Protecting your Employer Brand during a Downturn

Di Worrall interviews Heather Disher – Country Manager Asia Pacific of Employer Branding firm Universum.

Excerpt of audio interview with Heather Disher on Talent Management:

The keys to a powerful talent management strategy for uncertain times

I think that’s probably the question of the century, definitely of the year. Businesses are aware of what’s going on in the press. We all know that the majority of the press are not economists, they are not forecasters. They are going to get it wrong, and they have to talk about doom and gloom because otherwise there is nothing to talk about and people don’t buy their product, their papers and their press. So, there is a lot of talk about talent shortages and so forth, but if you operate in the global economy you can still attract talent from around the world.

A classic example at the moment is the investment houses that have gone under in the UK and the US. Those staff are being approached and are being attracted into the Asia Pacific because, relatively speaking, our banking and finance community have not been hit as hard. To buy in this type of specialized skills from the international market, and to pay less for it is a fantastic opportunity.

There are certainly skill shortages in some areas based on the economy and not in other areas. I think one of the key themes that people really need to understand is that talent management, engagement and attraction are not just the role of HR. The solution is to get a committee together or get a team together. Use members from strategy, marketing, communications, finance, HR of course, but get some other people together, get a corporate strategy team together. Use the diversity of this team to understand: What is our company; Where is it going; and what are we going to need from a product perspective in the next 6 months or even 3 years down the track.

If you don’t get the right team together you are not going to get the right internal information. If you don’t get the right internal information, the wrong message goes out and this is my biggest worry that Australian companies and companies in Australia will not get in quick enough, will not do it well enough and they will fall behind. Really, really critical particularly in this market it’s about the talent you have now and what you need in the future, where are you going to get it from. You may not be able to get it in Australia, you may go overseas to get it. You may find that there’s very little available in Australia because overseas have taken them given how the American dollar can buy us so cheaply.

Uncover the in-house knowledge and skills you already have that can help you navigate the economic storm

An IT project I was consulting to was a great project. It took a lot longer than expected - nearly nine months because we really had to look at what people knew. Their knowledge management systems didn’t really capture that much knowledge. It is awful to say things like that, but it had CVs in them, but it couldn’t draw out information from those documents about what their past skills were.

I’m not University educated and went into the workforce quite young. If you don’t put in my past experiences and my past skills, you won’t really know what my capabilities are in some of these systems. Like this company’s knowledge management system, you could put in people’s degrees and all of that sort of stuff and make automatic assumptions about it what sort of skill set they have, but if you don’t put in past positions and some of the skills areas, if you don’t have a system that will capture that and then enable you to use it, then you will not find out some of the things that this company found out.

So we did fix those things. Just finding these three people, these three guys who were hidden in the company. These three guys could actually run all of Asia Pacific and the Americas for this company in the coming 12 months to 2 years. Before we did this project, the company didn’t even know they existed and they also have the capability to not only run it and lead it but develop it.

Di - It’s a lovely lesson on opportunity in these current times. Too often we look outside to where’s an opportunity, what should we do, who else is there that we can grasp. But what and who have you got already, that you haven’t discovered yet.

There is so much that companies do. All companies do data mining, dig down into the data whether it be financial or customer databases and so forth. But you need to do some people mining too. Really get in there and have a chat to the people that are seemingly underground to you, people that you don’t know much about. You’d be surprised as to what people know and what people can contribute that is sometimes relevant to the time. Particularly in this economic environment, if companies don’t continue to develop, they stay stagnant, and if they stay stagnant they will be so far behind the global community that a lot of our Australian companies will sucked up into the global companies. Many of them will be taken over in merges and acquisitions and that is happening.

This is the time for it so I really, as much as we possibly can, give them a shake, don’t go too slow, keep going, don’t be left behind, this is not little athletics, you do not get a ribbon just for participating, you must be in that group that is running as fast as you can but you have to keep moving. This IT company was able to do that just by being able to identify what skills needed to be learned, and who needed to take certain training and who can run them and who can look after them. A really good development and then how do we reward them.

Heather Disher can be contacted at


mobile: 0438 025 290.

This interview excerpt is a small sample of the new audio CD series - How To Manage in Uncertain Times. The series is designed for leaders or for those who coach them. It is based on a growing collection of comprehensive interviews with people who are experts in a particular area of business which is critical to our survival under these uncertain economic and market conditions

We delve into what successful businesses do during downturns, such as:

• How do they sell?
• How do they respond to competition?
• How do they innovate?
• What type of mindset works well with risk and uncertainty?
• How do they design their employer branding strategy?
• How do they manage talent?
• How will they climate-proof their business? and
• What do culture, demographics and consumer behaviour tell us about current market opportunities and what lies beyond the downturn?

You won’t hear this particular combination of unique insights anywhere else. I’ll bring you a brief excerpt from each interview in forthcoming issues of this ezine.

Keep watch for the launch of How to Manage in Uncertain Times.