Take a minute one morning this week as you clean, feed, and dress your body and think of the brand choices you make each day. Savor a sip from that cold glass of orange juice, thick with pulp, and consider the labor behind those 8 ounces of liquid. Decades of dedication and careful manipulation go into the marketing of that brand so that when you are faced with an army of those plastic orange soldiers in the grocer aisle, your subconscious already knows exactly what it wants. Chances are, it knew before you even walked through that door.
adidas is one of those companies that gets that notion. Their employees understand the power behind brand differentiation and how a love of sport can attract brand loyalists. Many lovers of adidas, myself included, have been proudly displaying the brand on hats, pants, and shoes for years, quite possibly without being able to pinpoint when and why those three stripes became so beloved.
To better understand the people behind the brand, I asked Steve Fogarty, Recruiting Captain for adidas North America, how adidas does such a great job of integrating employer branding into a love of sport.
He began by saying that employment branding is the single most important recruiting strategy, yet very few organizations have been able to harness its power.
“Most recruiting professionals can tell you what brand is, but then there is a big gap between what it takes to build a killer employment brand,” Fogarty said. “What you tend to find is a better understanding of marketing and all of its sub-components like PR, Digital Marketing, SEO, etc. Without a well-defined brand position, strong alignment with your stakeholders, and strong linkage with advertising we are most likely wasting most of our marketing dollars.
“At adidas. . . sport is our brand. What I’m working on is how sport is infused with employment at adidas. There are lots of things we can say we are as an employer. We can say we have great careers, great perks, exciting global locations, work-life balance, etc. Is anybody listening to these things though?”
If you hear these perks enough, they start to sound like canned corporate jargon. To truly capture a person’s interest, Fogarty said, you have to promote the connection to the athlete, to sport, and the ability to shape the future of sport. From there he focuses on building alignment and linkage, the branding principles that drive consumer choice and expectation.
“At the end of the day we want top talent to choose our company over others, and their expectations need to be met,” he said. “This means we need to be authentic and true to who we are. If a person shows up and finds that people weren’t passionate about sport at adidas then we can certainly assume their expectations would not be met.”
adidas is using a love of sport to communicate not just to consumers, but to the people interested in becoming a part of their organzation. They recently worked with athlete Candace Parker to shoot video footage for an interactive career site that is under construction. During the Kennedy Conference in Orlando, a clip of the raw footage was unveiled, and it left some notable impressions.
The site is set to go live in April 2009. Upon arrival visitors will be able to interact with Candace and other adidas employees. For example, depending on the type of career you are seeking, Candace will introduce you to an employee in that division.
“Our goal is to show the connection between our employees and the athlete at the highest level and then serve up additional information as it becomes relevant to our target audience,” Fogarty said. “There is so much information clutter out there we have to be smart about when to serve information up versus try to push too many messages on our audience up front.”
adidas is also focused on creating videos for the general public that convey their brand message, including this one, which is a powerful animation of their heritage.
Aside from employer branding through video, Fogarty said his team is always experimenting with fresh recruiting techniques.
“We built a design micro-site which hosts Design team member’s blogs and allows candidates to upload a portfolio,” he said. “It’s a conceptual site that has the design teams rotating three dimensionally through a sphere to the beat of electronica genre music.”
They’ve also integrated some of their job ads with the adidas Originals Facebook widget. Other experiments include running Google ad word campaigns and sampling different social networks. But Fogarty said he’s most excited about a new CRM tool that’s just been implemented.
“Having integration with our ATS’s and advanced web search and tagging capability, it brings several disparate pieces together for us and allows us to collaborate as a Global Recruiting team,” he said. “We have our Asia Pacific team, Russia, North America and Europe all contributing to our pipeline. We have been and will continue to build out a common global recruiting language, so if we see top talent in Russia or Hong Kong we can access the same talent here and trust that we all view talent similarly.”
He also mentions developing a mobile strategy for 2009. “Mobile applications are being developed at a phenomenal rate. What’s unclear to me is how people want to consume media on these devices. It’s just not the same as consuming media on a desktop, so before we go out and push content onto a device like this we need to know what’s relevant, to whom, and can it be sustained.”
I ended by asking Fogarty where the future of recruiting lies. He said, “Recruiting leaders get hit with thousands of new products and services, all claiming to be the Holly Grail of recruiting. We are also expected to be masters of everything and tend not to have the resources to truly be masters . . . but the challenge is that there aren’t many experts and the information is becoming extremely homogenized within our community.
“I predict we will see a trend where more and more recruiting leaders look to Brand experts, Sales experts, and Supply Chain experts outside of our industry and incorporate systems and processes that are working on the product side. You will also see a push for better technology integration and simplification. Recruiting systems should not be overcomplicated. Most are. I also see recruiting departments set up more like sales and marketing functions in the future. You will see candidate segmentation and employer brand marketing supporting sourcing with strong, integrated systems support and much more effective and targeted marketing execution including recruitment advertising, guerilla marketing, mobile marketing, digital marketing, etc.”
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January 16th, 2009 at 6:17 am
Great post, thank you.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about after my “notable impressions” at Kennedy is how Adidas’ employer brand focused on sport actually influences their HR and recruitment processes, because I don’t think they really said much about this.
So I liked hearing about the use of Candace Parker to support Adidas’ interactive career site – I think this demonstrates how they are using (and how other organisations could use) their employer brand to act as a focus for HR / recruitment activities.
Jon.
January 20th, 2009 at 11:52 am
This is an excellent post. The adidas presentation at Kennedy was inspiring both from a recruiting and a marketing standpoint. Their sole focus is the athlete. Their brand development speaks to every stakeholder about the primary goal of the business: to serve athletes. I agree that the recruitment function has become very complicated. Ultimately, the best future recruiters will come from business development backgrounds.
January 21st, 2009 at 7:17 am
Well I see that adidas is making a concerted effort in strengthening their recruitment practices and gearing it to find the right fit for their organization. The employee engagement is a psychological function where the employees see a vested interest in seeing the organization achieve its goals.
However, I feel that Adidas by only targetting the candidates who have a love for sports are limiting their applicant pool. Rather they should focus on attracting people on their skills and experience and then building their committment around the goals of Adidas.
January 31st, 2009 at 3:40 am
Arif, I agree that it is important to focus on skills and experience. I disagree that it is an either or scenario though. If you are Petco you probably aren’t going to hire someone that doesn’t like pets. In fact I would argue that no matter how smart or skilled a candidate is they won’t outperform someone who is equally skilled and passionate about the brand. This is where I differentiate Brand Marketing and Production Marketing. Our Brand is centered around our connection to the athlete and our ability to shape the future of support. Our Brand Marketing focusses on driving this message. In HR/Recruiting our product is our jobs. I didn’t focus as much about this in my interview because this is an area that I think our industry is generally getting better at–knowing how to market our jobs to the right target audience. This is equally important though so I fully agree that you cannot lose site of this.
January 31st, 2009 at 3:43 am
Sorry, I meant “Product Marketing”, not “Production Marketing”.
February 20th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
I have to disagree with Arif as well. While the idea of hiring just based on experience and skills has worked in the past, the entrance of Millennial employees in the workplace has changed the game. Millennial employees, who I am guessing by the use of social media are the targets of Mr. Fogarty (but not the only one), associate a part of themselves with their employer. Engaging and maintaining the productivity of young professionals is extremely challenging, but by recruiting people with the same values as the brand it becomes much easier (since the employee’s lifestyle already fits with the brand’s ideals/lifestyle).
Additionally, when you create an employer brand, and recruit based on that employer brand you do a very important thing: the company differentiates itself from the competition. Today, many people have the idea that within a given industry the only thing that separates one job from another is salary. The employer brand enables the Millennial recruit who seeks not only a salary, but a place to build a community and achieve personal growth to get an inside view of what the company is really like. This allows the recruit to evaluate the prospective job, making sure it is a good fit for them, which reduces the amount of work Adidas needs to do because now the candidates that fit will be drawn to them.
An interesting book that you might want to read that discusses the trend toward more human centric operations is called Talent by Edward Lawler. He describes how some corporations, and especially as the War for Talent increases, are moving towards investing in human capital over the long term because of its increased productivity and stability benefits. The employer brand is the first piece of a human centric company that is exposed to a potential recruit, and as mom always said: first impressions count. So, I really applaud Adidas because they are certainly out in front of this trend.
May 4th, 2009 at 5:11 am
I completely agree with the fact that we need to have the resource that are aligned with the company vision and mission. Demonstrate the key attributes and values which the management desires in the employees at Adidas. My comment was that Adidas limits its pool by specifically focussing on candidates that have love for sports. Suppose you are looking to hire a CFO but the right candidates( with the right skill and competence) does not like sports would you not hire him.
My observation was that love for sports and the product will be built by the management and the culture of the organization.
But Bill and Steve your views are highly enlightening