Earlier this week, I referenced an article written by John Sumser. John is a recruiting guru from whom I've learned a lot over the last several years. While John's blog is on my Google Reader, I often skip over his articles because I really have to be in a position to concentrate to digest his articles. 
Every once in awhile, I dive into a month or two worth of his articles for a couple of hours and try to figure out what he’s saying. Typically, I walk away with something that changes my way of thinking.
I did this over the weekend, and the same held true. John recently wrote an article on employment brands that is quite insightful. I'll publish it here, and then spend the next couple of WorkPuzzles discussing its implications for the real estate industry.
"Employment Branding is the craft of being so completely organized that you are ready with the right message for the right person when she comes along.
A brand is a relationship.
Brands only matter to the people who care about them. Mention the brand name outside of the circle of people who have the relationship and you will receive shoulder shrugs. Mention it inside the circle and you can spark a conversation full of passion and opinion.
The only brands that matter are the ones that people care about.
The theory and development of branding has been reserved, historically, for companies that could afford large broadcast media campaigns. The best examples of brand marketing are consumer product companies, from automobiles to popular music to varieties of American Cheese. The term brand is used to cover a wide range of circumstances from name recognition to deep affinity.
Contemporary talk about 'personal branding' generally refers to the act of managing the fifteen minutes of fame that social media bestows. Peppers and Rogers, the authors of popular books on database and relationship marketing, move the concept to tightly grouped members of a database.
It is useful to think about branding as an early stage technology. Purely a 20th Century invention, branding, like many first generation technologies, began in organizations that could afford clumsy and inefficient approaches because of their sheer size. For the past 70 years, branding has been a game of extensive spending to attract large numbers of people to a single product or company.
Today, however, the tools needed to build very clear, very small niche oriented brands are readily available. Like much of marketing, the tools are now available from the desktop. This 'downward evolution' of marketing creates both expanded opportunity and expanded responsibility at the department and operating unit level."
Notice what he says in that last paragraph: "…the tools needed to build very clear, very small niche oriented brands are readily available." This is great news for those who recruit for a living.
Do you see yourself (you personally) as having a brand? Does your office (not your company as a whole) have a brand? What do the candidates that you're trying to recruit think about your office's brand? Do they wish they could be part of a team like the one you manage, or do they shrug their shoulders?
These are all important questions if you’re going to be successful at recruiting. It's funny how much easier recruiting gets if you start attracting…
Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. Comments or questions are welcome. If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email. If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.
