Anyway, you wrote:

Kyle, to your point “…I wouldn’t expect employment branding to have less effect on employee hiring/retention in 2007 than it did in 2002 or 2003″ I disagree. Any number of factors - societal, behavioral, environmental, economic, political — would effect hiring and retention in a labor market that is changing on so many levels.

You then wrote:

…hmmm. Re-reading these comments I see I may have missed what you actually meant…Please explain

I simply meant it seems unlikely that, in the last three or four years, people have become less educated and/or less concerned with the notion of branding as it relates to their employer. Maybe it’s because I am an active participant in the advertising/marketing/branding industry, but it seems to me that Americans (particularly those of younger generations) are becoming more attuned to the industry’s strategies and more aware of any disconnect that arises between a brand’s promise and its real-world delivery.

There’s an article on BrandWeek about teenagers’ response to Brands, and one of the findings is that 52% of teen feel that “Brands are created by marketers just to get more money.”

While some businesspeople might say “No, d’uh,” the inclusion of the word “just” implies a moral condemnation of such profit-motivated tactics. Employers need to take that condemnation into account (pun intended). If an employment brand is developed for the sole purpose of increasing the bottom line, then the younger generation of recruits (who are not searching for a career as much they are searching for meaning) will find themselves dreaming of escape before they’ve even completed their training. And that doesn’t help anyone.

What it comes down to, in my mind, is branding as an honest appraisal of who a company is and what it hopes to achieve. Everything that happens after the appraisal, from the development of a brand-influenced message to the design of a brand-influenced design template to the selection of brand-influenced colors is nothing more than (and nothing less than) advertising.

There is structure emerging in these communications, however, that differentiates research from opinion. There is only one link provided by Ami, that has a quantifiable “future” of value (the kind of value that if translated into practice that you can take to a bank and “bank on a tomorrow.” If you want to guess which once and tell me why, email me at coregroup@workecology.com. Yes this is a test!

Anna, what you have contributed here is a valuable representation of how a researcher, such as yourself, can benchmark change and think their way into it. So thank you.

Emerging within this conversation is a “truth” that will weave into real success stories. We are moving to a decade of the “unbrand.”
Brands sell products. Brands to not validate or credential knowledge. The difficulty with the HR and recruiting space at this time is that like in all fields, expertise (knowledge) is being differentiated from innovation (applied practice). If you are an innovator, you may not work for a brand. Your drive will be if the company will let you contribute to brand and you can recruit and work for that.

I think this conversation has some signficant implications that can only be tackled with quantitative research within a social network of trust. Web based polls in this area are useles if they cannot be quantified. In fact most magazines on the newstand are losing major advertising dollars right now for that reason. They don’t really know any longer who their reader is or if they are simply attracting a reader that puts forth heroic deeds, a la Jack Welch.

The workplace of the future is going to bank on a future as a result of collaboration and the disappearance of the hero into a immune system like galaxy of people representing a diversity that cannot be defined. Their voice and knowledge (not age) and how they speak (based on emotional intelligence) will define their power and influence. I suggest that anyone who reads here read this article in the most current issue of http://www.strategy-business.com on Howard Gardener. Just go to the search engine after you register for free and search HOWARD GARDNER.

Stay tuned for latest future scenario at the new under construction:
www.laviniaweissman.com. Coming to desktops in December/January.

BusinessWeeks’ The Future of Work and Lou Adler’s take Building the Workforce of the Future
The Future of Work Weblog
Talentism
RAND’s The Future at Work — Trends and Implications
The Engaging Brand
A River of Reputation Runs Through Your Employer Brand
The Underbelly of Your Employer Brand

Enjoy!

In many ways the whole shift is related to the perspectivism that some say Nietzsche and others prescribed/identified. The philosophical shift has affected us in many ways - not just in management/recruitment, but in a host of other disciplines too. I agree wholeheartedly that the apple cart has been upturned and that old prescriptions will not cure our current ills. We should all (regardless of our area of expertise) come to these things with a fresh, multidisciplinary and inclusive approach that fearlessly embraces change.
Thus spoke a baby boomer.