Competition for talent is heating up in many industries and will probably intensify, since demographic trends make it increasingly difficult for companies to replace valued employees when they retire.1 In response, many companies are trying to sharpen the way they market themselves to recruits, by applying branding techniques to recruitment.
Our analysis indicates that few companies are as rigorous or precise at branding themselves as employers as they are at branding their products and services. Experience therefore suggests to us that many of these initiatives could fail. For a company to exploit its brand effectively when it fishes for talent, it must think of recruits as customers, use sophisticated marketing analysis to identify its key rivals, determine which corporate attributes matter most to specific types of recruits, and understand how best to reach them.
Surveys that rank favorite employers by industry are common; so too are surveys based on the recruits' academic focus, such as business, engineering, or science. But these surveys don't provide employers with the knowledge they really need: information on which companies are the most formidable competitors for the recruits they want and how to become more effective during the various stages of the recruitment process....