Soft Skills

Brand yourself to attract the best

Employer branding is necessary to lure the best talent in the industry, writes Vikram Bhardwaj.

Inefficient employer branding and associated perception leads to inoptimal talent outcomes. A natural corollary is the increasing commoditisation and minimum differentiation between employers as brands. In a scenario like this, the following is highly relevant at the senior executive ranks.

For any role at the senior levels, the company looks for a top performer. The selection process is stringent and there are multiple rounds to weed out discrepancies in judgment. For obvious reasons, no company would like to hire an average performer, someone who has been asked to leave his previous company, a semi-anxious person who is always on the lookout for a job. These sort of candidates would always apply for any role matching their field, are less picky about details and want to explore, any job is a better job for them! If the selection is being made amongst this lot, the company is wasting its efforts, sometimes with disastrous results.

At the senior executive ranks, top performers are seldom in the job market. Their companies take good care of them. The only reason they engage in conversations if head-hunted is to check if the role is more challenging than what they are currently performing. However, all the company’s efforts are a waste if these high-performers go through the ‘job description’ which is average at best with little or no aspirational content associated with the role and almost nowhere suggests the impact of the role on the overall business of the company. These high performers can see that the job on offer is no ways superior to the one they already are in. Their non-interest goes beyond the role. It is unlikely that they will return to look at future jobs from the same company and may be turn into potentially negative mouth-speaks on anyone who happens to ask their opinion on the respective company.

Here are two recent true examples. A reputed company A is looking for the head of one of their business units. The verbal briefing however suggests no clarity on the business, its potential, the impact of the role, attributes and positioning of the individual, possible working internal and external relationships, etc. Similarly, a reputed consulting firm B is looking for a head of their package-implementation group. They simply copy the Web-profile of an individual who seemingly is the best person for the job and make it in the form of a description.

On reading such descriptions, a firm’s well positioned brand and image amongst the minds of top performing professionals immediately takes a beating. Drafting a good description is the first step towards attracting top performers.

The second is effective benchmarking. At the senior levels, evaluation criteria’s tend to be subjective if the interviewer is unable to position appropriately either the role or the candidate’s profile. Either of the scenarios hampers an objective assessment of the candidate against the role and results in inoptimal outcomes. Analyse this: A mid-tier technology services company in Bangalore is interested in hiring a senior director for ‘a general IT delivery role’. They are looking at someone with about 20 years of experience, who in his current assignment should be responsible for a delivery unit with over 1000 plus strong team. The idea is to hire someone with the maturity and bandwidth associated with large delivery operations. He is to be hired for a role which involves heading an offshore delivery centre (ODC) for one of their largest customers, expected to grow rapidly in the future. The current size of this ODC is only 200 people. Any candidate worth his credentials is asking for a clutch of such delivery units to be clubbed to make the role interesting enough, the company is however not relenting. To them, this means the person loosing focus! They are clear that the person should be prepared to handle smaller teams than what he is used to in his existing assignment. Well, that’s fine, but no top-performer would like to go three steps backwards.

The third step is to have the hiring process as streamlined as possible. Inconsistencies, delays, long gaps between successive interviews, too many rounds of interviews are all sure put-offs to top-performers who do not view this in isolation. Consider this—one of the top software companies is interested in this senior candidate for a role to head a $40 million business. They would like to have a discussion with him over the phone first followed by a meeting. The call was rescheduled again and again. The call couldn’t happen three times for some reason or the other. The candidate now thinks that the company is not at all serious about the role/hiring and doesn’t wish to block his time yet another time, only to be left again without even a courtesy call by the hiring manager apologising for the same. And thus, the company has just lost a top-performer.

Wherever these few basic tenets of hiring are considered seriously and internalised for any senior hiring process with aptly defined metrics and critical to quality measures, the company is assured of a regular, uninterrupted supply of top-performing talent, for any critical role. The state of the job market does not define or restrict the talent pool availability to such companies.

Vikram Bhardwaj is a Partner with Redileon. E-mail: v.bhardwaj@redileon.com