Another possible hiatus

I know my throngs of loyal readers will contemplate terrible acts, but I may not blog for a while (unless very agitated by new levels of ridiculousness in intellectual property law) as I need to focus on fleshing out the chapter I am writing for the updated / new Gower Handbook of Employee Communications – the chapter on Employee Engagement…

Filed under: Employee engagement

Recruitment agencies and employer branding

If you looked at recruitment and recruitment advertising agencies’ websites a couple years ago, employer brand wasn’t on offer.  It wasn’t a core capability.

Flash forward and now they all do it.  Correction: they all say they can do it.  And maybe some can.

But the issue is one of core competence and service extension versus expertise and experience.  On some levels, employer brand isn’t rocket science.  But there are skills and concepts and the confidence of actually having done it that separate the wheat from the chaff.

What spurred this posting? Another meeting with a client where they believed the recruitment agencies claims, then quickly discovered that the depth of expertise simply wasn’t there — wasting the client’s money and, probably more importantly, their time.  And damaging the reputation of the recruitment agency into the bargain.

Brutal truth: the internet is seriously hurting the recruitment advertising industry. Only an incredibly buoyant economy and skills shortage is keeping it afloat in some ways.  And we all want to make money.  Stay in business.  But jumping on the bandwaggon requires more than saying you can do it.  You need to invest in the skills and capabilities to be able to actually do it.

Yes, I’m biased.  But who likes to clean up other people’s messes?

Filed under: employer brand