Mispricing Prestige: Personal Reflections and Why We’re Investing in Our Employer Brand

Johannesburg | Thought Leadership

I started my career at what became South Africa’s largest stockbroker, Peresec. My seven years there, however, set me up for a naïve misunderstanding of branding and its value. I thought the professional world operated as a pure meritocracy, efficiently allocating resources to those who deserved them – the best talent and clients going to companies that created real value.

Completing my MBA last year, at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, was eye-opening to say the least. Most of my classmates came from large corporate environments with household names. They were battle-hardened to corporate politics and the need to always be selling their personal brands. At first, I found it painful, but eventually I started to appreciate that I had something to learn.

The world is complex and uncertain. For those unfamiliar with information asymmetry, it simply means that one party to a transaction has more, or better, information than the other. This often leads to inefficiencies and market failures. To deal with these challenges, we typically revert to heuristics to simplify our decision making. Although this can be useful for making instinctive, fast decisions, it can often lead to suboptimal long-term decisions due to unconscious bias. In an uncertain world, perception is often more important than reality. In the words of Rory Sutherland, “a flower is often a weed with a good advertising budget.”

I joined Moore Johannesburg in February this year. Have you heard of it? I hope so. If not, we’re working on it, and I’ll explain why. My role as COO, to steal from Clayton Christensen, is to best position our resources, processes, and decision-making to create value.

As a professional services firm, our most important resource is our talent. Bringing exceptional talent into our firm is critical. If we get that wrong, we don’t have a business.

The talent market is extremely competitive. People have choices, particularly the exceptional ones that you want to hire. The unfortunate reality is that we’re not well known. I attended a career fair at my alma mater earlier this year and most of the conversations started with “I’ve never heard of Moore, tell me about it”. Not ideal.

I mentioned information asymmetry earlier because that’s what we’re battling against. A common remedy to uncertainty is to follow trend and do what’s always been done. This is known as Social Proof, and it comes in many varieties. Quite simply, you’re more likely to go with a particular choice because that’s the default position. It’s also likely the default for your parents, your peers, and people you go to for advice. In accounting, the Big 4 occupies that position in your mind and the minds of others. When you think of prestige, recognition, and the likelihood of being envied, having those brands on your CV will take you a long way. For the uninitiated, you’ll look like a rockstar. Analogous to passive investing, you’ll earn market returns until you exit your position.

When it comes to career, I don’t love market returns. Not trained as an accountant, I never wanted to join an audit, tax, advisory firm. That said, I joined Moore Johannesburg for a variety of reasons. It’s on a steep growth trajectory, having grown from 28 people, 5 years ago, to around 200 today, with many more to come. The founders and owners run the place. They’re super hands-on and entrepreneurial. They don’t talk and politic, they make decisions and get things done. At 33, many people in managerial positions are younger than me – it’s refreshing. Is audit, tax, and advisory a sexy space to be in? No, but it’s great to be part of a company actively changing that narrative.

Most people don’t know what they want and they’re happy to go with the default option. Fortunately, we’re not interested in most people. We hold the contrarian view that a select few who want to play an active role in their futures go beyond the superficial brag of a well-known name on their CV. People who care about meaningful work, purpose, and responsibility. Unfortunately, great opportunities can seem hard to find because stories are drowned out by higher marketing budgets, default positions, and stories that never get told.

We see a different version of the future than most people in our industry. That’s why we’re investing in our employer brand, so that the right people know we exist. We cannot ignore that people reason with heuristics. If we believe that our accelerated career progression and culture alone will make us an attractive employer, we’d be naïve. We’d be building the greatest thing that no one’s ever heard about. If you don’t tell your story, either no one will, or someone else will.

I didn’t join Moore Johannesburg for it to be on my CV, quite the opposite. I wanted to play an active role in shaping its future by working with people who want to get things done. This place has an inspiring story to tell. It just needs a storyteller.