Employer Brand Headlines Newsletter

Survey results show employees are feeling anxious about post-pandemic working arrangements and the future of remote work, even if you don’t yet know what to tell them.

Analyzing digital communications can help you identify which people are high performers and which roles are becoming obsolete.

Universum Managing Director for the Nordics, Claes Peyron discusses Employer Branding during COVID-19 and what lies ahead for talent acquisition.

Hop off the bandwagon that employee engagement is measured using different click metrics. These KPIs can help explain EE to leadership more holistically.

Stanford's Nicholas Bloom says companies should adopt centralized hybrid work approaches.

Three data-backed techniques to ensure your emails get opened and read by employees. Have you ever had to send an email so important that you reviewed and re-wrote the email 10 times and paced around your home before pressing the send button? That’s how many communicators felt during the pandemic as many had to send […]

A survey of Fortune 1000 executives sheds light on the cultural barriers to change.

Presentations by Benedict Evans: The Great Unbundling

These surprising marketing facts will have you rethinking your recruitment marketing strategy! How many of these little-known marketing facts do you know?

If you agree with this idea that businesses need to step up to solve bigger, shared problems then we have a model for you. https://lnkd.in/gt3j9QY...

Google's Official Digital Marketing Publication. Explore the three types of marketing incrementality and what each type can be used for.

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.

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.

Because employer branding as a function is so incredibly complex, it seems like the people who do it each have their own "process" for development. Some people are copy-writers, some people approach it more visually. Some people leverage their tech stack. And others work the internal politics side to develop something that will have immediate buy-in. Those are all possible ways to do it. But what if you had something stronger, something that yo could build creative on top of, something that was tech agnostic, or could shut down petty squabbles internally quickly? Because such a thing might exist? What is your employer brand built on?

Yet another case study of an organization deciding to get serious about their diversity issues and actually moving the needle. How?! Start with data, but then also (and here's the magic part) have the will to make changes based on the data. Crazy, right?

Lots of great data points on Vox's wrap up of 2019 tech trends. The most interesting one is how tech talent is continuing to cluster around a handful of cities. This blows my mind. We all know how expensive it is to hire in the obvious cities, so you'd assume companies would look beyond those cities for talent (and a steep discount), but that's not happening. Might be a good chart to show the hiring manager who asks why it's so hard to hire in Boston, SF and Seattle

If you're going to force your candidates through your TSA-like ATS (huh... they share the same letters... weird), you better be taking advantage of it as a shared point of contact (and data) for candidates and recruiters.

The article itself sighs at yet another list of employer branding stats that you and I might find incredibly pedestrian, but having these kinds of things handy might help move that roadblock at work. Example: 91% of candidates seek out at least one online or offline resource to evaluate an employer’s brand before applying for a job.

Do job seekers really change? Here's two charts to show how much graduating talent has changed in just nine years.

And if you're looking to fine-tune your storytelling content strategy, Narrative Science has a nice ebook called Let Your People Be People I can recommend.

Anyone who has ever worked with sales and marketing teams knows how embedded data is in everything they do: how to collect it, how to make decisions with it, etc. And yet, data isn't really a core part of TA/Recruiting culture. Sure, we know our pipeline and TTF numbers, but that's just simple outcomes. I'm always thrown by how hard it is to get TA teams to think with data, but that's because the industry doesn't have a culture of using it. And if no one else in TA is using it, it's a great excuse to not use it. So if you're ready to change that culture, HBR has some good ideas.

Let's talk about trust. In a podcast last year, I predicted that salary information was crucial to candidates not just because candidates seek to optimize total compensation above all else, but because it is the only data point they can trust. Recruiters, employer branders and hiring managers are incentivized to paint rosy pictures of the opportunity, pictures candidates are not always able to validate until inside the company. Thus, they hold the salary number to be the best data point because it isn't subject to perspective or spin. Why bring up trust? Well, Edelman's 2020 Trust Barometer came out two weeks ago and it is stunning. Across the board and almost universally, trust of government agencies, companies, technology and media has fallen. People are worried about losing their job as the gig economy, automation and a lack of skills creates more and more chance of being left behind. A majority of Americans don't trust the news they get and worry about being manipulated. No major institutions are seen as being both ethical and competent. Businesses are seen as having little to no commitment for their people in the face of creating profits. Like I said, it's a stunner. And into this world goes your little recruitment marketing ad or a career site that simple suggests that yours is a company for open-minded folks looking to make an impact. How believable is that message when people don't trust the company producing it? Or when they don't feel like they have reputable third-party sources with which to validate the claim?

I talk a lot about how a thumbnail guide to measuring your brand strength is in measuring both your reach and your sentiment. But how to measure sentiment? Here's a list of words listed by how positive and negative they describe your company.

To steal a line from David C. Baker, you can't read your label if you're inside the jar. If you are trying to see and distill your own employer brand, your biggest obstacle is you (and your biases you can't see). By way of example, my colleague Dennis Billgren reminds us that you might "know" that what US tech workers want is more work-life balance and autonomy. So why does Tesla and SpaceX (notorious for NOT having those things) consistently rank at the top of most desired employers? What you think you know isn't the same as objective knowledge, especially in employer branding.

Google released a whole lot of insights around how and why people watch video online. The data, based on 12,000 people on YouTube, shows why people watch video online, broken down my age ranges and geography. Some takeaways? No one cares about your production values if the content is interesting and/or teaches something. Feeding audiences' passions is a much better driver than celebrities or is mobile-optimized (turns out having a good concept and purpose beats polish and optimization tricks). It turns out that while you're competing with Ryan Gosling for attention, you can still win. Great stuff here.

NYTimes has a bunch of data on how people's internet use has changed since their lockdowns. This might be useful as you plan how you reach out to people in a COVID world. My big takeaway is that where phone-driven apps had been growing steadily, the fact that we're all locked at home with our laptops and TV means that they are taking up a LOT more of our screen time.

I loved this article on how "combinatorics" (that term had to have been invented by an MBA with a math background) can help find tune your value proposition. If you ignore the jargon, there's a heck of pitch here: because you don't really understand what your talent prospects want (because you haven't tightened your focus enough), you can't differentiate.

And if you'd like to understand how data can underpin a stronger, more resilient employer brand, I wrote something up to try and put it all together and create a string business case for data investment, even when everything seems "up in the air."

Let's talk data. First, ignore the misleading title of how COVID has impacted employer brand, but this article from LinkedIn shows how companies are changing their messaging strategies to reflect the new reality their employees and prospects are facing. I was interested in what content was getting the most engagement, but be aware that often a post talking about how a company is taking care of its employees is going to get more engagement because employees are effectively endorsing and upvoting the concept.