Brian Wilkinson, a member of Randstad’s main board, told Recruiter that clients need to stand back and develop a strategy to re-align their employer brands to the current needs of those they are seeking to attract.

“The implication of continuing to promote differentiators that people don’t want will result in higher attrition and failure to secure key skills,” he said.

Wilkinson’s comments come after Randstad’s ’World of Work Report 2010/11’ found there were important differences between what attracts people to different types of organisations. For example, quality training and development ranked number one for public sector interim/contract workers, but this did not make the top three for workers in the private sector.

As social media now plays such a key role in reputation management, use this to your advantage and communicate your plans, for example about staff development, to your current and future workers.

It also found there was a mismatch between the views of employers and employees on what kept them in their current job, and what would encourage them to move to a new job.

For example, while employers ranked company reputation and employer brand as number one in retaining staff, employees ranked a competitive salary and remuneration as the top ’pull factor’ in luring them away from their current employer.

Wilkinson urged recruiters to use social media to build their external employer brand. “As social media now plays such a key role in reputation management, use this to your advantage and communicate your plans, for example about staff development, to your current and future workers. This will slowly help to re-shape the external employer brand, supported by ringing endorsement from the internal workforce.”