Job seekers’ behaviour on corporate websites, especially graduates, is probably not what you’d expect. Listening to the research that Max has done would lead you to re-evaluate where you focus your online careers efforts. And when the job-seeker does get to your content, the thing they really value is authenticity.

It’s a brave company that allows employees to be authentically themselves while representing the corporate brand. And yet, in this new world of social media, this may be the best way to attract potential candidates, by conveying the corporate culture in the natural voices of current employees.

Max believes that social media and networking technologies are in the middle of – or perhaps only at the beginning of – changing massively how organisations connect with everybody, especially jobseekers.

He talks about actions some of the more adventurous companies are already taking, and the opportunities for firms to steal a competitive advantage by taking the next step forward.

Do listen: the interview is full of valuable pickings gleaned from the coalface of careers communication: the way candidates view companies; how they use the corporate website and social media in practice; and the reality of recruitment pressures.

I’ve broken the interview down into smaller pieces, so that you can quickly find particular points you’d like to hear about. I’ve also included the whole interview and a transcript.

Part 1: Change, choice and channels

Key topics:

• ever-increasing choice of channels
• wide-spread availability of information about people’s experiences within companies
• reduced trust in employer communication

Soundbite:

“The world has changed from one where corporate communications could control the brand, control the message… all they can do these days is really engage, participate and influence.”

Part 2: Facing the fear and doing it anyway

Key topics:

• where to start
• overcoming the corporate fear of:
  • conversational overload
  • brand-threatening conversation
• the benefits of social media for promoting employer brand

Soundbites:

“[some companies] lock their pages down so that students can’t engage… that’s actually a big turn-off and I think massively limits the power of the medium.”

“Having sat on that side, planning those activities, I know full well what the concerns are… but the reality of it is quite different”

“If you’re talking about [communicating with] university students, then really Facebook has got to be one of the primary platforms, because [of the] 650 million people […] and all university students, pretty much, using it”

“In the year that Ernst and Young began its Facebook activity, they had a massive jump up the Universum rankings, I think they got to the top, or very close to the top.”

Part 3: Employer differentiation and corporate culture

Key points:

• importance of people in conveying culture
• using home-grown advocates to connect
• using LinkedIn to connect: know your audience

Soundbites:

“By the time [students] have seen three or four [milkround] presentations, they can’t remember who’s who, or what’s what! And what they fall back on, and this is why face-to-face continues to be arguably the most important channel, is ‘Did I like the people?’ ”

“The reality is, if you empower an employee to speak on your behalf… they’re not going to say negative things. They’re going to be positive”

Part 4: Employer Brand and Values

Key topics:

• relationship between employer brand and corporate brand
• relationship between employer brand and corporate values
• how best to use advocates to communicate values

Soundbites:

“There’s value in trying to understand who you are, and trying to express that. But there’s a real danger that it becomes very manufactured [and that is] an increasingly big turn-off to candidates who really are interested in authenticity.”

“If you let employees talk about their experience authentically… those things [values and culture] will shine through.”

Part 5: Employer brand online: corporate website vs Facebook

Key topics:

• behaviour of students in usability tests of the corporate website
• migration of the careers site towards Facebook

Soundbites:

“[On their first visit] university students pretty much didn’t go to the careers website… They did come and visit the site for one thing, and one thing only. And that’s to make an application… They wouldn’t come back at all unless they got some kind of positive response from us.”

“There’s a number of studies that show that if you’re two clicks away from Facebook, you lose half the people.”

“The web is shrinking, apart from social, which is great. And you see a trend now where you see big employers actually moving their careers site, almost lock, stock and barrel, into Facebook”

Part 6: Evolution, ethics and expenditure

Key topics:

• evolution of the employee profile
• Facebook, privacy and ethics
• where to put the corporate budget?

Soundbite:

“The single most powerful thing is campus events… this is an opportunity with social to really viralise your content and your messages.”

“So when you go on campus, and you’re going to do a campus event, for goodness sake, take some pictures, post some pictures up, get people tagging themselves. Encourage candidates to do it. And actually, because the more authentic it is, the better, actually: shoot some video. Get some vox pops saying, ‘What do you think?’ ”

Here’s the whole interview, in case you’d rather listen to it end-to-end; and the transcript, for those who prefer to read.

Many thanks to Max for taking the time to talk to Paul.

Who were we speaking to?

Formerly Global Head of Employer Brand at Credit Suisse Max Heywood has spent the last 10 years running Talent Attraction programs for Investment Banks, previously JPMorgan, HSBC and UBS.

His experience is centred in graduate recruitment but also includes experienced professional recruitment, internal mobility initiatives, HR and employee communications, HR systems and HR transformation programs. He began his career as an account manager at EURO RSCG, and went on to successfully co-found his own digital marketing agency, before moving across to the client side to manage global agency partnerships and run recruitment marketing operations.

Max is an enthusiastic advocate of Social Media for recruiting, and has been active across all of the major social networks for some time.

 Employer Brand, Culture and Authenticity: Interview with Max Heywood

He reflects on how he caught the digital wave, which corporate sites he rates, and offers some key lessons in getting into social media from a corporate perspective.

Do take time to listen. It is a long and discursive interview with some great tips, well worth listening to in its entirety.

I’ve broken the interview down into smaller pieces, so that you can quickly find particular points you’d like to hear about. I’ve also included the whole interview and a transcript.

Part 1: Looking back: junior reporter to digital leader

Key points:

• Learning lessons from newspapers
  • targeting content for specific audiences
  • building content on a schedule
  • storytelling and simplicity
• Taking advantage of technology shifts
  • text editing to desktop publishing
  • internal comms: print to intranet
  • external comms: product focus to strategic editorial management

Soundbite:
“We started with a site which was a niche product for PLC stakeholders, and what we have now is the company’s biggest storytelling machine… The majority of the audience now, which is quickly growing, is not your shareholders, or your analysts, or your fund managers, or your city journalists: it’s everyday customers who come into contact with Aviva and want to know more about us”

Part 2: What characterises the best sites today?

Key points:

• role of content in transparency and trust
• releasing corporate content into the wild
• connection of trust with social technologies
• a content strategy that helps elevate the content

Soundbite:
“We did some user experience studio stuff with a fund manager. He was asked “How do you use corporate websites?” … He said “My team, that’s their job. I used to do it. We pore over sites like this because that’s where the information is. And we make judgements about how successful it is, and whether we can get the information, and things like that, which gives us a barometer on how healthy we think the company is”

Part 3: The websites that stand out

Key points:

• significance of the peer group – and eating each others lunch
• comparison across industries, and in different countries
• best big companies…
• …and learning from the little ones

Soundbite:
“Major companies get stricken sometimes by this legacy. They’ve been around a long time…”This is the way we do it round here”… When you look at these new companies, they’re not often hamstrung by this… I am fascinated by the way they would tackle similar things, the agility of flexibility they’ve shown… Those are real rich pickings for learning, education, knowledge”

Part 4: Social behaviour, and the need for future planning

Key points:

• the internet in your hand
• expectations of the future
• significance of individual’s choice in communications

Soundbite:
“The real big ticket thing is actually planning about 3, 5, 7, 9 years time. Because my daughter, if she goes into further education, by the time her and her ilk come out into the big wide world of ugly work in their early twenties, say, they are going to be bringing a technological driven level of expectation that’s unbelievable. So they’re going to be saying:

• “I want to be a customer of yours and I do things like this so what have you got? How can I do it?”
• Or “I want to be part of the community so I’m interested in these things so how do I….?”
• Or “I’m going to be working for you so what kind of tools have you got that can help me do my job for you better?”
• Or finally “I might be a shareholder, so… I don’t want to turn up physically. I don’t ever want to walk in your office but I want to be part of your business and have a connection with you.
• So what have you got? Oh you haven’t got that. Well perhaps I’ll go over there because they seem to have got it and that fits with me.”

And I think every business should be thinking about this change that’s happening.”

Part 5: How Aviva built up experience in using social media

Key points:

• experimentation and courage
• getting it right… and wrong
• understanding the sense of connection and passion

Soundbite:
“We had the opportunity to support a round the world sailor called Dee Caffari … we used what was then called the Aviva Challenge as our laboratory… an opportunity to understand how this thing worked, why people find it interesting, why they engage with it and its implications for more corporate communications through your dot-com.

…The other thing I think is just being brave”

Part 6: Communicating with shareholders

Key points:

• the next step online for retail shareholders
• webcasts and transparency
• expanding the appeal of the corporate investor site

Soundbite:
“Retail shareholders are one of the areas that companies can really mine and I think they would like to take part in this as well…The Holy Grail is that someone recommends you to their friend or family. A shareholder might say “I really like this company because they keep me informed, the share price is good, the dividend is good…” – all these other things that are the decision maker – “But actually I really like the way I feel engaged in with the company, communicated to, part of it, opportunity to vote online for the AGM, see the workings of the meeting, do anything really.” And I think that’s a potential growth area”

Part 7: Selling the social media strategy

Key points:

• “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”
• learning from companies outside the industry
• increasing time on site…
• …or making it easier for them to get what they need and leave

Soundbite:
“We started to think about Twitter and in 14 months we’re now just hitting through the 1,000 [followers] mark. And then you look at the make-up, who’s bothering about this? Why would we do it? Well because other people, whether it’s analysts or journalists, are electing to get their news like this. They might have RSS, they might have signed up to our email drop from dot-com. But their behaviours are perhaps changing.”

Part 8: Getting into Facebook with a major brand campaign

Key points:

• raising brand awareness
• connecting with key influencers…
• …but enabling everyone else to participate
• connecting social networks and big business
• interesting tools that may – or may not – be the next big thing.

Soundbite:
“For a company like Aviva and its 53.4 million customers around the world (quite a sizeable number in the UK), it’s not too much of a stretch to work out that many of them will be on Facebook. So thinking about “Right, are we ready to have, say, an e-commerce motor and household page?”, perhaps Aviva is not, and many insurers might not be ready for that, but thinking about “Well where we should be in three years with this?” If we’re seeing this growth and Facebook are pretty definite they want a billion subscribers within perhaps another two years and given their current rate of progress would you bet against it? No. ”

Here’s the whole interview, in case you’d rather listen to it end-to-end; and the transcript, for those who prefer to read.

Many thanks to Stuart for taking the time to talk to Paul.

Who were we speaking to?

Stuart Bartram led the development of Aviva’s online corporate estate for 11 years.

The global insurance company has been considered among the leaders in FTSE 100 digital corporate communications. Its online communications challenge is a complex one, balancing the demands and opportunities of a dynamic consumer brand and an extensive global portfolio of websites.

Over recent years Aviva has embraced social media, personalisation and specific content for mobile devices within its evolving digital strategy.

Reporting to Aviva’s global brand development director, Stuart was at the heart of this strategy with his team also playing a key role in developing the digital presence for Aviva’s first global brand campaign: You Are The Big Picture.

Before joining Aviva Stuart spent 10 years as a journalist.

Married with two daughters, he lives in Norfolk and is a governor at Norwich University College of the Arts.

Stuart is on LinkedIn and Twitter.

 Interview with Stuart Bartram: Catching The Digital Wave

The first part looked at the beautification of business.  Currently all business is seen as being rather utilitarian.  Their purpose, especially in a capitalist consumer-led economy, is simply to get money out of the hands of consumers and into the pockets of shareholders.

It’s not that I agree or disagree with that .. it’s just that all the alternatives to it are similarly utilitarian.  So you have philanthropic or resource-based measurements all of which are about usefulness and efficiency, if in slightly different directions.

Why not, I asked, aim to have businesses which were beautiful as well, businesses which we valued for some kind of intrinsic reason as well as because they produced or consumed something at a certain rate?

The second part asked whether business should teach a man to fish.  What a business does at present is to mark off a little corner of proprietary information, try and make it as inaccessible to anyone on the outside, and then sell access to that information.

Many high paid professions, from banking to IT to medicine, are characterised by this .. they’re not really particularly hard as such, they just contain an awful lot of lingo without which it’s easy to look stupid.

Why not, I asked, turn it around the other way?  Why not find out how to do something and then make it your business to teach other people how to do it?  I’m not talking about education here .. I’m talking about dropping having power over someone as a core business requirement and replacing it with empowerment instead.

Four more challenges for responsible business

These two ideas strike at the heart of what we have come to mean by “business” and (to be honest) make me feel rather unwell when I think about the ramifications of them.

Here are another four I put together for the now sadly missed Sustainability Forum:

1. price your service or product according to how much it costs to produce, not how much the market will afford or how big a profit you can make;
2. innovate don’t copy: there’s nothing wrong with improving, or even producing lower quality versions, but producing something different because it means you’ve produced something new is no way to conduct business.  Yet it’s what a surprisingly large number of companies do.
3. pay your employees according to the value they bring your company, NOT their seniority or even their responsibility.  This is dangerously close to paying wages through profit-sharing, and if you’re challenging the greed of business as usual what could be wrong with that?
4. stay committed: businesses usually disengage with their clients and customers after a certain length of time .. either the contract for services has been completed, the product’s warranty has expired, or something like.  Usually one of the upsides of this “chuck it over the wall and run away” approach is that you get to be paid lots of money to go and fix it when something goes wrong.  Why not stay engaged, provide top quality in the first place and commit to support your client or customer come what may?

Revolution!

There’s a lot being talked at present about the next phase of CSR.  So much is going on it’s quite remarkable .. from cause marketing to sustainable stock exchanges; from integrated reporting through to banking reform.

All good stuff ..  but all about changing the effect of business, not challenging what a business should be in the first place.  Even creating shared value (CSV) is expressed as a means of exploiting the links between society and business, exploitation being the key word.  It’s not so much that the leopard is changing his spots as that he’s decided to paint them green.

It’s difficult to remember that today’s modern stakeholder-driven model of business was invented in the coffee houses of Europe just over 300 years ago but that markets, business and commerce have all been around for much much longer. It was a revolution 300 years ago to sell stakes in a company to shareholders, and it’s a revolution we need now.  Not to destroy business or bind it with government regulation, but to ensure that profit at any price doesn’t continue to warp what good business is all about.

^{Picture Credit: revolution by Chris Corwin under CC Attribution Share Alike License.}

 Putting it all together | Renewing CSR 3/3

But how can you demonstrate that you genuinely do, and that you actively consider human rights in your business? Showing is always better than telling…

Here are a few examples of what some of the biggest companies do when discussing human rights on their corporate websites.

Show the relevance of human rights to your company

There are several items in the list of Rights, but there are four that might be particularly appropriate to consider:

• No discrimination

  Diversity pages are increasingly common on corporate websites. Consider whether this is best placed in an About Us section, or in a Careers section. Note also, here in the UK, the need to consider diversity at Board level after the Davies Report.

• Freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining

  This is much less frequently seen, but one example is Volvo, who make it clear that these principles are covered in their Code of Conduct (that page is called Human Rights in Operation). Another is Anglo American on their Labour Relations page where they outline their commitment to these rights. Both these companies extend their discussion of human rights on other pages across their sites.

• No slavery or forced labour

  Child labour or forced labour is not relevant to all companies, but can crop up in several industries, especially in discussion of your supply chain. If there is any risk that your industry is one of these, consider discussing your approach to handling these issues in an Ethics or Corporate Social Responsibility section. (See examples of this below)

• Right to a private and family life

  This one is probably only indirectly relevant, at least to most companies, but there are a few who make a point of associating work/life balance with this human right.

You may have other, more relevant aspects to consider…

For example, African Barrick Gold have an interesting explanation on Security and Human Rights of what they are doing as part of their human rights activity: training stakeholders in human rights and supporting local government and law enforcement agencies in providing training in adherence to international human rights norms.

Note the progress/priorities sections at the bottom of this section…

Create – and make available – a human rights policy

G4S provide a page specifically about developing their policy—there’s also a press release announcing the new policy.

Note that they have posted a letter from an external expert explaining his involvement, and confirming that he believes the people at G4S he has worked with have shown real intent to produce a meaningful policy. As in so many things, external assurance helps convince the reader.

There’s more: they’ve included a presentation on human rights available for download, and they’ve outlined the next steps in their project to evaluate the ‘human rights landscape’ at G4S: how they will promote and integrate the policy.

Don’t forget to include your human rights policy or statement on the website. It’s good to see PDF content written out in full, but if your policy is long, attach it in a PDF, and offer a summary on the webpage.

Explain in detail your approach to applying the policy ‘in real life’

Rio Tinto devote a long page to their human rights approach, covering:

• Policy (and date of update)
• Due diligence “avoiding involvement in human rights harm by others, including business partners”
• Respecting the diversity of indigenous peoples
• Human rights risks
• Approach: policy/procedures/training/risk analyses
• International commitments, partnerships and publications

Chevron includes human rights as one of their Global Issues and also discuss human rights on a dedicated page in their Corporate Responsibility Approach section, where they include video and offer links to a variety of PDFs and external resources, including their efforts to address the risk of forced labour and human trafficking in their supply chain.

These are all good ways to highlight your human rights activities.

Ideally, it’s a good idea to provide some measures of success as well. One option would to use the GRI framework to measure progress – National Grid, for example do this. Another idea would be to include external ratings/awards as evidence of success in different areas (e.g. Chevron include their rating of 100% on the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index in their CSR report). And including case studies in CSR reporting is a popular option.

Interestingly, Mondelez International has a discussion of their verification system on their CocoaLife site:

“A verification system is a way to give voice to the people in cocoa-growing communities and it’s one of the three core principles of the Cocoa Life program. A verification system is an external set of eyes and ears, both looking and listening, to make sure that the program is doing what it set out to do. It’s similar to the model of verifying in the financial sector where books are kept and then auditors check those books. The big difference, however, is that money is quantitative and should be black and white, while human rights are qualitative and therefore not as clear-cut.”

It’s worth a read: scroll down the page to see what Mil Niepold has to say about verification.

Extend your approach to your sphere of influence

Companies sometimes talk about their sphere of influence. Often this means working with suppliers and partners; sometimes it means working with governments or other organisations.

• Sector

  Barclays and RBS both explain how they work with the Thun Group (an informal group of European banks) to create a discussion paper(PDF) for banks about business and human rights.

• Supply Chain

  British American Tobacco have a page called Human Rights in the Supply Chain where they discuss how they incorporate human rights criteria into their major supply chain programmes.

  They also specifically discuss the issue of child labour in cultures where children assist their parents in domestic/agricultural chores. Since BAT has an agricultural supply chain, this is clearly a very relevant issue for them. They link this page to other highly relevant pages on their site: Managing Human Rights, Social Responsibility in Tobacco Production, and their supplier assessment tool. This is a good example of how to interlink pages to demonstrate consistency and depth of approach.

• Government agencies

  African Barrick Gold explain how they are working with the Tanzanian police force:

  “ABG is the first and only private company to comprehensively engage with senior Tanzanian government officials and local law enforcement agencies to encourage and support the provision of Voluntary Principles [on Security and Human Rights] training to these agencies and the adherence to international human rights norms.”

Make it clear and interesting

And finally…

Sometimes policy pages are little more than a list of downloads. Consider using a different medium: for instance, Volvo Group provide a video outlining their approach; as we’ve seen, Chevron offer a case-study video discussing one particular aspect of their human rights policy.

And good use of language, font and layout can help. CapGemini communicate their sustainable procurement policy very clearly and the human rights elements can be clearly seen.

***

This post is part of Blog Action Day, which this year is discussing human rights.

Previous contributions to Blog Action Day have been:
2012: One Plus One Can Be Greater Than Two
2011: Lessons From Food Security: Telling Us What Matters
2010: Mixing Oil and Water
2009: Climate change and the corporate site
2008: Celebrating the FTSE 100: action on the breadline
2007: Enticing the green investor

 Communicating Commitment to Human Rights

Specifically, consumers think businesses have a range of resources available to them, which those businesses should use to positively impact global issues. This isn’t an isolated sentiment. Over 10,000 consumers in 10 countries were surveyed, and the consensus was clear — consumers expect businesses to give back. Businesses that do can gain loyal customers. 47% of survey respondents indicated they are more likely to be loyal to a company that supports social and environmental causes, and 53% indicated they are more likely to recommend those companies and brands to other people.

It’s important to note that while there are specific causes that consumers are passionate about and believe that companies should support in order to drive changes (see the infographic below for the details), consumers also want companies to make internal changes to positively affect social and economic causes. According to the participants in this study, consumers most want companies to:

• Change the way they operate = 34%
• Apply unique business assets = 19%
• Develop new products or services = 16%
• Raise awareness and educate = 11%
• Develop partnerships = 11%
• Make donations = 7%
• Donate employee time/expertise = 5%

Take a close look at the data above. The first step most companies and brands take to demonstrate their commitments to impacting social and economic causes is to donate money or require employees to donate money and time to charitable organizations. Are you surprised to see that the internal changes consumers most want companies to make in order to support social and economic causes don’t include making donations and donating employee time and expertise until the sixth and seventh items on this list?

Businesses should support economic and social causes for multiple reasons. Most importantly, they have the resources to make positive changes, but also because consumers want them to and will reward them with referrals and loyalty. For brands the benefits are numerous. At the most basic level, economic and social causes evoke powerful feelings in people, and tying emotions to your brand can have significant results to loyalty, advocacy, and sales. Never underestimate the power of emotional branding.

 94% of Consumers Think Businesses Should Give Back