Our concise guide on why and how your talent acquisition team can transform its internal recruiting strategy in 2021. Sign up for our webinar on May 4 to learn more!

From screenplay writing inspiration, to how storytelling training is part of their onboarding, CEO David Cancel shares how they drive narrative internally at Drift.

In the third installment of his CMO ot CEO column, Paul Evans ponders how putting marketing strategy at the heart of his business makes for better leadership.

You know that my feeling is that the platonic ideal of employer brand isn't to be a silo, but rather a single perspective through a shared brand for the entire company. Ignoring how surprised I was that a marketing/branding magazine even know what employer brand was, here's a great article geared towards marketers on how to leverage a stronger employer brand.

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.

What's the hardest part of getting your employer brand ideas off the ground? Building a business case. Very few of us were taught this skill, so my friend Mezjan wrote up his own process for business case development perfect for EB pros.

I've got an open call for podcast and article ideas (feel free to chime in), and one of the big asks is more discussion on how to work with recruiters and other teams. While I try and put together my own thoughts, here's an article from HBR on how culture differences should be considered when building trust with other business units.

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. Here are two: Lilian Mahoukou talks about his work at Mondelez,

What does it take to build a strong employer brand? Well, you need to know how to execute projects (tactical mind). You also need to be able to select and prioritize your projects (strategic mind), but theres something still missing. If you want your brand work to achieve maximum impact, you need to know how to tap into a third mind: the political mind. The Three Minds of Employer Branding over at ERE.

I continue to maintain that employer branders usually have zero functional power, so must rely on their ability to influence others. So here are seven ways to build your influence internally.

In a lot of ways, an EVP is like home improvement: you start watching enough HGTV shows from your couch and you start to think, "how card could that be? Maybe I should tackle my own EVP project..." Which are some of my favorite famous last words. Now, I'm not saying you can't build your own EVP all by yourself, but watching the process from the outside misses the complex and messy things that go on during the commercial breaks where everyone's screaming at each other and that suddenly load-bearing wall has been demoed. Oops. So if you're thinking about taking the job yourself, here is a great article at ERE on some common ways that companies who try to to DIY their EVP get into trouble.

Even before we were doing our jobs from our dining rooms, employer brand was its own kind of remote work: teams of one or two directly supporting teams around the world via video calls and emails. In order to make sure you are demonstrating your value when people can't always see your activity (which is good), here are some idea to consider.

If you don’t have time to read Robert Greene’s book on the 48 laws of power, here are the seven kinds of power one can have in the workplace. Know where you as the EB pro have power, and when you need to lean on a different kind of power from somewhere else.

"If this is how we consume content in our busy, daily lives, why would we behave differently in our even busier work lives?"

Sometimes, the biggest potential talent source is right under your nose. But how can you foster a culture in internal career mobility? Let us show you!

The ease with which consumers have adapted to rapid change signals a future of more disruption.

Oof. When HBR is arguing against “talent management optimization,” you gotta ask: why aren’t we treating each and every employee like an artist? How is it that Taylorism is still alive and well?

One of the very clear axes (plural of axis, not a thing for chopping wood) by which you can communicate your culture and brand (though it isn’t often used), is the way a company invests in individual professional growth. Is the employee in charge of their own growth (a la every agency I’ve ever seen), the employee is in charge but the company will pay, the company encourages and supports upskilling, etc. If you want to be known as a place where people are expected and supported in their growth (you’d think that was every company, but you’d be very very wrong about that), it means getting your CEO involved.

Hosting a virtual holiday party? Learn how to plan a remote team bonding event in this post.

As a guy who seems to always be launching this new project or that new idea, I really do try and carve out a little time every few days to just… think. Sometimes its to write a sit-down book (not some musician biography or noir pulp book I use to escape, but a book I need to be seated in a chair to absorb). Sometimes it’s to dump a bunch of thinking on my white board. And while this year has made it hard to get a safe change of scenery (I used to love airports and plains for just this sort of thing, but my favorite was camping out in a hotel lobby for two hours), it is still imperative that we all break away from our calendar and email and make space to just think, to let the mind be… idle? Well, maybe if you’ve achieved total enlightenment, that’s something you can do, but every without the saffron robes, maybe you can just make sure you give your brain some space.

Emily Firth pulls zero punches with her list of ten ways employer brands fail. A lot of them could fall under the category of “ you treated your employer brand like some external ad campaign” or “you only think you got buy in, but you really just got ‘fine, fine, leave us alone.’”

Sure, infographics might feel a little 2015, but what about interactive infographics? I can see value in using them to show internal teams the value of your work, as well as putting together a fact-sheet for potential candidates.

Embarrassing admission: I’ve spent a good deal of time in the NLP/Neuro-linguistic programming world of Bandler and Grinder (Hey, I was young once. And if you have no idea what I’m talking about, consider yourself lucky). Anyway, while 99% of what came out of NLP was garbage, some smart tidbits did manage to escape. Specifically, mirroring. If you want someone to listen to you and consider what you say, you have to talk more like they do.

Employer branding is the act of getting everyone at your company who doesn't have to listen to you to change how they think about their employer. Yay! So anything that helps arm you to create change in an org is useful to know.

Want to make it crystal clear how important your employer brand work is? Maybe bake it into an infographic.