In today's business climate, business leaders perennially face difficult choices when it comes to career opportunities.
Your important staff are likely to be regularly headhunted by your competitors with appealing offers. Do you constantly remind them of what you offer as a talent-value proposition?
Turnover costs
Staff turnover costs can have a huge impact on a business, both directly through recruitment costs and more indirectly through cost of conversion, lack of productivity and a drop in staff motivation when competent managers leave.
To minimise these staff churn costs you must develop and strengthen your talent-value proposition – everything that talent values when choosing to join or choosing to stay with a specific company.
Build your proposition
Before you start developing or refining your talent-value proposition, here is some advice:
- Understand your audience. Before you start formulating key messages, get to know your target group: what do they value when selecting an employer? Who do they consider are your biggest competitors on the talent market (you’ll be surprised to see they are not your closest competitors in regular business). Ensure you conduct in-depth interviews with both present and future employees.
- Focus on your differentiators. Promote what is really unique and what is seen as advantageous by your current employees, not what you would like to offer in the future. Why are they working for you?
A talent-value proposition typically consists of:
- Compensation and benefits. Considered as the base offer that should align with your competitors. However, studies of what executives value in choosing an employer suggests that this isn’t what matters the most.
- Personal development opportunities and, in a broad sense, the company's corporate culture and values are what really matter. Executives make career decisions based largely on these two factors. Such things take years to build, however, and so are difficult to replicate.
Spread your employmer brand across a wide range of channels, from obvious ones such as job advertisements, to channels often forgotten such as what interviewers tell candidates about the company. It’s easy when working with employer branding to make the mistake of focusing all your efforts on potential new employees, thereby forgetting your existing staff.
The talent-value proposition should be closely connected to your company brand. This will require a cooperative approach between HR, corporate communications and your marketing department.
An ambitious company will work as professionally with its employer brand as it would with its corporate and consumer brands.
Case Study: how the Swedish Trade Council defines its talent value proposition.
“The Swedish Trade Council offers a world of opportunities:
“At the Swedish Trade Council you have a role with purpose [...] since our contribution to Swedish trade and industry is significant. The Swedish Trade Council has varied, stimulated duties to offer you [...] since our assignments cover many different types of clients and services [...] a job in the Swedish Trade Council provides great development opportunities [...] and will create a good foundation for your future career."
