You have been very successful in creating an attractive workplace through solid “employer branding work”. If you were to give us three concrete pieces of advice, what would they be?
You need to start where you are. Be honest with yourself when you measure your baseline, even if it turns out that your goal is far from your starting point. There are no shortcuts if you really want a sustainable result, so don't be tempted to jump on them when they appear. Instead, spend time getting a good and well-developed foundation in place and then build on from there.
Define your target group and challenge yourself to really figure out what type of candidates you are targeting. Base it on business strategy/business goals and what you need to enable this. In this way, it becomes clear to you as a business and facilitates the other work around the development of various activities. It also creates clarity for the target group you want to reach with your employer branding work.
Get the whole organization involved in the work. This is not an issue that is only owned by HR or the Communications Department but is something that needs to involve all parts of the business. Find your ambassadors but aim to expand this so that it includes everyone. In this way, you get an employer brand that comes from within and becomes genuine and authentic.
Private recruitment companies are automating both selection processes and employer branding work to an increasing extent. How does the Swedish Public Employment Service work with this type of digitization?
We are currently reviewing how we use the opportunities that exist to automate parts of the moments in our recruitments with the help of digitization. There are a number of development areas linked to the various steps in the process, everything from selection, reference taking to onboarding. It is really positive that we now see how we could streamline our work in the recruitment part. This is also a natural step for us, to digitize various processes within the HR area as we do the same with many other parts of our internal operations.
Regarding employer branding, there is nothing on the agenda right now, but personally I see that there are things to do even in that part.
What do you think about the next five years – which parts of this important work cannot, or should not, be digitized?
This is of course a difficult question. I think that more than what we see as possible today can be digitized. It is easy to think that the human contact and what is supported by the individuals in the organization cannot be digitized. But what happens when we have a combination of robots and people in our businesses?! I personally think it is more important to focus on which skills we will need to strengthen our organizations with. Regardless of what the future will look like, there are a number of skills that will be particularly crucial, regardless of what type of business you are in. Therefore, employer branding work is extra important to prioritize. If you can also streamline that work in various ways through digitization and automation, it is only positive.