A company can’t afford to be just any old company anymore. It must be a brand.

One company that took this relatively new concept of employment branding to the next level is Suncor.

What they found applies to many organizations interested in establishing their own unique employment brand - one that will set them apart from the competition in attracting the right talent:

• Employment branding begins with research into future hiring needs and trends as well as what people thought about the company

• Employment branding is different than product branding. In employment branding you are targeting specific groups of people who you want to identify with your company, you want them to join your company and become part of the culture.

• How you communicate your brand also requires careful consideration. It is critical that you identify and use language that your target group understands.

To find out more about how Suncor went about establishing their employment brand, check out this video (Firefox users need to install the following ActiveX compatibility plug-in: Windows Media Player ActveX plug-in / if your default browser is Firefox you may also simply copy and paste “http://broadband.bnn.ca/?vid=26653″ into an Internet Explorer browser) .

Are you using the web to attract new talent?

According to a January 2008 Warrillow study, the percentage of web-centric small business owners in the United States has risen to 45%, up from 24% in 2005.

Warrillow defines a web-centric small business as having an owner who considers his/her “Internet presence” (includes a web site, social network profile, etc.) to be important for driving business results.

The dramatic growth of the web-centric segment is being fuelled by a number of products that have come of age in the small business market over the past three years:

• Facebook has become an advertising medium for small businesses social networking.

• The Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing platforms can be navigated by a layperson in a career search.

• A LinkedIn profile is now more important than a business card for many entrepreneurs.

• Email deployment services like Constant Contact can send professional-looking emails to a small business owner’s customer/membership list.

How is your organization taking advantage of the Facebook Factor?

Do you have a project that requires input from a number of your staff? Are you struggling with the cost of traditional software that encourages online collaboration? Have you heard of wikis?

It’s not just for online encyclopedias: smart business owners use the new wiki software to encourage collaboration and save money.

A recent article in Fortune Small Business profiled a law firm with 30 employees that had switched from traditional and costly software to using a wiki which saved a lot of money.”The biggest reason that we’re switching is that the wiki is easier to use,” says the company owner. “If employees see a better way to organize or present information, they can just go ahead and do it with a wiki. Traditional software often requires a programmer.

At its simplest, a wiki is software that lets users work together to create and edit a collection of linked web pages. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is the best-known example - its 85,000 contributors have written, edited, and policed the content of more than nine million entries. Like Wikipedia, all wikis benefit from the network effect. The more people who use it, the theory goes, the better the quality of the information.

The transition to a wiki may not be without tension. Given the power to organize all documents, it is not uncommon for staff clashed over how to categorize and classify documents.As with many contentious entries on Wikipedia, the two sides can edit each other’s decisions repeatedly until they come to a compromise. It forces everybody to learn about each other’s job and that benefits everyone in the long run.

A Seattle-based financial investment company started a wiki for self-managed investment retirement funds. Users of the site read articles on how to manage retirement funds, and can edit the articles and post their own – the company does no editing. Another benefit – many readers are clicking on the link to the companies regular website. About 16% of those users become paying clients - more than double the conversion rate for those who find the company through search engines. “The results are undeniable, and the returns exponential,” according to the company president.

It appears that wikis can boost teamwork and collaboration, not to mention attracting potential clients and members.

Read the full article.

Mark Thompson, President of McKinley Solutions, will be a co-lecturer in a Federated Press Employee Engagement Course on March 18 and 19, 2008 in Toronto. In addition to McKinley Solutions, participating organizations include Aon Human Capital Consulting, Art Gallery of Ontario, Hewitt Associates, Kinect and the Royal Bank of Canada.

Course highlights include:

• Creating a competitive edge through engagement strategies

• Motivating employees to improve processes and productivity

• Overcoming barriers to engagement

• Inspiring brand advocacy in customer points of contact

• Linking career development with talent engagement and retention

• Providing tools and skills development for effective engagement

• Developing metrics for gauging ROI

Registration information is available in the course brochure.

Seth Godin’s recent reflections on writing blogs is, as always, food for thought.
His first advice is avoid any advice that includes the word “must.” It seems like his collegue, Brian Clarke, has a similar take.

Seth finds that for big organizations to embrace something, they often need the template, the strict rules, the golden path. TV commercials must be thirty seconds. Public companies must have a big lobby and a receptionist. Like that.

The reason that there’s so much pressure and focus on finding an ironclad list of musts is that the big and the slow demand it. Seth’s final take- That doesn’t mean you have to listen to them.

Seth’s advice in a second post - Just say it

Don’t let the words get in the way. If you’re writing online, forget everything you were tortured by in high school English class. You’re not trying to win any awards or get an A. You’re just trying to be real, to make a point, to write something worth reading.

So just say it.

Candidates who are actively looking for work are visiting more and more job boards - these job boards are a great source for getting your message out to this target audience.

This new technology is great for the job seeker - with one new service, candidates can search all the top career sites at once and apply to all jobs with one click, whether it is 1 or 1000.

While this makes it convenient for the job seekers – it creates major challenges for the recruiters. Now the same resume goes to several companies at the same time and it then becomes a race to be the first to make an offer before someone else does. This is forcing many recruiters who feel under pressure to consider ways to move the process along faster so they can get the candidate an offer faster. The most common technique is to ask fewer questions, leaving out key information about the candidate, and to measure success by how fast we fill the position.

The goal of the hiring process is to find The Right People, not People Right Now. Who are The Right People? That is your decision, but here are the big six things that we recommend you look for in an applicant:

1. Learn quickly and don’t get caught up in the wrong details

2. Take personal accountability or responsibility for their own actions

3. Have a sense of humour and know how to use to use it appropriately to defuse conflict and/or engage others.

4. Attitude towards types of work

5. Attitudes towards types of supervision

6. Attitudes towards your customers/clients

These are not the characteristics that come from the resume, but do come from the next step in the McKinley Hiring Solution, the online first interview that begins the McKinley Hiring Process.

If you want to Attract, Hire, Train and Retain “The Right People”, check out the complete McKinley Hiring Solution.

I received an invitation from a business colleague to become his Facebook “friend”. He is a well-known author and public speaker and views Facebook as a valuable and viable business networking venue.

While there is a chance that some of the information could be open to abuse, he is willing to take that chance because of the benefits of being more connected to his colleagues and clients.

He presents some compelling business development reasons to get on Facebook:

…the key to a successful online presence for business, for networking, and for fun is to show up in many places. One web page does not an online presence make. When you keep popping up one environment after environment people start remembering you. One small cavil, however… what pops up must be congruent.

The days of hiding behind gatekeepers are over. Long live transparency and intimacy.

In case you’re wondering, Michael and I are now “friends”.

According to Jeffrey Gitomer, people spend more time trying to figure out how to get a 7% return on their money than they do trying to figure out how to get a 1000% return on their life, their career, their success, and their fulfillment.

Investing has a much more powerful opportunity that most people do not take advantage of. Investing in you. Personal investing that, if done correctly, will lead to wealth and security without one share of stock.

According to Gitomer Investing in you consists of several elements, including:

Think investment. How much “think time” are you setting aside each day?

Library investment. Survey your library. Look at the books you admire most. Look at the ones you promised yourself you’d read, but somehow never did. What about the books you need to read to get ahead?

Physical investment. What shape is your body in? You must invest in a healthy lifestyle to have a healthy look.

Health investment. When you’re sick, nothing else matters besides getting well. That’s why it’s an imperative to invest in heath and well-being. Prevention. Not “cure what ills.”

Study investment. In sales, the word “student” is defined by the salesperson’s dedication to lifelong learning, and the salesperson’s willingness to research sales calls before they are made.

Time investment. I saved this quality for last, because it’s the glue that holds all the other investments accountable. Time to study your product, time to think, time to study your customers and prospects, even time to study the competition. There is also a time commitment for networking, writing, and marketing. Time is your best friend. Take advantage of it.

Instead of searching for a hot tip, you might want to consider searching your PDA and inserting some appointments with yourself for thinking, writing, reading, exercising, and studying — elements vital to your success, but currently missing from your lifestyle.

You can improve personal productivity with Web tools according to a recent article in Profit magazine. They include Web tools that will help you:

Get control of your to-do lists - Still scribbling to-do lists on scraps of paper at home, at work and in the car? Toss them all and try a free online to-do list such as Ta-da List .

Keep appointments straight, from anywhere - Online calendars such as Google Calendar have two big advantages over those in e-mail programs such as Outlook: they’re easier to view from any place or device, and easier to share with business contacts, friends and family.

Gather key info in one place - Having crucial information scattered all over the place can blow a hole in your productivity. Web tools such as Backpack helps you keep it all straight by providing an online home for your ideas, to-do lists, photos and files.

Say goodbye to Word and Excel with Google Docs and Spreadsheets - Word processing and spreadsheets are what got business hooked on computers in the first place. The addiction will only deepen now that you can use this free browser-based service to, for example, create a word-processing file even if you’re on the road without your own computer

Slice and dice data in bold new ways - Once you’ve seen the eye-opening Dabble DB video on the firm’s site, suddenly Excel, Access and FileMaker seem a bit clunky. Dabble makes it easy to import existing data from spreadsheets, contact lists or databases (or input it from scratch), then group, sort and filter it.

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