How We Do It

Engagement comes down to the individual and how they feel about where they work. Everyone's known for years that their success depends on their people, but have done very little about it.

Mainly because it's always difficult to secure budget for something that's a bit intangible where you can’t articulate the result of the investment. It’s our job to make it tangible and measurable.

You don’t know what you don’t know. Organisations often focus on the result of the problem and think that's the problem.

'We can‘t recruit enough social workers' isn't the problem.

Why you're losing people and why others don’t want to work for you is the problem. And there could be many reasons for that.

So, first thing we do is listen. Listen to you and to your people. In this discovery phase we use lots of tools to understand you. Audits, focus groups and strategy workshops.

Let's start with what we actually do. We're communications experts. So we clarify messages, figure out ways to get everyone involved and excited about stuff and ensure that everything you say resonates with what you stand for. Most engagement issues are as a result of bad communications and solved with good communications. So, yes, we do Intranets, incentive schemes, internal comms, social media, employer branding etc. But to be honest, every client's different and needs a different solution.

This is a biggy. There's no point in investing loads of cash if you haven’t benchmarked where you are and defined where you want to be. For example, Jardine Motors Group invested £20k in an engagement project and got £1.4 million back and a 50% surge in profits.

So, we measure what's measurable, and what’s immeasurable, we make measurable (good old Galileo). We’ll benchmark where you are, define where we’re taking you and tell you how much that'll cost.

Recruitment advertising's dead. Paying a media channel loads of money to rent their readership's eyeballs is becoming an increasingly ineffective way of doing things. It was never hugely effective anyway, you’re only targeting job-hunters which is a tiny minority compared to the overall workforce. But there's a bigger, cultural reason too: people changed.

They stopped believing what we were saying and stopped looking at what we wanted them to. They're subjected to so many marketing messages, they’re not buying your newspaper, they don't want to pay for content and they're definitely not going to spend time reading about how brilliant you think you are.

So, here are some quick tips:
Be interesting. Be honest. Be relevant.

Employer brand is a frustrating phrase. Elusive, abstract, means different things to different people. To be honest, it's pretty frustrating. Our industry is responsible for so much hyperbole, meaningless diagrams and enormous consultancy bills over those little words. So let's keep it simple for once. Your brand is what people think of you, both internally and externally. You can influence that by having a clear, true idea of who you are and communicating that consistently. The truth bit's important, no point in saying you're something you're not. Your employer brand is just what people think of you when it comes to working for you and not using your product/services. Often, the two bleed into each other anyway. Loads of people want to work for Apple, Innocent and Virgin without ever seeing a recruitment advert for them. So that's employer branding. We can talk you through what happens under the bonnet in terms of research, planning and creativity if you like, but we're not going to try and do it on a website.

Less and less people are using traditional media channels to find a job. Your print advert is probably the most expensive and least effective way of finding people. Now, you're probably expecting a big social media sales pitch. Well, yes and no.

You see, the thing about social media is that it offers huge potential for very little cost. But the flipside is that you have to be interesting. Tweeting about how brilliant you are or asking people to become a fan of your company Facebook page will get you nowhere. You have to be genuinely, selflessly interesting. How successful you are depends on your reputation and how much effort you put into being interesting. One thing's for sure, if you plan ahead and take the time, it's a far more cost-effective way of recruiting great people. So when it comes to attraction, we figure out what makes you interesting and then become that interesting personality when we're talking to people you'd like to come and work for you.

So, you’ve attracted their attention, but that's only the beginning. We work to ensure that the candidate experience is consistent through application, acceptance, induction, everything.

Basically, we're joining up the engagement work with the attraction work here. Get both right and you'll attract people with a promise and you'll fulfil that promise when they come and work for you.