When MS Banga moved from being Chairman, Hindustan Unilever in 2004 to his global assignment in London, he was struck by the difference in perception of Unilever as an employer in India and elsewhere. HUL in India stands for a dynamic, iconic place to work where leadership spends time and effort into grooming the next generation, as opposed to Unilever’s brand as an employer on its home turf in the UK, which was one of an old-world, stodgy, slow workplace. And as Banga puts it, “that feeling of belonging (to an iconic workplace) mattered to me.”
While Vindi Banga is close to exiting his successful and much documented 33-year career at Unilever, his thoughts reflect the aspirations of an entire generation of professionals for whom the feeling of belonging to an organization that ‘stands apart’ matters… a lot. A powerful and attractive ‘employer brand’ today has the capacity to attract and retain talent and represent quality to customers, with the goal of gaining global recognition in a sustainable manner. A simple count of the number of wall-street bankers waiting for that call from Goldman Sachs or the number of graduates from MIT/Stanford/IITs aspiring to work at the innovation labs of Apple and Google would reveal the power of this ‘attraction’.
At the cornerstone of such branding is the success of the organization itself. Being part of some of the most profitable, successful and powerful corporations is an attraction on its own. Other contributors to the employer brand include opportunities for empowerment (responsibility and power), a culture of grooming and development, a feeling of community and achievement, iconic leadership and obviously, a history of large compensation packages. Over the past 2 decades, many companies in India especially in the IT services segment, have managed to build an employer brand based on their productive workplaces and global footprint.
Under normal circumstances, there is a clear distinction between companies that need to invest heavily in an employer brand and companies that do not. Factors like the levels of innovation needed, and the kind of sector the company operates in (manufacturing vs services), and the level of ‘employee expense’ that keeps the company’s stock attractive as an investment – pretty much decide whether a company needs to spend on building an employer brand for attracting the brightest and the best.
But these are no ordinary times – the Indian economy is going through a period of unprecedented growth, while the supply of skills and talent is just not able to keep pace with this growth. Companies are competing intensely with each other for talent and there have been multiple instances in the recent past when an entire industry has lost key professionals as a result of the emergence of other sectors – like the FMCG sector losing people to telecom and healthcare in the last 5 years or the hospitality industry losing younger professionals to BPO companies.
In such a backdrop, employee branding becomes a forced norm for most companies and the ability to recruit and retain employees is heavily influenced by an attractive employer proposition.
...On attraction & retention
There are many ways in which the company’s ability to retain top performers affects and supplements its attractiveness for prospective employees. Says Uday Chawla, Managing Partner, Transearch, “It is an entire process wherein attracting happens first, which should ideally be followed by retention. If we are able to attract talent but fail to retain them, then the entire process of attracting goes to a waste. Attracting and retaining are inter-dependant. Failure in one area affects the other. One cannot exist without the other.”
A strong value proposition based on excellence – like the perception of marketing mecca at Hindustan Unilever, P&G, PepsiCo and Coca Cola or of engineering excellence at infrastructure giant L&T – has a strong pull among job seekers. But the ability to retain great talent goes way beyond perception alone. Explains Jon Younger, Principal, The RBL Group, “There is certainly a strong relationship between the quality of a company’s talent and its performance. But raw capability per se isn’t enough. We know from both surveys and other avenues that top organizations aren’t always the ones who spend the most on talent. What distinguishes great companies around the world is a clear vision and strategy that is meaningful to prospective and current employers, strong leaders and leadership, commitment to a well defined employee value proposition, the chance to work with excellent colleagues on important and challenging assignments, rewards consistence with contribution and a willingness on the part of the organization to give excellent people real responsibility early on.”
Five Principles of Attracting & Retaining Talent
-Jon Younger
1. Know your talent. The leaders of top companies spend as much as 25-30% of their time getting to know their future talent, reviewing their performance, and engaging them in important projects that test and prepare them for increased responsibility.
2. Avoid myopia. There is a natural pride in home grown talent, but it is potentially a blind spot to think your people are ‘best’. Continually test that assertion. Create opportunities to see competitor talent in action. Bring strong talent in from the outside as a way to continually benchmark and challenge your people to step it up.
3. Regularly review and invest in best practice. Great organizations make small but important improvements in their internal process every year.
4. Talk about the importance of your people and their contributions. Its obvious but not often enough practiced. Great leaders consistently remind their people that they know and appreciate the importance of employee effort, ingenuity, and commitment.
5. Teach your executives to be better leaders. So often we forget that leadership is a profession. You wouldn’t seek the advice of a lawyer who wasn’t keeping up with changes in the law, or a doctor that doesn’t regularly attend classes on the newest techniques. Management is no different.
