There’s little doubt that agency recruiting has become far more complex and challenging over the last year. Internal hiring restrictions and increased inter-agency competition for talent—among other factors—have complicated this increasingly essential component of agency management. So today it’s become all the more critical to:

• one, frame an accurate and compelling Employer Value Proposition (EVP) for your agency, and
• two, bring this EVP forward consistently and prominently at every “touch point” with potential recruits - in your print and online materials, in your social media outreach, and in your event activities.

When I say this I don’t mean incessantly trotting out an itemized “logical” statement of the points of value that your team members get out of working at your agency [although formulating this framework is a highly useful background step]. What I do mean is making certain that you convey what it’s like to work at your agency in a style that engages the immediate attention of potential recruits, and speaks to them in familiar and comfortable ways.

One way you can do this is by stressing the appealing aspects of concrete, on-the-job reality at your agency. I’m suggesting three approaches that will help you inject a dose of authenticity and immediacy into how you portray your EVP or employer brand. The good news is that all these approaches are “media-agnostic”, i.e., they can be implemented in print, video, online, social media, and event-oriented form. The (maybe) not-so-good news is that they require some creative effort and production elbow grease.

Portray agency workplaces realistically and visually. Serious candidates want to get an authentic feel for working with you. So don’t hesitate to make liberal use of photos of your workplace environments. That’s not to say you shouldn’t consciously set up these shots in ways that underscore the variety of work settings and the attractive attributes of your EVP; just don’t let them look too staged and cheesy. Include people at work (and not lined up like the yearbook shot of your high school chess club). If, like many agency websites, you stick to a sterile verbal presentation, without realistic visuals, you’re missing an opportunity to engage candidates in an authentic and direct way, free of off-putting, if subtle, pretensions of authority. If this purely verbal web approach is agency-mandated, you should consider using other media to capture the real-world spirit of your workplace environments.       

Let representative team members make your case for you.  Don’t forget that candidates respond at a deeper, more personal level when they see and hear people like themselves describing their jobs, their working experiences, and the underlying cultures of their agencies. Personalized visual and video testimonials, sidebars, blurbs, case studies and so on add more real-world zing to the underlying attributes of your EVP.  Paragraphs of factual but unevocative prose about mission, teamwork, work-life balance, variety of assignments, and prospects for advancement just can’t carry this off as well.  Again, if agency Web standards make these resonant first-person approaches difficult, consider social media and YouTube as your creative platforms for this tonal outreach.

Don’t presume that an authentic portrayal precludes inspiration and emotion. Agencies attempting to depict their respective EVPs in recruiting engagement media frequently stray into one of two less effective habits: they either attempt to convey the higher values of their mission and the dedicated spirit of their agency teams in purely verbal terms, or they restrict their visual/video employee testimonials to facts alone, with no emotional or inspirational coloration. The former approach can veer into the forced and stilted; the latter into the sterile, stiff, and formulaic. The most engaging solution: let your visuals subtly convey higher values and your employees speak directly from the heart. It will pay off in recruit response.

Saturday, I attended Houston's Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas, where I found myself not only in the presence of the titular sponsor but some 77 other official brands, from standbys like McDonald's, Nordstrom, and Exxon Mobil to national and local organizations like the U. S. Army and the Houston Ballet. With 68,000-plus in attendance (the largest among 2011 bowls played to that date) and an ESPN viewership, the venue exuded the kind of success that's a draw for sponsors. But favorable bowl sponsorships might have even more value in today's cognitively cluttered environment. America's bowl tradition, presently consisting of 35 games, confers educational, civic, and philanthropic mental associations on the institutions involved. Indeed, some bowls are so embedded in the fabric of their host cities that their proponents have reasonably defended the NCAA's current "FBS structure" against a centralized "championship tournament model" that prevails among the smaller college teams.

In a cognitively cluttered environment, corporate bowl sponsorships offer a relatively straightforward way to associate a brand with a positive event, furthering brand salience, i.e. the propensity to come to mind or be noticed in a buying situation. The employer brand equivalent would be for a prospective candidate to remember you at the time of forming their consideration set of potential employers.

But what does Meineke gain in salience from sponsoring a college bowl game? They are a solid brand in the automobile franchise aftermarket as evidenced by the fact that a few weeks ago New York equity firm Harvest Partners became a primary owner. As people hold onto cars longer and find it more difficult to maintain computer-based vehicles, Meineke seems to have a strong market case. In fact, some 92 percent of people in the U.S. recognize the Meineke brand name. One might wonder if Meineke might spend more time trying to pull customers away from competitors with their differentiating positioning that emphasizes consumer choice and financial benefits or their loyalty program, the Car Care Club.

The answer is that when thousands of messages press upon us each day, mental accessibility and availability assume greater importance. While persuasive content can be of help in making decisions, when we need to get an oil change, the chances are that we aren't going to overly scrutinize our options. However, when we think we need to "take the car in," known availability is essential. A bowl title sponsorship allows an organization multiple opportunities to keep the name front and center. Positive associations and brand attributes, rather than passionate loyalty, can lead us to Meineke. And people tend to be more "fanatic" about sports than brands. (At a Ted X conference, Byron Sharp has shown this matter to be true even for the so-called leaders in brand loyalty like Harley and Apple.)

Prior to becoming a sponsor of the Texas Bowl last April, Meineke had sponsored a bowl game in Charlotte, North Carolina. Ken Walker, Meineke Chairman and CEO, was well familiar with what  bowls do for business: "For the past six years the Meineke brand has benefited tremendously from its sponsorship of a College Football Bowl, and we are delighted to continue this tradition by returning to our roots in Houston, Texas [where Meineke began thirty-nine years ago]. It excites our Franchisees and it heightens Meineke’s awareness among the passionate and loyal fans of College Football across the country.” Notice where the passion and fandom are naturally going.

For more information on how bowl game sponsorships can cast a national spotlight on brands, check out thisarticle on BigLeadSports. 

We're about a month removed from the holidays, and regardless of how you celebrate the season, one thing that seems to be a common theme is the expectation of a sense of joy or happiness. For some, this may happen thanks to their connection to certain religious beliefs. For others, it may be more secular and/or consumer-oriented. Or perhaps some combination of both. In my case, it tends to be very superficial – the exchanging of gifts (usually at the exchange counter).

Assuming that most of us went through the season with a similar experience and set of expectations as I mentioned above (oh, how my heart soared when I received a pair of electric ear muffs, the Partridge Family Greatest Hits CD, and my very own Garden Weasel), one would expect that whatever level of happiness we felt at the moment, we must still be experiencing.

Same thing with the phenomena known as the vacation. We plan, anticipate, and run off to some ideal destination, near or far, and then, when that vacation has come to an end, we bask in the afterglow for days and weeks on end.

Except that isn't the case at all. A few days after the holidays, or after the conclusion of our vacation, our level of euphoria, excitement, or contentment simply dissipates. In the aftermath, it all seems downright fleeting. Oh misery! Oh despair! Oh that-really-sucks!

However, experience shows that in the same way we don't stay at those heights, our psyche doesn't allow us to stay at those depths either.

And that's the point of the Hedonic Treadmill. According to the theory of hedonic adaptation, we will always return to our standard level of happiness, regardless of what positive or negative events may transpire. The treadmill analogy was developed by Michael Eysenck, a British psychology researcher who compared the pursuit of happiness to a person running on a treadmill. You have to keep working just to stay in the same place.

Now think about that in context with the employment experience. You start a new job. Everything is wonderful. You're happy about your new circumstances, the compensation, the benefits, even the local restaurants. But hedonic theory tells us that this employment contentment will level off. And when it does, we find ourselves back to the level of happiness on this new job that we had at our old job. Oh, the irony!

If we accept this as true, or even only relatively true, then how can we expect employee engagement or satisfaction or whatever measure we want to use, to improve when the employment experience is relatively static? Answer: we can't.

That means we need to design a new type of experience. One that is dynamic, introducing new ideas, programs, and policies on a regular basis in order to achieve a more fulfilling experience for employees.

Next time: how to accomplish that little task.

r

Greetings, all. (And by all I mean the two people responsible for maintaining this site and those of you who stumbled here by accident.) It has been quite a while since my last entry.

After years of writing about the employer brand and its myriad healing powers, I needed some time to recharge. Not having the resolve of an ascetic, or the antipathy of a hermit, I simply walked away from my blogging responsibilities and lived out most of 2010 in my shed. There amidst the garden tools, children's bicycles, and occasional visit from a family of rodents, I focused on fulfilling Einstein's dream of a theory of everything - a theory that ties all the laws of physics - gravity, electro-magnetism, and quantum mechanics into an elegant, easy-to-understand explanation of everything that transpires in the universe.

After manufacturing a super-collider out of PVC pipe, an old cassette player, and a paintball gun, I was able to recreate the moment when the universe sprang into existence. This moment of elation was briefly interrupted by the town building inspector, who, while having no problem with the super-collider itself, did take issue with the plasma screen television I had hooked up to my neighbor's cable feed. One building permit and a few half-hearted apologies later, I went back to my super-colider, through which I discovered several new sub-atomic particles including one that made parking tickets go away. I was all set to publish my theory of everything when I realized there were two phenomena I could not account for - the existence of reality television and Parsippany, New Jersey.

Daunted, deterred, but not humbled, I returned to terra cognito to take up a more accessible, yet still mildly esoteric quest - to bring new conversation and insight to the topic of the employer brand, a topic mired in seemingly endless rehashed statements of the obvious.

How bold, you say? What unbridled hubris? Perhaps and perhaps not. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't.  Some say yes and some say no. Okay, just hold off a bit before rushing to judgment. Especially since the first point of discussion will focus on a little something known as the hedonic treadmill.

The term hedonic treadmill first appeared in the 1971 article “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society,” by Brickman and Campbell. It refers to the fact that even though outside forces are constantly changing our lives and our life goals, happiness is a relatively constant state. In other words, our situations may get better or worse, but we will usually report about the same levels of happiness or sadness.

Why bring up some obscure theory from a time when the airwaves were ruled by Laugh-in and FM radio? Because when it comes to employee retention, attrition, engagement, satisfaction, attraction, and anything else related to the employment experience, the hedonic treadmill is our theory of everything. It explains why so many employees leave an organization after three to five years of tenure, why long-tenured employees often join the "stay and quit" club, why the elation of year one may become the despondency of year ten, and conversely, why the despondency of year ten may be dissipated by the elation of year one.

And understanding how this happens enables us to understand what we should do as employer brand managers. But more on that later. Right now, I have a shed to clean out.

r

In October I commented on government agencies’ growing use of Facebook and Twitter. My focus then, based on a pair of September articles in Federal Computing Week, was on these social media tools as aids to recruitment. I’ve since taken a closer look at this trend.

The takeaway from my informal scan of federal social media: this trend is growing like a swath of mushrooms after a spring rain. I counted more than thirty major agencies or departments with Facebook pages and innumerable others on Twitter (contact me for a full list, if you’re interested).

None of the government Facebook pages that I found appears to be mounted with much conscious attention to recruiting. Most are devoted to agency programs and activities, and most are (first) linked from their sponsor’s home page, rather than their Careers sections.

What does this tell us? I’d venture that in most of these instances the creative impetus to enter the social media realm originated with agency public affairs professionals rather than HR staff. This doesn’t diminish their effectiveness as collateral recruiting tools. After all, they do reinforce their sponsoring agencies’ brands, and that’s a bonus for recruiting…although a bit more focus on the agency culture--and its employees—would be nice. The same goes for Twitter.

All this is good news for human capital professionals and recruiters, even if your agency’s Facebook and Twitter outreach is administered by your public affairs department. In the first place, an agency social media presence is a powerful branding “hook” for engaging potential recruits. Just because HR doesn’t own your agency’s social media resources doesn’t disqualify you from at least promoting it in your recruiting outreach, both online and off.

What’s more, these tools can provide a recruiting engagement platform that’s accessible to HR at virtually no cost other than the exercise of your team’s intra-agency persuasive powers. If you can sell the team that administers these resources on letting HR contribute content, that’s a big win indeed for your recruiting program.

First, it was the Clapper. Then the Garden Weasel. And now, we are all witnesses to the Snuggie.

Are you kidding me? Have you seen this thing? Basically it’s a blanket with sleeves, with all the fashion sense of a Franciscan monk’s robe, absent the stylish rope belt. It’s just the kind of thing we can sit around and laugh at, feeling secure in our un-Snuggieness. In Chicago, people went so far as to sponsor a Snuggie pub crawl – stay toasty while you’re getting toasted, I guess.

So imagine my surprise when a friend and colleague of mine confessed, that yes, she had a Snuggie. Her rationale: she could use the TV remote control while still keeping her hands warm (the sleeves of a Snuggie seem to extend down to your knees). Naturally, I laughed and continued to give her grief about it.

But later, I gave it some more thought (why I did has to do with a very long commute and my continued inability to stay focused). I came to the conclusion that the Snuggie is a brilliant piece of matching a product offering to the times. It’s not the Snuggie itself that matters, it’s the two realities it taps into. The first is that we’ve been in a recession with a capital R, and people are cutting back on all sorts of expenses because they feel financially less secure. Whether that’s perception or reality doesn’t matter. The second is that environmental responsibility is the new religion – heretics beware. Both of these trends lead to the same thing. Turn back the thermostat – save money and/or save the earth.

So the Snuggie is not only classic recession chic, it’s also a permission slip, a badge of honor.

Which now sets the table for the inevitable employer brand tie-in. Employee value propositions, at their best, also fit the times. And there are times when basic, no frills, Snuggie-like attribute are what matters most. So when evaluating your value proposition, take a look at how it meets the needs of your employees not only with differentiation in mind, but with today’s circumstances firmly at the forefront.

r

Read an entertaining piece on Yahoo! the other day about how out-of-date certain terms are in relation to describing the Internet. Most were what you would expect, like Weblog (for blog), World Wide Web for Internet, and “surf” (which was ridiculous the minute it was first said out loud. “Hey, look everyone – I’m surfing the Internet!” No. No you’re not. You’re sitting in a chair. You’re barely even moving. And take off the wet suit.)

I’d make the argument that the same thing has happened with the employer brand. There’s an entire lexicon that has developed around the concept, which is fine as far as giving people a common framework. But I think it also tends to complicate efforts.

Rather than seeking a basic, concise understanding of what’s going on in the workplace, how to communicate it, and how to improve it, we put our efforts into crafting the “employee value proposition.” (Just saying it makes it seem important enough to talk with anyone about it. You know, like the CEO. “Oh, I thought you just wanted to hire and keep employees, but now that I know you want to create an employee value proposition, that’s different. Come on over to my house for a barbecue. How about some stock options?”)

Let me offer up something a little more direct. Something, that in it’s simplicity gives us the focus and objective we really need.

Here’s the scenario.

Two friends are talking.

Sooner or later, one of them is going to ask the question “How’s work?”

Whatever the answer, it’s going to leave an impression. And someone is going to walk away with an idea about an employer, maybe even your company.

These conversations are happening everywhere, every day – through professional networks and on social networks, in back yards and in front offices. And they’re conversations we all need to affect.

And we need to affect them not with academic jargon that raises eyebrows, but with conversation that creates interest, the kind of conversations that people really respond to.

So, how’s work?

r

Are you taking full advantage of the upsurge in government hiring? When the president says he wants to make federal employment "cool again," do you feel like he's talking about someone else or about another agency?

You're not alone. Research has shown that only a few agencies have a head start in the image category. As NASA celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Apollo Landing, it's easy to see why they're one of the government's most highly rated employer brands. After all, as then President Richard M. Nixon said to the returning astronauts, "This is the greatest week in history since creation."

But even the grandest triumphs hardly do justice to the vast opportunities within the federal government. No other employer comes close to presenting the career choices and options available. Each department and subcomponent has a story to tell. And with the tools of Government 2.0, they can convey this uniqueness accurately and quickly.

Cool medium and message

Government HR has been rapidly picking up on Web 2.0: social networking, blogs, video, etc. The interactive nature of these tools signals a dramatic shift from push (one-way) to pull (two-way-communications).

A recent tweet from the IRS' jobdog59 Twitter career site, succinctly expresses this difference: [the site owner – jobdog59], "thinks Twitter is like a river I throw bones into. They float along and if anybody wants one they are free to have as many as they want."

A free-flowing river, offering helpful career hints, doesn't conjure the old image of the IRS as a faceless fiscal fortress. That's why the advent of "Government 2.0" means much more than a technical change-over. The very use of these tools carries a powerful message:

Rather than being formidable bureaucracies with labyrinthine hiring processes, federal agencies are emerging as responsive, accessible venues, open to those who wish to serve.

Ennobling the federal employee

Of course, flexibility and transparency alone are not sufficient to overcome inertia. Many young people are wary that working for the fed will land them in dead-end, boring job, a secure job perhaps, but without an upwardly mobile path.

That's where branding federal employment brings vitality. For instance, when the EPA needed to "fine tune" its workforce and "hire for commitment," TMP introduced an employer brand emphasizing balance: "Something good for myself. Something good for the world around me." We then wove an offline and online eco-system around the anchor career site, expressing the connection between balance in work-life and the environment.

Similarly, for the Missile Defense Agency, the branded website parallels the "work" with the greatest technological achievements of our time. Reinforcing the uniqueness of the technical accomplishments, the site uses Government 2.0 tools from an interactive timeline with video to an action game.

Both of these examples help a candidate feel assured that they are doing the right thing for their personal and professional goals.

Recently at a TMP-sponsored gathering, put on by Government Executive magazine, Congressman Gerry Connolly (D-VA) commented that when he was growing up in Boston, President John F. Kennedy projected that kind of stature for government employees. At that time, many young people heeded the call to "do what they could do for their country." JFK expressed the confidence that public servants could dare the impossible, whether landing men on the moon or trekking to serve in far-off villages.

Connolly said that we need to "ennoble" the federal employee again. That approach, abetted by the president's Call to Serve, may even go beyond parity with the private sector. For the infrastructure of government as well as its regulations make possible an innovative free market. As brand advocates in touch with citizens, public servants also set the tone for civic life. And isn't that "way cool?"

For more examples of Government 2.0 in action, check out our TMP Government Portfolio.

You’ve certainly seen Best Places to Work lists in business magazines like Fortune, and maybe in the niche publications that publish their own rankings for narrower constituencies. What you might not know is that Washington’s Partnership for Public Service regularly produces a similar government-wide ranking of federal departments and agencies (http://data.bestplacestowork.org/bptw/index).

It’s all based on what a couple hundred thousand government workers tell the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in its bi-annual survey. The Partnership, in concert with American University's Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation (ISPPI) and The Hay Group--and with support from TMP Government--collates and submits OPM’s independently gathered results to strict statistical analysis. The outcome is a detailed side-by-side comparison of how federal organizations rate with their own employees across a range of criteria, from teamwork to training to perceived leadership competencies. The rankings also compare OPM’s employee responses—again agency by agency--by demographic segments, including gender, ethnicity, and age.

A benchmarking tool for agencies. If you’re looking for insight into your agency’s authentic employment value proposition, this compilation is a remarkable source, provided you’re willing to spend some time exploring its capabilities.

Both OPM’s own survey report (www.fhcs.opm.gov/) and the Partnership/ISPPI rankings allow you to see how your agency measures up in the eyes of your own workforce. But the Partnership/ISPPI compilation makes it easy to compare your results directly with those of virtually every other government agency. What’s more, the Best Places comparisons provide you with a statistically sound benchmarking tool for improving or refining key attributes in your own workplace culture. It can help immeasurably in refining your programs for employee engagement, inclusion, organizational development, succession planning, retention, and a host of other human capital focal points.

And when it comes to recruiting, is there a more resonant and authentic jumping off point for your agency’s employment brand than the characteristics where your own workforce tells you that you excel?

A resource for job seekers. For the federal job seeker, these rankings are indispensable, cutting through the recruiting noise to core workplace characteristics. While this certainly should not be the only comparative tool a candidate uses, it does represent a marvelous starting point and useful set of job search benchmarks for federal candidates at all levels of experience.

So...which agencies are the leaders of the pack? I leave that to you to discover. If you’re serious about how your team’s collective view of your workplace stacks up against other agencies, go here: http://data.bestplacestowork.org/bptw/index.

All over the country, all over the world, thousands of employees are filling out myriad surveys, diligently record their responses to scores of questions being put forward by their employers. The purpose? To understand the degree to which employees are satisfied.

Talk about setting the bar low. (“Hey everyone, most of our employees are mostly satisfied with most of us – let the rejoicing begin.”) For companies not faring too well in this regard, perhaps they could lower the standard from satisfaction to tolerance. Or if that’s still too high, perhaps they could shoot for reluctant acceptance.

Yes, I know that there are different levels of satisfaction, and that some of those may even come close to contentment. But the point is, if we’re really going to try and get employees engaged, don’t we need a higher standard? And while we’re at it, it’s time to admit that work and life (as in work/life balance) no longer have any real degree of separation. If work is good, then life is more likely to be good. If work sucks, then everything else suffers from a degree of suckitude (the technical term) as well.

So what if instead of satisfaction, happiness was our standard? Psychologists are now (yes, this very minute, even as you read these words) seeking to understand the effect of happiness, how it manifests, and its variations. There are a number of scales, tests, and theories all geared toward understanding happiness and its relation to the human condition. Of course, by its very nature, this also helps us understand those things that make us miserable (like a 3-hour commute, or worse, finding out that Eminem was in on Sasha Cohen’s joke all along).

Imagine an employment experience with happiness as the standard. Who knows, it could even result in shorter surveys.

r