Employer Brand Headlines Newsletter

Here's a fun story! You spend months launching an EVP, you build our comms and messaging and candidates seem to really respond to it. Recruiters are using it, talking about how collaborative you are as a culture, how supportive you are. Your words show up in the job postings, recruiter outreach, comms messaging and everything is going great! Then the candidate you've convinced to interview based on that idea of collaborative culture meets your hiring manager who stares at their phone the whole interview. your efforts have been wasted! Worse, that candidate is going to tell everyone on a rating site! This is all to say, don't forget the power your hiring manager has to adding to your employer brand. Which also means, you need to engage them and get them on board. So here are some thoughts on how to educate your hiring manager.

Okay, I now have three friends in the past year who have joined the green economy. Not the recycling economic, but the chronic, reefer and/or blunt economy. Obviously the laws on how legal it is to own and use pot is evolving quickly state by state, but have your HR policies? Note this (just the most recent) occurrence of a company firing an employee for failing a drug test in a state where it isn't criminal to partake. Have you talked to HR about their ganja policies and have you talked about making that policy known to candidates before they apply?

Richard Mosley does a nice piece on how Ireland is an interesting case in what happens when a not-massive city becomes a hub for corporate HQs. What was once a sleepy city (compared with London, Paris and Berlin, certainly) is not a center of business activity. As you may suspect, hiring quality talent has gotten difficult, to say the least. The parallels to US cities not named NYC, LA, or SF are obvious. Fifteen years ago, Seattle, Austin, Denver and Fort Worth have seen 20%+ growth in the last 8 years to meet hiring demands.

"Ryanair’s success is remarkably simple. It understands people, and what drives their decision making, better than almost any other company on the planet."

File under: the little things make a big difference. How to write a disposition letter (most people call them rejection letters) that doesn't make people mad.

You know what bosses like to announce? Events. You know what recruiters and EB pros hate to manage? Events. Overstatement aside, events always sound like fun until you have to manage your own. And things get worse when the boss asks afterwards what the ROI was. So before you even begin to start planning your event, answer some of these questions first: A recruiter's guide to event management.

Related to that, HBR asks if you give your employees a reason to feel proud of what they do? I'd add in, do you ask employees to share that pride when talking with their own networks?

There's a whole movement on "positive psychology" (meaning: psychology focused less on "fixing" you and more on making you feel better) that branders can learn from. For example, people feel better when they have a reason for doing what they are doing (see: the old joke about two stone masons building walls, one of which sees themself building a cathedral). This doesn't mean you should over-index on "purpose," but rather on the work that is serving your purpose. That is, don't just shout about the mission-driven purpose, but remind people that the work itself has purpose.

I'm on record as saying that candidate experience is an often-misunderstood (and over-valued) concept, that (much like EB itself) it isn't something you buy or implement, but is a reflection of who you are and how you operate. Great candidate experience should show off your values and the real experience of working there, not just be obsessed with some vague notion of "white glove service." So I love it when other publications talk about CX from the same experience.

Good visual identity is about more than engaging colors and pretty creative. It needs to enhance your message and brand. That means getting beyond colors and fonts you like or are fashionable. Instead, think about the visuals as a way to invite people to learn more bout your employer brand.

I loved this article in Fistful of Talent about seeing one's job of EB owner as more than just being the EB cheerleader. Too often, we embrace cheerleading simply because aren't given the power or control to make change. But our jobs aren't about control, they are about influence, and how much do cheerleaders really influence things? Instead, be a brand champion.

But there is a dark side to being committed to being data-driven. What happens when you collect enough data on your employees to spot non-productive staff automatically? And if the data can spot them... what happens when automation fires them? Sound crazy? It's happening right now. This isn't a "this is bad!" post, but these are the changes that are happening that directly impact how people perceive your employer brand.

I'm going to call it right now. 2020 is the year recruiting and hiring get real about data. Between all the data sitting in your HRIS systems, the AI that can pull it out and deliver some measure of insights, the availability of low-cost external perception research, workforce planning et al, HR and recruiting will spend the year learning how to collect, manage and make decisions with data. What pushed me over the edge is Talent Culture talking about bringing in the last foot-dragging elements of HR into a data-driven mentality: recruiting.

This week's big read is Boston Consulting Group's article on how the changing world of work is a confluence of changing tech, changing talent needs, and the value of purpose in the next decade. It's very mega-trendy, but there are great notes. For example, how will you understand and communicate your EB internally as teams get smaller and more virtual? Does your EB change for someone working from home? How do you change your strategy of turning them into advocates?

If you employer brand function owns the recruitment marketing function, here's a great article on how to better manage your ad spend.

While candidate experience is impacted by every aspect of recruiting, the number one recruiting focus for 2020 will be employer branding. In fact, 81% of all global companies we surveyed...

LinkedIn says 2020 is the year recruiting completely changes. New skills, new tools, new approaches to recruiting. So... you mean like employer branding?

I'm helping a friend walk her employer brand project through leadership, so I'm super sensitive to how hard is it to get leadership buy-in. Then I see this article on how to get leadership to buy into consumer branding, and I realize we aren't quite the proverbial red-headed step-child we often think we are. Even marketing has to work hard to get buy-in, so why not steal some good ideas from them?

I really wish we could all get away from talking about "culture" as if there's some platonic ideal of culture we should all be shooting for. What I like is not what you like and that's completely fine. And while there are some good points here about fostering a stronger and more obvious culture, don't get sucked into the position that there's only one measure of quality culture.

I'm already on record (what record??!?!) for the power of embracing constraints. When you have no resources or money or time, that's when you are forced to get really creative in solving your problems (even employer branding ones). So here's the HBR talking how innovation doesn't occur despite constraints, but because of them. Sure, if you want to play "follow the leader" and "best practice bingo," you'll pay a premium to do it the way everyone else does. So embrace those constraints (or even apply some arbitrary ones) to innovate better.

When I talk about how to build an employer brand in a company with diverse microcultures, I usually reference a company's legal team and sales teams as the most disparate groups. One is driven by taking risks and the other is driven by negating them. But the trick is, I really don't know much about how corporate legal teams work, do you? Which is why I'm pointing to this article entitled "Does your legal team spark joy?" To me, it was an interesting perspective that even the dry and boring legal team can have and develop their culture. As they support the business, you can be supporting them by telling a more interesting and intimate story about them.

I know I'm in the minority when I say that I don't know that "day in the life" videos are not how I would want to learn about a company (my quibble: they can be as staged and fake as any other marketing device, and frankly, what your office looks like and what meetings look like don't tell me much). But they are obviously a part of many company's employer brands, so if you're going to build them, maybe build them well. William Tincup says the secret to a good video is a focus on hypertransparency and radical candor.

In EMEA and APAC, where tenures are longer and people change companies less, there's a deeper investment in university recruiting to establish and develop one's employer brand. In the states, however, university recruiting often has to beg for crumbs at the table. So if you're going to build a campus recruiting team, do it right. (I'm not saying the secret is to set KPis and tout successes, but it kind of is.)

The intersection between employer brand and influencers is a strange one. You're supposed to create influencers and advocates internally, right? But while consumer marketing fell in lover with professional influencers a few years ago, the tide seems to be changing. Interestingly, it seems like they are changing from "buy an influencer" to "build internal brand communities." Huh. That seems familiar, somehow...

Just as great conversationalists get invited to parties, great content is a welcome guest in an email inbox or a social media feed. And, because content marketing is so critical for B2B companies, being a great guest who gets invited back is just what you want to be.

The top 8 recruitment marketing trends for 2020 (oh look, employer brand as the core of all messages is #1).

There's absolutely nothing wrong with investing in tech, but you can't use it to replace your brand mindset. But how will robots change branding? Well, if your brand is tech-driven, it will definitely flip over the apple cart. But if your brand is idea-driven, it's a very different story.

The bitter and cynical black-hearted part of me really loved this article on brands and emotional dishonesty. All those brands projecting sunny dispositions and unrelenting positivity, are they really getting what they want? Are they applying a short-lived salve to soothe people's pains without actually changing anything? And in the world of employer brand, where there's no such thing as "short-term fixes," what would happen if brands embraced emotional honesty?

Is your employer brand charismatic? This article is really focused on how to build one's own charisma, but the notes sound like I'd want to see in a strong employer brand. Example: "use of metaphors to simplify messages, stir emotions, invoke symbolic meanings, and aid recall" and "The articulation of moral convictions and shared sentiments to demonstrate alignment with the followers." Sounds like a great brand to me.

Not enough attention has been paid to "predictive analytics"when it comes to employer branding. Predictive analytics is the mechanics that suggests what movie you should watch next or what products you might also be interested in. Maybe not in a "you might also be interested in this job" way, but what about predicting what information and content a candidate needs to see next to make a decision on the company. By way of example, here are 7 emerging ways to use predictive analytics.