Dear boman,

I  have realized that HR is the primary face of an organisation to the outsider. A lot of onus lies on the HR person to build a brand and communicate its value to the internal and external customers. I had read an interesting comment somewhere ‘a brand is a piece of real estate which you build in someone’s mind’ …………..the impact is strong and effective

Now, Brand building,has essentially been seen as Marketing bastion, so how does hr do it? Actually in both cases we have potential .customers. In case of HR the customer is in the form of potential candidate whom we try to employ and the internal talented employee whom we want to retain, and in case of Marketing it is the external world, though the two are overlapping. The majority of employees seek to be associated with a strong, reliable name (Maslow’s hierarchy supports this), we get entitled to the extra social privilege/prestige when we say that we work for ‘Company X’ and our near and dear ones also bask in the reflected glory. So often we have seen employees flaunting their company provided T-shirts with the logo of their company embossed on it. During my Engineering days, we used to wear shirts with university name embossed, and believe me, we were so proud of that brand….. HR people keep improving the quality and impact of recruiting messages, they highlight employee benefits, key cultural values, strengths and opportunities of the organisation, effectively communicate acquisition and merger decisions, post-merger integrations, design intranet for better information sharing, manage company’s reputations by projecting it as a socially and environmentally responsible one… all these are but branding tools.

General employees do not keep track of the brand rating of the company, but a compelling employer brand is built when there is a unique attractive work experience that sets it apart from the rest. Apart from the financials and corporate governance part, it is the HR person, who as a Brand Ambassador of the company,can create a reputation of employer of choice.

Also, an HR Manger needs to be a General Manager (literally speaking) to go about this job. He/she should have strong understanding of all other processes in the orgn, namely,finance, marketing,coroporate communications, strategy etc etc. It would be quite pertinent to mention something the ad guru David Ogilvy had said, nothing will kill your reputation in the labor market faster than doing a great job advertising a work experience you don't deliver.

Regards

Shantanuji