Fri, 29 Jun 2012

The current negative publicity surrounding RBS and NatWest might not appear to be good news for the banking group's employer brand, but it could have a silver lining as far as attracting talent is concerned, a conference has heard.

Responding to a question at the #SRCONF Social Recruiting Conference 2012 in London yesterday, Andy Taylor, regional marketing manager, employer brand, RBS, acknowledged "the understandable anger" of the public caused by the knock-on effects of IT problems at the banking group.

However, he added "the irony is that when we are in the headlines visits to our website go up and applications go up".

"Make of that what you will," Taylor continued before suggesting why this might be. "Come fix the bank is a selling point, so where we are at does resonate with a large section of our target audience."

Taylor said that as a recruiter: "We need to divorce the general noise and understandable anger from what we do from a recruitment point of view."

The "absolute key" said Taylor was to ensure that RBS's brand promise was reflected in the candidate experience and journey. "We are doing a lot of work throughout the organisation to achieve that and to make that the case," he said.

RBS was constantly engaged in understanding and testing how perceptions of the bank translated into the recruitment space, and used "lots of metrics" to achieve this, Taylor added.