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To be a leader in the travel industry, you have to have talent: talented marketing strategies, thought leaders, content strategists, artists, developers, ad managers, sales executives, media planners, researchers, and more. It's important to your company's success to identify, attract and retain that talent.
A Talent Brand is a significant contributor to your company's overall reputation — in addition to how you brand yourself per the services you provide.
Your company has a Talent Brand, whether you are aware of it or not. It's the impression other people have about what it's like to work for your company: Are you creative? Do you expect and reward top performance? Are you transparent? Do you invest in training? Do you think strategically? Do you respect and honor your employees? Do you offer opportunities for growth?
A Talent Brand also must be authentic. For example, at Miles, we are known to be entrepreneurial and work hard because our clients expect that of us. We provide them highly customized quality products and highly customized customer service. This approach creates a culture of high creativity, flexibility and ownership/responsibility. It aligns perfectly with how we service our clients and our company brand.
Another example is Google. Their Talent Brand aligns with their company brand of innovation. They actively look for new ways to help their employees deal with work/life balance with their gDNA project, a long-term study to understand work behavior. Starbucks empowers their employees to engage on social media channels to share their values of creating franchises and giving back to communities.
To be effective, you need to make your Talent Brand intentional. Let others know about your efforts in employee engagement and development by actively managing your brand — monitoring, building and maintaining it.
This isn't solely the responsibility of Human Resources, or even senior management; it should be everyone's focus. After all, the place that you pour your creative heart and soul into for 8+ hours a day is where you also have to interact with your bosses and coworkers, and these people make and affect your Talent Brand.