After a senior executive of an automobile brand talked about "employees miss the birth of a child in order to build a car", which aroused negative public opinion, Xuan Jing, vice president of public relations of Baidu, caused many netizens to "crusade" because of remarks such as "public relations employees cannot have holidays" and "employees break up and leave their jobs in seconds".
Some voices believe that Xuanjing's related remarks are impersonal, lack respect and care for employees, and ignore employees' needs for work-life balance. Xuan Jing's personal remarks overturned and also affected Baidu's "employer brand image". Baidu founder Robin Li quickly spoke out, saying that excellent employees represent the real Baidu.
The term "employer brand" is a foreign product, generally speaking, it is the "personality" of the enterprise, including the working environment, salary level, career development opportunities, management policies and styles, corporate culture, etc., which is an important reference for judging the construction of corporate culture and ESG system.
In recent years, the young generation represented by the post-00s generation has become an important force in the workplace, they have a strong sense of autonomy and personality in career choice, and the construction of "employer brand" has received unprecedented attention among global giant enterprises.
Shopping malls are like battlefields, and the rabble cannot win the battle. In the history of business, the companies of the world's giants have often been "far ahead" in employer branding. For example, Procter & Gamble defines employees as the greatest asset, Google pays attention to work-life balance for employees, provides rich benefits and employee care programs, and Apple attaches importance to the growth and development of employees, advocating a fair, diverse and inclusive workplace environment.
In China, there are also many giant enterprises that are committed to employer brand building, which is popular with young people. For example, Fat Donglai, who has repeatedly been out of the circle for "spoiling employees", recruited more than 200 people for certain positions and received more than 30,000 resumes.
Recently, the world's largest online travel platform (OTA) Ctrip Group announced that the customer service team will fully implement the Spring Festival return to the hometown office policy, taking the Spring Festival in 2025 as an example, Ctrip's customer service can return to the company one month before the Spring Festival next year, and return to the company two weeks after the Spring Festival, and the hybrid work of Ctrip's customer service will be extended to one and a half months during the Spring Festival. As soon as the policy came out, the number of resumes submitted to Ctrip's customer service soared. Ctrip's policy has been well received by the outside world, and some netizens said that this is the first wave of surprises received by professionals in 2024.
The Boston Consulting Group, a global corporate strategy management company, once said that a company's brand is divided into company brand, product brand, and employer brand. Enterprises rely on the company brand to attract investment, rely on the product brand to attract consumers, rely on the employer brand to attract talents, all three are the cornerstone of enterprise development.
Young People's Workplace Guide: "Looking Forward" is Better Than "Looking Money"
There is a classic line in the movie "Prometheus": Life is a wilderness, not a track. In the concept of career choice of the younger generation, the pursuit of the breadth and freedom of life is extremely important, and "looking forward" is better than "looking at money".
According to data from the Ministry of Education, in 2022, there will be 10.76 million college graduates in mainland China, and the annual number will exceed 10 million for the first time, and the first batch of post-00s will enter the workplace. This year, some institutions launched a questionnaire survey for students and newcomers in colleges and universities across the country. According to the results of the survey, the top three factors that respondents look for when looking for a job are growth space, sense of value and high salary.
In 2023, the number of mainland college graduates will reach 11.58 million, a new high. The recruitment agency released the "Fresh Graduates Survey Report", which shows that salary and benefits, industry development prospects, growth opportunities and development space are the three most important factors for post-00 job seekers when looking for jobs.
It is worth noting that compared with 2023, the 2024 fresh graduates have significantly reduced their attention to "salary and benefits", while their attention to the development prospects and growth opportunities and development space of the industry has increased.
Judging from the above survey or survey data, the young generation represented by the post-00s is increasingly pursuing the realization of self-worth, although salary is very important, but the priority of realizing self-worth is higher.
In the current workplace, the post-00s young generation has distinctive characteristics, such as "WLB" (work life balance), "refuse to draw cakes", "rectify the workplace" and other high-frequency words. It is worth noting that the post-00s pursue the release of personality and the realization of self-worth, and also have a strong sense of social responsibility.
Previously, senior domestic human resources experts and professors from famous overseas universities, after research and interviews, came to the same conclusion: young employees represented by the post-00s generation pay more and more attention to the mission, value, humanistic culture and social responsibility of an enterprise, and they pay attention to why a company needs to work by themselves every day, and what are the exciting and moving aspects of this company.
Under the "rectification" of the post-00s, the workplace has begun to enter the era of "new employer economy", which is typically characterized by the evolution of employment relationship to partnership between employees and enterprises, which brings new opportunities and challenges to the employer brand building of enterprises.
In the current workplace, almost all jobs need to give full play to people's subjective initiative, and this subjective initiative is difficult to be bound by a paper contract, and the relationship between the enterprise and the employee is simply understood as the employment relationship, which is easy to cause the employee and the enterprise to be separated.
For recruiting companies, it is necessary to build a talent fortress by providing more development space and a friendly environment for young people, making the workplace a "wilderness" rather than a "track", and stimulating the subjective initiative of employees. At the same time, the sense of social responsibility of enterprises is also a "must answer" for employer brand building.
Employer brand building, the global giant has no battlefield of gunpowder
In the business market, employer branding is becoming a battlefield for global giants, and there are many cases of mutual achievement between employees and enterprises.
For example, Google is one of the top Internet companies in the world and has one of the highest employee happiness indexes in the world. At Google, employees can enjoy free food throughout the day, access to the gym at any time, daycare, on-campus medical care, and a lap in the pool. What's more, employees can bring pets to work.
Through a reasonable and beneficial welfare system, Google has formed a development path of "improving employee happiness, improving the quality and efficiency of customer service, improving customer satisfaction, and leaping in company performance and business value".
For example, in the first quarter of 2024, Google's revenue was $80.5 billion, exceeding market expectations, compared with $69.8 billion in the same period last year; Net profit was 23.66 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 57%. In the capital market, Google's market capitalization has been climbing, exceeding $2 trillion.
Many people attribute Google's success to its envious employee benefits policies. In addition to overseas giants represented by Google, many domestic companies that have grown into global giants also attach great importance to employee care.
For example, Trip.com Group recently announced that its customer service team will fully implement the policy of returning to their hometowns during the Spring Festival. Taking the Spring Festival in 2025 as an example, Ctrip's customer service can return to their hometowns about a month before the Spring Festival next year and return to the company about two weeks after the Spring Festival, and Ctrip's customer service hybrid office will be extended to about a month and a half during the Spring Festival.
Around the spring of 2024, more than 600 Ctrip employees piloted a return to their hometowns, and achieved win-win results: the unit efficiency of employees returning to their hometowns increased by 5.2%, the praise rate of employees for the company increased by 10%, and the absenteeism rate decreased by 44%.
According to public data, Ctrip has 15,000 customer service employees, distributed in call centers in 18 countries and regions around the world, providing 7*24 hours of service for passengers, and can answer 95% of passengers' calls within 20 seconds. Ctrip's customer service team is the "nuclear weapon" of the company's partners to lead the globalization, and the company is also committed to improving the happiness of employees.
In recent years, Ctrip has engraved family-friendliness into its corporate values and actively provided a more friendly working environment for its employees without compromising work efficiency. Before the Spring Festival return to work policy, Ctrip also announced in June 2023 that it would invest 1 billion yuan to subsidize employees' childbirth, becoming the envy of office workers as "someone else's company".
Ctrip's subsidy of 1 billion yuan is a positive response to the three-child related policy and a typical manifestation of social responsibility. Ctrip's employee care policy and social responsibility have become a "strong magnetic field" to attract talents. For example, after the release of Ctrip's Spring Festival return to hometown office policy, the number of resumes delivered to customer service soared, the search volume of the recruitment website Ctrip increased, and the number of customer service internal referrals increased.
Giving to many people is a great cause. Like the overseas giants, Ctrip has also achieved a leap in performance and business value. For example, in 2023, Trip.com Group will achieve operating income of 44.51 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 122%, and net profit of 10 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 614%. In the capital market, the share price of Trip.com Group's Hong Kong stocks has continued to refresh its highs, with the latest market value of nearly HK$290 billion.
Countless business cases have proved that employer brand building is a long-term behavior, which is beneficial to employees, customers, enterprises and society. In the era of the "new employer economy", if enterprises want to seize the talent dividend, they need to find a combination of social responsibility and corporate benefits.