Talent and HR News Update: Employer Brand and Employee Engagement

Here at exaqueo, we believe that a strategic employer brand is pulled across the entire employee lifecycle, from pre-hire to alumnus. The employer brand not only impacts talent attraction, but influences employee engagement and retention, too. This month’s talent and human resources update is curated with this belief in mind.

1) Searching For The Perfect Employee Engagement Tool? Seven Things To Consider from Forbes

Engaged employees are the cornerstone of every successful company. When a team believes in what they do, they're motivated to work harder. That's why measuring engagement is crucial for success.

But what exactly goes into selecting a survey tool? How do you know it's really aligned with what your organization is looking for?

2) Employers Go Further to Hold Onto Employees from Bloomberg BNA

Employers will need to work harder to retain top employees as the labor market tightens, consultants say.

“Since 2012 it has become more difficult to retain both highly skilled employees and employees at all levels of the organization,” Kate Kennedy, media and public affairs manager at the Society for Human Resource Management, told Bloomberg BNA in a Jan. 31 e-mail. “The cost of replacing highly skilled employees especially could be seen as severe enough to prompt more employers to look for new ways to boost retention.”

A SHRM survey found 19 percent of HR professionals said that “in the past 12 months their organizations altered their benefits program to retain employees at all levels of the organization; 12 percent indicated their organizations altered their benefits program to recruit employees at all levels of the organization,” Kennedy said. “Health care was the benefit most frequently cited as being altered over the past 12 months to retain (61 percent) and recruit (65 percent) employees at all levels of the organization.”

3) Workplace Predictions for 2017 from Training Magazine

Expect greater focus this year on diversity, change leadership, and the role of conversation.

Each year, top leaders within organizations are required to confront pressing internal issues, many of which result from events taking place both nationally and internationally. Events from 2016—including the presidential election, growing Millennial workforce, and technological advancements—have created a new set of workplace priorities as we head into the New Year.

The impact of the last year is affecting organizations in a real way by bringing to light a number of issues company leaders are looking to address head-on in 2017. As organizations commit to ensuring leadership development skills are prioritized, here are some important trends last year’s issues have inspired that we can expect to see over the next 12 months, and how employers can address them.

4) Employer Brand Vs. Consumer Brand: What’s The Difference? from TalentCulture

Branding has been a buzzword for a while now—a hot one—but employer branding as a concept? That’s still relatively new. Many companies know they should be doing more of it to recruit talent and increase employee engagement—but they don’t have the budget or resources to follow through. Others might simply confuse it with consumer branding, which is understandable since there is some overlap.

If employer branding is part of your 2017 planning, here are reasons it’s important and also different from consumer branding. And, here are some ways to you can make employer branding work for your company.

5) Culture, Careers Drive Employer Brand from The Wall Street Journal

A company’s culture and values do more to bolster its “employment brand”—its reputation as a prospective employer—than any other factor. This conclusion is based on a detailed analysis of data collected by Glassdoor, an employment website that lets employees anonymously rate their companies on a number of factors.

The analysis was conducted by Bersin by Deloitte in May, and draws on information from 2.2 million employees at more than 6,000 companies. Salary and benefits are important, of course, but this study demonstrates that employees put more emphasis on investment in leadership, culture and employee development when determining whether to recommend their own companies as excellent places to work.


Do you have news or insight about employer branding, talent or culture to share? Want us to include it in our monthly update? Contact us below.

Shannon Smedstad (@shannonsmedstad) is a Principal Employer Brand Strategist for exaqueo, an employer brand experience firm building employer brands and the talent strategies that drive them through research, consulting and creative and digital execution. Contact exaqueo to learn more about our employer brand innovation, workforce research and recruiting strategy offerings.

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