I highly recommend this list of 14 rules of identity by Jasmine Bina, who is one of my absolute favorite thinkers in the space

Apropos of nothing, I really liked this list of the 50 ideas that changed their life. Reading it will make you smarter.

How the creative director of Spotify uses data. This is a great video, but I suggest you watch to see ways Spotify could have used data in the aggregate to tell a big boring story. But instead, it found unique slices of the data to say something interesting, about themselves, about their listeners and about the world.

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.

This list of five things every brand marketer needs to be doing right now is focused on consumer brand, but you don't even need to translate ideas like Lean Into Purpose and Rethink Your Brand Culture into employer brand terms to see the thought processes.

I can usually count on the HBR to take the safe road in any given situation, so seeing an article that embraces some very contrarian ideas is always worth a note. But this article on the three things most people get wrong about organizational change was pretty great. Things like "Share Your Failures" rather that "Follow Best Practices" make my heart warm on many levels. Also note the example of "Kill Our Company" (also known as Red Team exercises) where people try to figure out how to destroy their own company in order to shore up their own strategic weaknesses.

By now, you're as sick as I am of the glut of "how to manage a culture virtually" articles that have come out over the last two months. But this conversation with Jane Garza of NOBL was absolutely fascinating. Bursty work, bicameral work hours (6-10 and 2-6 instead of 9-5), and the reminder that we don't need to take all our calls on Zoom (set up more meetings on the phone so you can walk and talk).

I love it when I headline to an article just knocks me sideways and I go, "Duh! Why didn't I think of that?!?!?!" Ted Bauer asks the simple (yet profound) question: Why don't we treat interviews as real data? There's so much we could learn about our company, ouir recruiters, our hiring managers and our entire experience, but we don''t because we treat the interview as some sort of gamut both we and the candidate must survive (as if we didn't flat-out invest the system).

In case you don't feel prepared, here's HBR's guide to Corporate Social Justice.

If we are in a post-advertising world (and there's evidence to suggest it), have you started to think about your employer brand as a platform? Or have you started to think about your employer brand's place in your corporate brand platform?

Since you've likely shut down any and all in-person recruiting events for the year, here's some inspiration on how to build a better virtual event.

Some nice pre- and post-lockdown (unsegmented) data points on how employees and candidates attitudes have changed. Biggest takeaway: remote is no longer a nice-to-have (so... maybe you need to have a chat with leadership and HR about making this whole WFH thing a real thing).

Speaking of not segmenting enough, this article on common mistakes on brand awareness lists forgetting to segmentation as it's first mistake!

PathMotion took a look at all the bot-driven conversations on its platforms to see what candidates wanted to know more about. This isn't what candidates said they wanted, it's what they asked for, so if you don't know what to add to your career site and social channels, this is a solid starting point for a content map. I will caution and say that Universum's data (day job alert!) agrees with a lot of these conclusions, they aren't equally true across the board for all audiences. Just keep that in mind.

Are you sick of me saying how you need to start thinking about your employer brand beyond the funnel? Too bad! This article talks about all the ways professional systems will be changing in light of everything, and this is my chance to remind you that you need to make friends with the development team. What the company offers to learn is one thing, but connecting to to why they want to learn, to develop a story pipeline system about the people who embrace the development culture and what they get out of it is totally in your jurisdiction.

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.

Is now the perfect time to form a company book club? Well, I'm a huge fan of getting book clubs together (and I've seen instances of the CEO just mentioning that he/she is reading a certain book lead to informal but impactful culture change), so yes. Do it. Do it now. The trick, as ever, is to pick a good book.

There are a lot of little tidbits of concepts in this article around brand perception (neuron mirroring, framing, cognition, etc), so don't expect a deep dive. But taken together, it felt like there were a lot of good ideas around identifying your brand perception issues might be, and how you might be able to solve for them.

It’s time to move past “What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?”The real value of emotional commitment is that it gives you (and everyone else) permission to re-write the "rules." You know those things you've always done because that's just the way it's always been done? Set that on fire and re-invent, not because it's what your boss says to do, or because that's what the magazines say is "cool," but because you actually care about outcomes. Example? Reinvent your hiring process. Now, HBR isn't exactly coming up with cold fusion here, but when the they are willing to say that the way we interview flat-out isn't working, you know it's time to reinvent. But don't reinvent around a fad. Thing about what you and your company really care about in an employee (and what you reward) and build round that. Writing, games, role-play, improv exercises, whatever it takes to tap into your (and their) emotional commitment.

Plenty of management books burn paper trying to build leadership structures that mitigate a lack of emotional commitment, throwing around works like "matrix" and "agile" because they haven't figured out that most companies still treat their people like cogs in a machine: easily replaceable and bought from the lowest cost vendor. As this turns into a mini-rant, Tom Peters says that if you care about what I care about, I'll care about what you care about. And it is only in light of the pandemic that we see which companies actually seem to care about their people (and which don't, suggesting where engagement scores might go to die). EB has a role to play, because if people really believe the EVP/pillars you turned into a poster, they are more likely to feel emotionally committed. And if they don't, that suggests you need to go back to the drawing board.

Too much talk around employer engagement is about making people feel a certain way or (worse) hitting some "engagement scores" based purely on surveys. Is that somewhat dismissive? Yes, I'll own that. But I've gotten in trouble for saying things like, "no one comes to work wanting to be disengaged, so I wonder where the issue lies?" A lot of the issue is that we've lowered the bar on what "engaged" means, to the point where it feels like "not actively planning the company's downfall" feels like a win. In reality, engagement means giving a crap about the people, the purpose and organization. It means a level of emotional commitment in outcomes and processes.

The word "purpose" gets attached to so much of what we do, these days. Our EB should provide purpose for employees (which is crazy, as purpose comes from inside people) and that the key to successful companies is a shared sense of purpose (which is always framed in "we save the world" language rather than "we retire early" language). But as EB gets closer to corporate brand, and as corporate brand understands how to leverage the people to support the brand, the conversation around brand purpose gets louder, but mushier. Which is why I thought this article on brand purpose was a good read: it talked about how to think beyond "use some sense of purpose to get more out of your employees" blah blah, and instead use a real sense of purpose to breakthrough roadblocks and see new possibilities. (includes some nice examples)

Thinking about D&I a lot lately? Me, too. So I figured I'd get my friends Torin Ellis and Gabriel Hitt together to talk about how to re-think modern approaches to D&I using data. So yeah, you need to register for another webinar. Speaking of D&I, if you want your messages to "stick," you need to explain why D&I is important to your company (and don't assume everyone's already on board).

Virtual recruiting events are on everyone's mind lately, so here's how Google does it.

Do companies still balk at letting employees build content? I know for a long time it felt like there were companies who just couldn't let their staffs have that kind of freedom to talk (as if they need permission). If that's you and you need some ammo to make their case? Here are some stats on the power of leveraging user-generated content.

Still on the content marketing side, have you given any thought at all to building episodic content?

Here's a nice juicy article on how to write short stories in your posts to create more clicks and engagement. This article didn't feel at all like the usual run-of-the-mill listicle, but had some great new ideas that get your readers to really chew over your ideas.

As a followup from last week's post about the Facebook boycott, there's some skepticism that these companies have the most altruistic reasons for cancelling their FB ad buys. And while interesting on its own, I think it brings up some warnings about tying your brand too closely to corporate social responsibility. It's a bit more of a mine field these days, so step carefully.

I've pointed out that employer brand is the new go-to crisis PR move, but how do you manage your employer brand in a crisis? This article really conflates employer branding with employee engagement a bit, but the notes are still useful.