Benoît Heilbrunn, ESCP Business School – The employer brand: the employee becomes a consumer of employment! – Strategies & Management

The drop in the unemployment rate is good news, except perhaps for companies which see the balance of power with their future employees reversing. While it often becomes easier than before to find work by crossing the street, negotiation conditions are more favorable to employees seeking qualified employment. Hence this paradox which consists of companies posting CVs as people looking for a job would do.

Many sectors are thus faced with two well-known marketing problems: on the one hand the attraction of new talents, on the other hand the retention of employees who are often tempted to look elsewhere due to the new opportunities offered by an economic situation of almost full employment. Hence the need for companies that are accustomed to the principles of efficiency and performance of Taylorism to claim to build a calming and fulfilling work environment. And all the more so since the company is increasingly subject to a transformative ideology which postulates that it must necessarily positively affect the lives of individuals and societies. This is why we cannot separate the question of purpose from that of the employer brand. Companies that talk the most about purpose also have a stronger propensity to develop their employer brand. Hence the temptation of a utopian discourse which would suggest that the world of work is truly idyllic.

Therefore, an employer branding strategy has the essential function of showing that the company is not simply a collective work space, but a real place of sociability and fulfillment. It’s about making the employee an actor in their work and showing that their tasks are part of a larger, meaningful whole. Rather than focusing on the economic dimension, and therefore on the purely transactional question of work, it is a question of emphasizing its properly experiential dimension. And the essence of the experience economy is to put the consumer to work by ensuring that they are both producer and consumer of their experience. Which reminds us of a fundamental dimension of work, namely that we produce ourselves as we work. It is about cooperating in the double sense of working together and doing common work. This is why employer brands benchmark themselves through numerous surveys according to criteria of trust, respect, pride, when it is not a question of camaraderie.

However, it is clear that it is most often in companies that claim that it is good to live and work within them that invisible games of terror, power and anonymization are deployed. By considering the employee as a customer who must be seduced, it is a question of bringing work into the field of consumption. By disguising ourselves behind a discourse of emancipation and fulfillment, the aim is to discourage any desire to zap the behavior of employees considered as simple consumers. A bit as if work were just a commodity, which goes against the very idea of ​​an employer brand.