Back
Managing Director Jon Porter reflects on his extensive career in Talent Advisory and the evolution of Employer Branding:
Early Career in Recruitment
I’ve been in the Talent Advisory and general recruitment space for a very, very long time. After a brief spell selling advertising space for Marketing magazine, I found myself at a small agency called Hoggett Bowers Advertising in June of 1989. As an eager Account Executive, I searched out companies who were getting advertisements set by the newspapers and enticed them to use our creative and production offer. Heady days. Everything revolved around copy deadlines and media discounts. It was fun and exciting but not what you would call high-end conceptual work.
From Hoggett Bowers I moved to Austin Knight (now TMP) and then to Riley (now Havas) and then to TMP Worldwide in January of 2001. During that 12 year span a new a philosophy was building momentum, originally coined by Simon Barrow, and then taken on by many across the sector – Employer Branding. The fundamentals of the approach were founded in common sense – why would the principles of Employer Branding and Employer Marketing be materially different from those around consumer goods?
The Explosion of Employer Branding
The next 20 years saw Employer Branding ‘explode’ across the world of Talent Acquisition. Organisations hired Employer Branding specialists and worked with agencies to build brand narratives, pillars, toolkits, and content libraries to land their brand message at each and every stage of the candidate lifecycle, before and into the organisation.
But the world of work has materially changed over the past 20 years. And with it the demands on the discipline of Employer Branding. Candidates want more in their working and home lives. They want more choice around how and when they apply, how and when they work and with whom they work. Employer Branding has had to evolve. It has had to embrace the Social & Digital space to broaden its reach from talent attraction into culture, inclusivity, and purpose.
The Launch of the TMPW Outthink Index
To reflect these changes TMP Worldwide has also evolved. The social & digital space is now centric to our offer and our approach is founded in our outthink proposition. On Wednesday 3rd July we launched the TMPW Outthink Index. This new industry benchmark measures brands against a wide variety of key candidate touchpoints to give an overall score which we can use to rank organisations against named competitors and sectors. Ultimately allowing organisations to understand if they are leading or lagging behind.
The sector I joined and the sector in which I now work is unrecognisable. Future change is the only constant. In that time Employer Branding has come a long way however with the TMP Worldwide Outthink Index it I’m convinced it continues to be in safe hands.
