most actionable, influential and relevant of parameters.  We need consistency from our EVP but not something set in stone for 36-48 months. An element of an EVP should be forward facing. It’s unlikely to still be forward facing four years down the line. 

Tomorrow’s EVP will be nimbler and more intuitive. They shouldn’t take months, even years, to build. If they do, then no wonder there is little enthusiasm to revisit it for years to come. And how relevant is an EVP if the research that predicates it is already a year old? Particularly given the bewildering speed of labour market and economic changes we’ve touched on earlier. 

I firmly believe that organisations have to continue to look forward in terms of their EVP. Brexit, the Great Resignation and other factors like hybrid working over the last few years mean that, for many, finding great talent has never been harder. A recession and cutbacks may be a short-term solution that many are – and will – take, but for organisations to work through and come out the other side of it in a strong position, means the EVP needs to be flexible; to be regularly reviewed and constantly evolved in light of those findings. As an employer brand agency, we’ve probably never had as many discussions about EVP, or ongoing live projects (both in the UK, and interestingly, in different parts of the world) as we currently have on the go. So, in my experience, clients are fully aware of the importance of their EVP and are already taking steps for what is to come.  Mike Heal, MD, WDAD Communications

How will diversity and inclusion continue to influence EVP over the next 12 months? Having spent 2022 working on a wide number of EVP projects, inclusion has been a key part of the conversations which have made up such EVPs. 

Key learnings? This is such a nuanced and sensitive area. Diversity and its relationship with EVP has to be integrated and joined up – some organisations are criticised for adopting a binary approach to diversity, focusing on one particular characteristic at a time, without being holistic. Younger audiences, particularly those from major cities, have grown up in healthily diverse environments – they are often surprised to be asked about the subject. It is something they have grown up to expect not hope for. Diversity also looks and feels different in London, compared to, for example, Glasgow, Dublin and Belfast. Learning about the experiences of a particular characteristic and living with it are wholly different things, about which assumptions are very dangerous. And if an organisation looks diverse and inclusive except when someone looks upwards to senior leadership, then such inclusivity lacks credibility. 

Key take out? I think an organisation’s inclusivity initiatives are key to why people stay there, not why they choose to move there. And if some are sceptical about an employer making what they consider to be too much about inclusivity, then, equally, any tolerance towards racism, homophobia, sexism or ableism will stop an EVP dead in its tracks. 

Finally, and nodding back to the earlier point around confidence, do we risk creating an echo chamber around EVP? While it’s warming to see huge and increasingly global TA/EB/EVP events taking place (and taking place in person), are they simply preaching to the converted? How many marketers or senior leaders attend such events? What is their view about EVP and what it enables and empowers? This possibly speaks again to how our industry could be more confident. More interested in understanding how an EVP can make a broader, more actionable corporate contribution. 

How often do senior leaders genuinely act as EVP ambassadors? Does the CEO have a recruitment video on their career site? Couldn’t and shouldn’t we do far more than this? (Again, this touches back to metrics – the CEO is more likely to get involved if they are convinced that the EVP is responsible for some key bottom line deliverables). Do they make it very clear what the EVP is and why great talent should come and work for their organisation? 

Just like January, I’ve probably gone on too long. What are your thoughts about the direction of EVP during 2023?