It is increasingly accepted that a brand is not only the elements such as the logo, website, product, etc, but is also the values, beliefs, mission, What makes us think that the old, static model of 'positioning' a brand makes any sense?

I often hear employer branding being described as an exciting field. And to me it is. But what’s exciting to me may not be particularly exciting to you. If you think ‘exciting’ means that it’s an in-demand industry where your skills and perspective are valued through the business, where companies vie for your attention and […]

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

Have you heard that joke that every item in an employee manual should be named for the person who necessitated that rule? The drinking at work social engagements is the Chad Rule, for example (he knows what he did)? Yeah. Employee manuals are kind of the worst. Don't take my work for it. Fistful of Talent agrees with me, calling it the "worst HR document ever." I bring this up because anything that sucks that people see is an opportunity to support your employer brand.

Our jobs often feel lonely in a sea of people (because we're the only ones who understand what we do). So essays that discuss what someone has learned in their job and journey are so valuable. Jazmyn Mijuskovic talks about her first year at Publix.

What happens when your employees get politically active? This week, more than 360 Amazon employees signed a public petition demanding the corporation take action on climate change. The company responded by threatening to fire them. Last year, Google saw a mass walkout. Between Greta, a US presidential election and Brexit, the political and social landscape is getting very tricky. And yes, your employer brand plays a role. If you've established values and pillars around being green or being socially responsible, what happens when staff act on that? And do you know how leadership will respond?

Here's some advanced brand thinking: Is there an opportunity for you to mix high and low culture ideas to give your message more meaning, more interest? This article over at HBR looks at examples of how super luxury brands co-op super-low status ideas without losing their high-status desirability. Why care? I was struck by the idea that high-status luxury isn't really luxury anymore. I can fabricate or recreate almost anything. Brands like Zara are built on making copies of high-end pieces at affordable prices in weeks. So how to stay high status? Show your high level of taste. Show that you can put a gas station potato chip on four-star meal. Show that you can pull it off. The lesson for you and I might be that we can open up the horizon to all sorts of new ideas for our branding is we have the style and taste to pull it off. Example? If I ran the brand for a fintech brand, I might feel boxed in by who the customer base is. If I provided loans as needed, I might feel weird about providing high end swag to prospects. Maybe we shouldn't exclude these ideas out of hand, but look for ways to mix things up. Because the knock on effect of mixing the two is how... surprising and interesting these hybrids end up appearing. And isn't attracting attention and interest sometimes the point?

I'm glad I finally get to link to an article on "how to enhance your candidate experience" without having to complain that there's more to candidate experience than "white glove." In this piece listing three ways to support your CX, the overarching theme is to provide and deliver more useful information to the candidate. Be it social signals, formal messaging and relationship-building.

Everyone loves the Wendy's social media accounts. How does a square burger chain dance so gloriously on the line of impropriety that other brands can't even get near? They embrace their position as a "challenger" brand. Specifically, they don't shy away from the core idea that you need some kind of conflict in order to create a meaningful narrative.

Branding Mag (rightly) calls "shenanigans" on what feels like every company embracing the concept of "purpose" as a driver in their marketing. To the author's eyes, it is obviously self-serving and has been used to the point of uselessness. That's not good news for us employer brander folks, many of whom rely seriously on the concept of "inspiring purpose" in their EVPs (I mean, now many times in one newsletter am I allowed to use the term 'over-indexed' before this thing gets silly?). But there's some good, news, especially for brands who aren't just slapping a fresh of coat of "purpose" in the brand as the solution d'jour. Defining and proving how your company is trying to create a change in the world is the first step. Get it right, make it real, or just don't both.

Why is an employer brand important? I am a total employer brand nerd. I talk about employer branding.I wrote an essay on how this is the time in which your employer brand is truly revealed. It is during a crisis that we see that we were putting our faith in pretty words to attract talent, or if we were portraying our organization in a meaningfully different way. I'm hoping its a little more inspirational than the this little description makes it sound.

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.

A New Human Normal. "Think of this as a “KonMari” moment for brands"

What can employer brands learn from "luxury brands?" To understand their own truth. Beyond this article, I think there are a lot of interesting parallels between EB and luxe brands. Exclusivity: There's only one open role so only one person can have it. Identity-signaling: People judge you on where you work and you derive self-work from where you work. Cost: No one's ever had an easy job search, no matter how good they are. Just something to consider.

I've talked before about how much I love Oblique Strategies and how I would one day write my own deck for employer brand (tangent: the above article, which you should read all the way through because it talks about the weird shit Brian Eno came up with while recording Bowie's "Heroes," starts with a quote that should be tattooed on our collective hands, "Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences." Anyway...), but this article does a pretty solid job listing 61 ways to differentiate a given brand. A great exercise would be to list all 61 (or maybe just 30) and then list all the ways you could differentiate your own employer brand with that strategy. Congrats, you now have a LOT of good ideas you didn't have before.

I know you want to make BFFs with your marketing team, but a lot of you are having trouble making making it work. The culprit? It's that marketing doesn't understand you. They still see your team as a funnel-filler or Glassdoor review watcher. They treat your team as untested and untrained dilettantes "playing at marketing." Which is why I wrote this for you (to give to them): The CMO's Guide to Employer Branding. It's a long read, I'll grant you, but it should speak their language about your value.

I’m not pointing fingers, but let’s be honest: its easy to define an employer brand when we treat work as a place to go and not as a thing you do. (This article on the future of working kind of made me realize how much we define the issues we solve to make the answers easier to accomplish. Turns out people are messy, and when you can’t just focus on the place, it gets messy to try and explain why people do what they do.)

Before I go any further, I must make an important distinction. This article concerns driving a brand's growth within an existing category. As such, it is Brands fighting for market share should keep these ten actions in mind.

There’s a lot of assumptions around the intersection of brand value and brand quality. That is, if a company does a great job supporting its people, the quality of the brand establishes the value of the brand. But it isn’t always so cut-and-dried. Take SpaceX, a company known for its horrible work-life balance and overly-aggressive management, two thinks engineers say they hate. And yet, SpaceX is the top company engineers want to work for. How can you leverage the disconnect between quality and value?

What do doughnuts and tacos have to do with employer branding? You may be applying the wrong marketing and sales techniques to recruitment.

I’ve talked before about different attributes that can help define your brand (how does your company approaches personal/professional development, what’s the level of internal transparency, amount of hierarchical structure, etc). Here’s one I hadn’t thought of before: Courage. How does your company reward courage? Can you disagree with your boss? Do you have to do it quietly one on one, or are you allowed to disagree more publicly? What about disagreeing with leadership? Answers to these simple question (assuming leadership and front-line staff agree on the answer), go a long way to defining your own company.