As you will have read about, I have been chairing the organisation of a global telesummit taking place on the 8 November 2007 and will be attended by authors, speakers and leaders in the field of personal branding.

In case you have not had the opportunity to study the programme schedule in detail, I am going to post the details of the seminars I will be specifically taking part in. If the event is not of interest to you, then there is no need to continue to read the remainder of this article.

With the ever increasing challenge to attract and retain the talent you need to deliver the promise of your business strategy, it is critical that we both develop and communicate an engaging employer brand.

Employer branding is not about creating a logo of just about the recruitment adverts you place or only putting in place the state of the art recruitment portal on your website as many people would have you think.

Your employer brand needs to reflect the whole employment life cycle. By adopting and embedding employer branding strategies your company will be in a stronger position to achieve its business goals.

In this panel, which will take place at 2pm ET (7pm Dublin and London) on the 8 November 2007, I will be in conversation as the facilitator of a panel on the subject of employment branding. I will be joined by other human resource leaders and consultants to share their perspectives on how they have developed and embedded employer branding strategies to win the war for talent in the 21st century.

The participants in the panel are:

Leigh Branham, founder and principal of Keeping the People, Inc., who helps organizations analyze root causes of employee disengagement and turnover, then develop and implement strategies to become “employers-of-choice.”

Orla Graham, Head of Resources for Deloitte in Ireland, the fastest growing professional services firm in Ireland and a five times winner of one of the Top 50 companies to work for in Ireland.

Tom Zastudil, Director of Domestic Staffing and International Assignments at Lubrizol, a US-based specialty chemicals manufacturer who has differentiated it’s strategies to attract both recent college graduates and mid-career professionals.

This event is FREE to attend. If you would like to join me to listen to this panel, you can register at the personal branding summit website - and if you can not attend then we will be recording the seminar.

I do hope you will be able to join us.

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As you have read here in many articles, building and expressing your personal brand is a key to positioning you and your professional services firm as a leader in your field of expertise.

I am therefore thrilled to have the opportunity to announce a forthcoming event - the first of it’s kind - a global personal branding telesummit taking place on 8 November 2007.

I have had the priviledge of being the chair of the organising team who have all gifted their time to bring this event to life. We have attracted some amazing speakers who are authors on subjects related to personal branding including William Arruda, Dick Bolles, Anita Bruzzese, Kirsten Dixson, Stewart Emery,Neville Hobson, John Jantsch, Catherine Kaputa, Guy Kawasaki, David Meerman Scott and Debbie Weil.

All of these speakers are gifting their time to support us in our goals of reaching 100,000 people across the globe with this FREE event to educate people about personal branding.

Yes the event will cost you nothing to attend - just the cost of your phone call so make sure that you register. And if you are not able to attend the event due to your schedule, we will be making the recordings available after the event for you to access.

We also have a social cause partner in Kiva, who support entrepreneurs on developing countries by providing them with microfinance loans. Their goal is to elimate global poverty and we think their goals are so aligned to personal branding that we will be inviting attendees of the event to make a contribution if they felt the event provided them with great value.

The event is also made possible thanks to Zane Safrit and his wonderful team over at Conference Calls Unlimited who are one of our sponsors and have donated the two bridge lines that we will be using to deliver the 24 sessions.

Yes 24 hours of content about personal branding that you can access at NO COST from anywhere in the world.

The content has been developed so that we have three streams:

• Career Management Success
  The content of this stream will be relevant for career professionals who want to apply personal branding strategies to support their career success. This content stream is also relevant for professionals in the field of career coaching, resume writing and career counselling
• Talent Management
  The content of this stream will be relevant for HR professionals and business leaders who want to discover how to attract, develop and retain talent through the application of personal branding strategies
• Entrepreneurship
  This content stream will be applicable for business owners and solopreneurs who want to apply personal branding strategies to grow their business.

If you too are a blogger or podcaster or have a newsletter, I would be honoured if you could spread the word about the event. If you write an article about the event to share the news to your own community, be sure to let me know by posting a comment and sending me a trackback to this article, I’ll be sure to make a link back to you on a special post I will do about personal branding (sharing the link love!). For the pupose of tagging please use ‘personal branding summit’.

You will find badges for your blog and website at the personal branding summit website. Make sure that you subscribe to the feed as well as to attend the event as we will be adding articles about personal bradning to the website from our guest experts and the evetn organisers over the forthcoming weeks.

I have to say that while the event organising has taken a lot of time, the organising team have had great fun getting to know and work with each other - we too are from across the globe and all our meetings were virtual. So if anyone has a question about being in an organisation or a network trying to achieve big things in the world but feel they have to meet face to face, what I can tell you is that you do not need to be together. We have created this event without ever meeting each other and without real connections to the speakers. That for me is an incredible testament to the vision and personal values of everyone involved and a key to building a strong personal brand - the power of collaboration.

I do hope you will be able to join us on the 8 November and access some great advice from some of the foremost leaders in the world of personal branding and career success.

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Last week at the HR Ireland conference it was great to see so many companies interested in learning how to develop their employer brand to attract the talent that they need to deliver their business strategy.

One of the subjects I covered in my workshop at the conference was the importance of research and understanding the differing needs of the people in your business.

“The Times Top 50 Where Women Want To Work“, now in it’s second year, has recently published it’s research into the top 50 places where women want to work. Their organisers state:

“It is important to note that there is no such thing as ‘companies for women’ or ‘jobs for the girls’. There are, however, some organisations that are clearly more progressive than others, and that is why the Top 50 exists.

This year’s Top 50 is made up of the UK’s most progressive organisations. Their offerings are impressive their work challenging and meaningful, and their cultures exciting. These are the Top 50 organisations where women want to work.”

Unlike the “Best Companies to Work For Awards“, this award seems to be based on the feedback from the companies alone, so it would be interesting to see if women in the “Times Top 50 Where women Want To Work” survey agreed with the results.

What is interesting that one companies engagement in social media was a contributor to their being awarded a place in one of the categories as you will discover below.

Whether we are male or female, most of us are looking for organisations that provide us challenge and meaningful work where we are respected by our colleagues for our strengths, talents and contribution. When that doesn’t happen is when we are more likely to become disengaged and our performance and contribution will diminish, impacting the performance and morale of those working with us.

But remember that not everyone seeks to work in a similar culture - what might be a great employer in your eyes may not meet my needs.

“The Times Top 50 Where Women Want to Work” is based on five factors:

1. DIVERSITY - how the organisation fairly represents the customers and communities they serve. The winner in this category was Citi.
2. PROGRESSIVENESS - this factor reviewed how forward-thinking the company was in terms of employee initiatives and the progressive apporach taken in relation to recruitment, flexible working, training and development, pay reviews, networking and childcare. The winner in this category was Google.
3. RESPONSIBILITY - this covered an organisations social and environmental commitment  and their successful impact on and contribution to the world. The winner in this category was McDonald’s.
4. OPPORTUNITY - this is where the participating organisations were asked to present their unique selling point to potential employees i.e. what they do that presents an exciting and challenging opportunity for employees; how they market this; and how their corporate values drive this. The winner in this category was Cisco.
5. CONNECTIVITY - this factor covered the work experience in terms of transparency and flexibility including technology and processes to support flexible working and access to information. The winner in this category was Deloitte - interestingly one of the factors in Deloitte’s submission was that they quoted that half of their employees use Facebook in innovative ways to connect with each other.

In the alphabetical list of “The Times Top 50 where Women Want To Work” winners it is not suprising to see many of the companies being in the areas experiencing the most challnege in recrtuitment and retention of people (professional services, the financial sector and energy) as these sectors have been investing in building strong employment propositions and employer brands for some time, recognising the talent challenge.

For example, as I covered in my presentation this week, while 80 percent of the attendees at the conference had a talent strategy that extended over a 2 year plan, the energy sector have talent strategies that span some 15 years.

So if you are finding it a challenge to recruit and retain the people you need to deliver your business strategy, why not explore what your people and your potential employees are looking for - starting with how you fair against the five criteria above would be a great starting point.

Here are the list of “The Times Top 50 Where Women Want To Work” finalists in alphabetical order: Continue reading

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As you develop you employer brand to attract and retain talent to deliver your business strategy, how confident are you that you are taking the appropriate measures to guarantee you build a compelling and magnetic employer brand?

Here are four fatal errors that I note when evaluating the effectives and strength of employer brands. How well does your employer brand stack up against them?

1. No clear, consistent and differentiating employment experience

How many businesses are there who are looking to attract the same talent as you are in a 10 mile radius of where you are based?

How well do you know who they are and what the employment experience is in their business?

If you don’t know who you are competing against for talent and you don’t know how you are different from them, how will you be able to communicate this clearly and concisely in all your communications?

2. Not leveraging every communication vehicle

Engaging people behind your employer brand is a key to bringing it to life.

How well do you communicate about your employer brand and what you stand for in all your communication from your corporate website to your intranet; from your internal newsletters to your external job adverts; from your appointment announcements to your employee handbook; from the minutes of executive meetings to the verbal messages delivered by your line managers?

Are you sure that your message is consistent?

And if your message is consistent does it also match your behaviours and the decisions you make about key appointments, reward decisions and how you recognise the contribution your people make to the business?

3. Paying lip service to your employer brand values

When the going gets tough, are you prepared to stand your ground in the decisions you make on appointments so that the people you hire are going to live your corporate and employer brand values?

All too many times, especially in internal appointment decisions, many companies will appoint the person who is able to undertake the role based technical ability, not their ability to live the values of the organisation or their ability to demonstrate the leadership behaviours required in the organisation.

Technical capability can be bought or taught. Behaviours and reputation are far more difficult to acquire. Hiring for technical ability above leadership behaviour and demonstrating living the values and culture you aspire may help you in delivering short term profit but does not build equity in your talent for the future.

4. Not considering the employment brand through the total employment lifecycle

Many organisations consider that the employment brand is only important at the time of recruitment and selection.

However those organisations that are able to attract and retain high quality talent in a challenging market place recognise the importance of delivering on the employment brand proposition throughout the total employment life cycle.

Understanding where you need to adapt your systems, processes, policies and ways of working will enable you to create a magnetic employment brand where employees are not only proud to work for you but they are also your biggest employer brand ambassadors and can themselves help you attract talent to the business.
©Krishna De, Oneocean Ltd 2007. All rights reserved.

Reprinted from ‘Biz Growth Express’, a Oneocean Ltd publication for leaders in professional services practices, featuring inspiration, strategies and tips to build your corporate, employer and personal brand and enjoy greater success with less stress.  Subscribe today at http://www.bizgrowthlive.com and access free branding and business development teleseminars with experts from across the globe on how to build your brand and expand your professional and personal success.

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Welcome to the August 2007 edition of “A Carnival of Employer Branding Advice”.  The purpose of this carnival is to provide readers with high quality articles providing practical tips to develop their employer brand so that they can attract and retain talent.

The content of the articles do not necessarily reflect my personal views on employer branding and talent management - but then there is richness in diversity of thinking.

I do hope you will get chance to read the articles that Bhupendra, Henry and Alvaro have taken time to post for you.

Employee engagement

Bhupendra Khanal presents Are you really paid enough? posted at Analytics Bhupe, saying, “First address the emotional issues of the employees and then think everything else.”

Employer branding

Henry Bagdasarian presents Why Some Executives Abuse Power posted at Free Identity Theft Prevention, Detection and Fraud Solutions.

Talent management

Alvaro Fernandez presents Training the Aging Workforce posted at SharpBrains: Your Window into the Brain Fitness Revolution, saying, “Given the aging workforce trend, offering state-of-the-art and appropriate training to staff over 50 will become critical for company branding and staff retention.”

If you have an article that you would like to submit for consideration for the next edition of “A Carnival Of Employer Branding Advice” you can do so at our carnival submission form.

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