The speakers throughout the afternoon at MediaCom’s recent careers
conference ranged from the futuristic (Rhys is still buzzing from the CES in
Vegas earlier this year and sees the world in 3D) to the philosophical (Alain
de Botton took a sweeping look at the development of our attitudes to work).
MediaCom Career’s managing director Aki Mandhar highlighted the biggest
issue I think faces employers these days. Living as we do in the Age of
Dialogue, we’re all faced with the very real fact that our brand belongs to our
customers.
Not just to our customers, moreover, but also to our employees. Marketing
directors can try and deliver as complete a brand experience as they like, but as
well as the very easy access consumers have to customer reviews and Twitter
feeds about the brand, they can also easily access how employees inside the
company really feel about it.
The website
Glassdoor.com gives a free insight into 84,000 companies with anonymous
comments from employees about interviews, salaries and working conditions. And
yes, MediaCom Worldwide is on there and our global chief executive Steve gets
100% approval.
But looking through the comments and scores generally it is very hard to
get a brilliant review overall - especially in the current economic climate. Even
Google, which has an excellent corporate reputation, only manages 3.9 out of 5.
This would
not be everyone’s first port of call when looking at a brand’s reputation, but
just as few of us go on holiday without checking out tripadvisor.com, sites
that report back on how employees feel increase in their importance for all
levels of staff.
More than ever before, your employees are your brand. Not just, as in the past, in the sense
that your customers experience you through them.
But in the sense that your potential future employees will check with
your current and past employees on what it is like to work for you.
For your brand to have a future, this had better be a proper reflection
of your marketing.
