Q Could you share with us the secrets of how does Albert Heijn Operating Unit’s employer brand stand out?
At Albert Heijn, we are facing a challenge in recruiting and retaining our store employees. Our operation model is built on a large number of teenagers. It’s hard to recruit and retain the target group. Since we are talking about hiring a large volume of teenagers, there is a lot of experience available on the market, locally and through social media. The secret of our Employer Branding approach is our employees themselves. They share their experiences with their peers, we only grow their stories and give them a stage. So our Employer Branding secret lies in the employee experiences we offer, experiences which can engage our people and make them proud about the experience they want to share.
Q What are your best ways that can jump-start a strong employer brand strategy?
Employer Branding is an approach with a long-term scope. It is about reputation and there are no quick lasting fixes available. In relation to recruitment demands, in most cases, there can be different quick fixes, varying from process optimization, job marketing activities to recruitment tech solutions. But always the first question you have to answer is: what role do I want to play in the lives of our employees? Followed by an investigation of the needs of your employees.
Q What are your TOP tips for employer brand managers?
Start with your current employees, find out what their needs are, what their experience is and what they tell others about working at your company.
Do not look at all the employees as if they are all the same – differentiate, make relevant segmentations from business and employee point of view.
Start small, take step by step.
Get your data right. Gather and combine the relevant data from different sources to prove internally the added value of your approach and to learn by doing. What does really work and what doesn’t. So you can develop your approach fact-based.
Q What are the most important challenges of employer branding & employee engagement?
The most important challenges are rooted in a scarce market, growing flexible work approach with less loyalty intentions on both sides – the employer and the employee; technology changes which impact labour market and labour forces and the new ways of working. All together this will make working look quite different from what we experience today. Knowing this, our challenge from an Employer Branding and an Employee Engagement point of view is to attract, retain and engage the right skills at the right moment and optimize the added value of these skills for our customers for the time the people with these skills work with us. To grow the Employee Life-Time Value.
Q Please, share a couple of practical techniques you use for employee engagement.
That is a tough question without a context. In essence, it is about employee journey mapping, managing the employee experience and giving our store managers some tools to gain insight in their local employee experience, which makes it easy for them to impact the local employee journey in their stores since employee engagement is often built on the local level by managers and their teams.
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