When Maya Shankar was a young girl, she never dreamed that she would become senior director of behavioral economics at Google, lead the White House Behavioral Science Team under President Barack O

People like future-related products and images more if they’re positioned to the right, and past-related ones if they’re on the left. The effect reverses for those who write right-to-left.

You you content marketers and lovers of narrative-driven employer branding, have I got some gold for you... but I'll tell you more in a minute. That feeling, right there, where the writer yanks the rug out from under you and doesn't immediately satiate your curiosity? That's emotional power, something referred to as an "open loop," a glitch in your own cognition you can leverage to create more engagement and emotional connections with people.

Speaking of communicating, Recruiter buried the lede over on this article on how to be a better communicator when everything is Zoom/Teams/Hangouts-based. The best part is at the bottom, where they talk about the importance of being memorable. While i'm enjoying my tour through everyone's dining rooms, it is hard to tell one conversation from the next these days. So yes, spend a few minutes thinking of (on-brand) ways you can be more memorable in your conversations.

Look, this is something I am grappling with because I really want employer branders to think… deeper. It’s not just putting out little videos and polishing up career sites, but helping leadership think better about their brand. One of the ideas I haven’t gotten my arms around but think is special is the concept of cognitive dissonance. We want what we want, but what we want might not align with our stated values. A company who can help its customers overcome that cognitive dissonance is one who can win a long time customer. Like i said, I’m not sure how we can use this idea, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

Look, this is something I am grappling with because I really want employer branders to think… deeper. It’s not just putting out little videos and polishing up career sites, but helping leadership think better about their brand. One of the ideas I haven’t gotten my arms around but think is special is the concept of cognitive dissonance. We want what we want, but what we want might not align with our stated values. A company who can help its customers overcome that cognitive dissonance is one who can win a long time customer. Like i said, I’m not sure how we can use this idea, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

Weren’t we just talking about branding as a means of solving for cognitive dissonance? Here’s another article on building brands on conflicting desires.

Katrina Kibben (is there anyone who thinks more or better about job postings? I doubt it), asks the killer question: for entry-level job postings, why even have bullets at all?

Long-time readers of this newsletter will know about my love/hate relationship I have with HBR. When they aren’t mis-representing what EB is, or clinging to a fairly outmoded sense of who is in charge of an individual’s career, they occasionally drop an article like this one around how “feel good” messages don’t always motivate your employees. Personally, I would have re-written around how not all employees respond to feel-good messages (or any one kind of message, frankly), but good for them to at least consider that employees aren’t interchangeable cogs…

We all love stories! Create an emotional connection with candidates using storytelling techniques to become an Employer of Choice

So I’ve really been living in this “employer branding is all about creating desire” thing lately, huh? I hope it’s a useful way for you to look at what you’re building and how it is performing. But be living in this world of “desire,” to be successful, we need to leverage different ideas. For example: Anticipation. By stoking anticipation, you create design, but it turns out you are creating something else: fear. Think about the last time you were prepping for an interview for a job you really wanted: you anticipated the interview, you were excited to share your experience and learn more, but you were scared you’d mess it up. Juggling two contrasting emotions at once will likely be one of the most valuable skills in EB.