This has been a week of quite amazing project experiences at STAGIS. From from flying to Jutland with Anne to do identity studies among pupils and teachers at Femmøller Efterskole, to facilitating an exiting workshop on worst/best-case scenarios and visions for leaders across a sector for public transportation in DK with my colleagues Nikolaj and Louise. This exiting Employer Branding project that I’ve loved helping to start off, and where the pics are from, is just getting going on the road now after many months of prep-meetings; stay posted for more on this in 2008…
Codifying communicative challenges of recruitment and Employer Branding Even though these two projects are very, very different, they somehow share a code, that is also part of the code of what we do at STAGIS: Helping organizations communicate their authentic strengths from within, and develope their culture and visual identity in a way, that will strengthen the organization, express its culture in the authentic way, hereby aiming at recruiting the right employees for the organization – or pupils for the school, that will thrive in the institution – because they get an authentic image of what the organization or institution can offer.
In this sense, ‘wrong’ recruitment of pupils, which may lead to broken-off studies, because the institution is communicating a cultural image, values, goals or making promises it can’t deliver, or because the communication isn’t clear for its target groups, can be just as problematic for both the pupil and the institution, as if workplace organizations present themselves in an unclear or inauthentic way in a recruitment process, which may lead to an unfruitful process for as well employees as employers, challenging the work-life of both and making trouble for the organization keeping their employees or recruiting at all.
Authentic organizational identity as projecting images of practice
Through projecting an authentic image of the organization, the institution or business will make promises it can deliver, and with consultation it might also be able to reflect upon its own potentials for learning, developing and improving its recruitment to grow more futile grounds for attracting people that can support the values and future of the organization. So this is a two-way, relational and co-dependent thing, that our work aims at supporting. Really important when communicating on the job market – crucial when communicating or marketing to children and youngsters.
One of the identities Anne and Nikolaj will work on now, based on the identity research Anne and I did in Jutland this week, is the new identity and institutional image of Femmøller Efterskole.
Among other things I’ve been working on our interview material today; and I must say it was such a great experience talking to the appr. 15-18-year old pupils at Femmøller. After having specialized in communicating and marketing to kids and young people, and having worked with consumer identities among childen and young people, it was a great pleasure for me to do this research.
I’m impressed with the mind-sets, maturity and reflexivity of the pupils we talked to. If I were the principal there, I’d be thrilled hearing how happy and exited the pupils are with their scool and the culture lived at the institution. So, I look very much forward to see how Anne and Nikolaj will work with our culture and identity studies, turning them in to the authentic organizational image and identity of the institution.