Assessing Your HR Brand: Are You Retaining the Best & Brightest?

Whether you’ve set out to intentionally create one or not, your company has an HR brand. An HR brand is more specific than your overall brand, and is internal to the company – it encompasses the way your employees experience your workplace and talk about it, the way leadership deals with internal issues and the beliefs employees have about why it’s important to work there.

If you haven‰’t been intentional, though, this brand won’t be doing its ultimate job, which is to retain the best talent in your industry. In fact, if that internal brand is more negative than positive, it could be actively working against you, causing you to constantly recruit as talented employees leave.

How do you assess the value and viability of your HR brand? Here are a few key questions to ask yourself as you determine whether your internal brand needs an overhaul.

 

Are you giving employees a reason to work for you?

Give careful thought to your employer value proposition. Why would an employee want to come into work every day? This goes beyond salary and benefits. It‰’s about what satisfaction and value they get from spending the lion‰’s share of their time forwarding your company’s goals. This should tie directly into your company‰’s purpose and be something that‰’s made clear in your brand, from the first communication you have with a potential employee through his or her retirement.

 

Who are the employees that have remained the longest?

Think about the characteristics of your employees with the longest tenure. Are they your top performers, contributing the most to your organization? If so, identifying their strengths will help you tailor your recruiting strategies to attract similar people. If not, maybe you‰’re retaining the wrong sort of employee, which may impact they way you think about your rewards and recognition programs too.

 

Who did you lose long before you wanted to?

Have some of your brightest stars burned out and left the company too soon? Think about what characteristics the good employees who have left have in common. It‰’s possible that during the recruitment process, expectations are created that aren‰’t met in the day-to-day workplace or there was a disconnect with values and culture conveyed against the reality of what is practiced.

One caveat: If the majority of those that have left are part of Generation Y, you‰’re not alone, and that‰’s less of a reflection on your company than on the younger generation of worker‰’s constant search for new challenges. ‰”About 91 percent of this age group are likely to leave their job in less than three years, according to the ‘Multiple Generations @ Work‰’ survey by the Future Workplace” ‰- Millennials and hiring managers alike have become aware of this trend.

 

Ask yourself these questions. If you find your answers are less than satisfactory, consider reworking your HR brand and being more intentional about your strategy for recruiting, retaining and inspiring your employees.