Considering employer brand

The concept and meaning of an ‘employer brand’ has been widely discussed by human resource teams of our parent company, SUEZ ENVIRONNEMENT, and here at SITA UK.

Discussion around this topic has made me wonder what makes people join SITA UK. What is the overall message and impression that we give to potential employees?

There are many experts and academics trying to define what an employer brand is and how a company can best develop its brand and utilise it to the company’s advantage. In the past at SITA UK, we ran the ‘contact programme’ where each month we contacted a number of new employees and asked them why they joined us. Additionally, we would approach a number of employees after six months of working with us and asked what their thoughts on the company were.

Of course there were many individual and often personal reasons for joining – career, promotion, location, etc. However, one reason most of people mentioned in their top two and three reasons, often almost as an embarrassing afterthought, was their wish to ‘be green’ or to ‘give something back to society’.

Perhaps these rationales should form the basis for our employer brand, because there are few things that will commit an employee to an organisation more than an alignment behind its social responsibility.