The “Profit, Sustainability, Art” (P.S.A) Approach for Talent Content

By scanning the web, we may have steady streams of content and stories about employer branding, talent marketing actions. We’ve also understood that excellent marketing initiatives couldn’t hide poor employee engagement and a negative workplace experience. Employees are getting more and more connected, and private or offline conversations could happen anytime.

Content is another very important element. Classic.

However, a lack of vision could lead to content based on job postings and basic press releases. Not very engaging.

Before dealing with talent content, let’s get focused on two questions:

Q1 – how value creation is being defined?
Q2 – what are employees recognized for?

Standard answers may go like:

A1 – Accumulation of profit
A2- For generating cash or squeezing costs

This sounds like an excessive focus on financial capital, and we’ve seen the limits of this kind of thinking. We could call it the “Profit-Only Approach” where the best managers are needed for manipulating resources with dexterity.

Of course, it’s still important to make a profit! Commercial successes and awards are strong signals for attracting candidates.

But, what if we add the Sustainability and the Art elements?

We’re getting another definition of value creation. Making a profit, executing (contributing to) a sustainability vision and being artists.

Sustainability and Art are two very important additional boxes. In the Sustainability one, we find actions for people development, workplace innovation, societal impact, volunteering, environmental campaigns, etc…

The convergence of Profit and Sustainability provides growing talent content opportunities. By taking all these actions as stories, one of the talent marketers role would be to contribute, document and share them.

With Art, it’s all about creativity. For example, Facebook uses this to run hackathons. One of the latest one was about space hacking with near 3,000 tweets about it. It turned out that hackathons are also “art projects” because of the important amount of creativity.

We could also add the Google Museum Project as another great illustration. By going from outdoor photos to indoor ones, the Google Maps team just flipped the normal thinking of what a Maps service should be.

Therefore, Art is about abstract and emotions. And with the rise of tools/channels like Pinterest and Instagram, it does make sense to go for “Art Projects.”

Lilian Mahoukou is a France-based marketing professional interested in leveraging social media to spread the word about people-centric initiatives. He also blogs at Doppelganger.name on the use of social media for employment and talent marketing.