Six Ways to Drastically Improve Your Company’s Employment Brand
February 21, 2017
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
WilsonHCG, a global talent solutions company, recently published its Third Annual Fortune 500 “Top 100 Employment Brand Report.”
The report ranked the top 100 of the Fortune 500 companies based on evaluations of the companies’ Career Pages, Job Boards, Employee Reviews & Candidate Engagement, Accolades, Recruitment Marketing, and Social Responsibility. John Wilson, chief executive officer of Wilson HCG, took time out to discuss the report with BioSpace and what it means for biopharma companies.
Wilson indicated that the reports began about four years ago, when “we started discussing with our clients, reputation and ease of recruitment. And on the flipside, the challenges relating back to employment brand.”
Biopharma on the List
Culling the top 100 figures from the Fortune 500, the report breaks down six industries: Commercial Banks, Computer Software, Pharmaceutical, Airlines, Insurance: Property and Casualty, and Railroads. A look at the list shows a number of different companies that fall fully or partially into biopharma and/or life sciences or medical devices.
The number two company on the list, tied for first with General Electric, was Johnson & Johnson .
The list included:
1. Johnson & Johnson (81 total points)
13. Dow (74 total points)
14. Monsanto (74 total points)
16. Stryker (74 total points)
20. Humana (73 total points)
29. Bristol-Myers Squibb (71 total points)
38. Thermo Fisher Scientific (71 total points)
44. UnitedHealthcare (70 total points)
45. AbbVie (69 total points)
56. Eli Lilly & Co. (68 total points)
60. McKesson (68 total points)
61. Merck (68 total points)
65. Abbott Laboratories (67 total points)
67. Amgen (67 total points)
86. Cardinal Health (66 total points)
“Pharma does a lot of hiring. When you look at a company like Johnson & Johnson, which has ranked at the top of the list the last two years, they are a huge consumer brand as well. When you’re interviewing, meeting with and interacting with tens, even hundreds of thousands of people a year who are your potential customers, even in an interview process who have shown interest in the company, how are they treated? Of the hundreds of thousands of employees who work there, how do they feel about the company they work at?” Wilson said.
Stryker: A Case Study
Stryker is a Fortune 500 medical technologies company based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It produces surgical equipment, joint replacements and other implants used in trauma surgeries, and quite a lot of other products. It employs approximately 22,000 people.
“About a year and a half ago, we had a call from Stryker. What are we missing? What can we be working on? For people not listed in the report, we will conduct an evaluation to see how they compare to the Top 100 on the list. For Stryker, it was important that they put a major focus on their employment brand, and used this report as a benchmark. And they really made a significant improvement this year,” Wilson said.
Six Factors
As mentioned earlier, companies were evaluated on six factors: Career Pages, Job Boards, Employee Reviews & Candidate Engagement, Accolades, Recruitment Marketing, and Social Responsibility.
1. Career Pages
The report evaluates companies’ career pages, noting that if it is not accessible and effective, the company may have problems attracting top talent. “This category,” the report says, “took corporate culture into high consideration, looking at culture information, videos and pictures, hiring practices, and employee testimonials.”
2. Job Boards
This factor evaluated how companies, their job postings and job descriptions, and the overall message of the company appeared on job boards. The report cites, “To rank highly in this category, we looked at how often companies posted jobs on both mainstream and niche job boards. The wider the net, the higher the ranking.”
3. Employee Reviews & Candidate Engagement
Weighted 35 percent in the report, authenticity was a key factor. “Although a company can’t control what is shared about their hiring process or employees’ work experiences,” the report states, “organizations impact and influence those responses by following through on their promises, practicing transparency, and delivering consistent messaging.”
4. Accolades
Simply put, is your company being noticed by your industry?
5. Recruitment Marketing
How you market to potential clients, the report argues, is as important as how you market to potential customers. “Cohesion matters the most in recruitment marketing,” the report notes. “From your career-specific social media accounts and your employee testimonial videos to your dedicated talent community and job descriptions, your company’s EVP should be apparent throughout.”
6. Social Responsibility
The report sums this up neatly: “People want to work for companies that value people over dollars.”
Takeaway
The report leads with the thought, “Now more than ever, employment branding directly influences the health and well-being of companies. A poor employment brand not only puts your ability to attract top talent at stake, but will also affect your bottom line.”
Over and over again, when discussing why Boston and Cambridge are the top spots in the U.S. for biotech startups, the response is: It’s easier to recruit top talent.
This report attempts to underline that concept, and to identify key ways companies are developing an “employment brand” that better enables them to recruit the best talent available.
“I think the one thing people want to know is, ‘What advice do you have on how we can improve?’ It’s really setting out a long-term strategy. It can’t happen overnight. I think that’s one of the mistakes companies make. The companies that do well on this report, there’s a common theme—all of them involve their employees in the story, in the brand. And what we’ve seen over time is that when the company does that, it starts breeding ownership and pride in their employees and a real consistency in their employment brand,” Wilson said.