Over at Branding Mag, there's an interesting conversation about how to create a sense of brand without a visual identity. The idea being that the experience itself is the brand. Can the experience of working somewhere be a clear brand? It's an interesting thought.

TalentCulture, in a three trends for hiring Gen Z talent article, suggest that we are in the midst of a shift in which tech talent doesn't always have a tech degree, which is interesting. As technology becomes democratized, it will simply be a larger element in every major's curriculum. And since you can download code and code snippets for free, it becomes easier and easier for other majors to tap into the tech. I mean, not all doctors started as biology majors.

In an increasingly complex and stressful world with blurred lines between personal and work lives, workers at all levels need total well-being in all aspects of their lives. Expectations at work and home are no longer distinct or neatly separate – they are becoming one and the same. Savvy companies know that workers who are well

LinkedIn looked at its own user data and discovered some trends for 2020 and beyond. The most interesting? They think that data and analytics have reached a kind of "inflection point" at which is it no longer a "one day" thing but more of a "we're falling behind" thing. Also, they are seeing trends that their next new hire is likely to be found internally than in recent years.

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.

Have you wondered why your "talent community" (quotes intentional) isn't working? More to the point, have you had to explain it to your boss? I think the first issue for most of us is that we call it a community without understanding what a community really is. Here's a quick checklist to see if you really have a community or just a pretty mailing list.

Hashtags aren't magic. Having one doesn't generate awareness. But here are a few examples of EB hashtags done right, thanks to Stories Incorporated

Do yourself a favor and sit down before you read this (very contrarian but not "wrong") article on how brand loyalty is really just laziness and inertia in action. This might sting a little.

Usually, when we wonder, "why did someone apply and interview only to walk away from the offer?" we think about the question on an individual level. What was the issue with that person or interaction? But when you look more systemically, you might see that things like messaging, branding, and candidate experience timeline have just as much of an impact. CNBC asks why 50% of offers end up being rejected.

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.

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,

Taking an entire company, hundreds and thousands individuals' hopes, dreams and passion, and distilling it into something that might fit inside a fortune cookie without sounding... like a fortune cookie, is an art. So if the time has come to try your hand, here are some great value proposition templates to help you focus your thinking.

Are you thinking seriously about Gen Z talent yet? You should. And not because they are the 23 and 24 year olds you're desperate to attract, but because they really are very different from their millennial predecessors. First and foremost? The current landscape of economic and political instability is forcing them to make very different choices in employer.

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?

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.

The big conversation this week (ignoring the global news stories, that is) is about Apple's new employer brand video. The animated video features about a hundred different variations of the famous Apple logo morphing from one to another while a female voiceover tells "constant beginners who sing off key" that "all are welcome." Visually, it is gorgeous (but really, Apply making an amazing commercial is no surprise). But the question is: is it effective?

I've got mixed thoughts on this article on employer brand KPIs you can adopt. It has the usual suspects (Glassdoor rating, TTF, CPH), in addition to content engagement and candidate flow. Sure, those are good metrics to know, but they aren't clean metrics. If a million people engage with your content because you offered job seeking tips, does that really impact your employer brand more than tangentially, regardless of volume of engagement? And the same can be said for diversity metrics: while it's helpful to know what roles are appealing to which gender or ethnicity, metrics imply a goal, which isn't usually how we're expected to see diversity, is it? Just keep that in mind if your boss this sends this article your way.

I was really impressed by this employer branding manifesto from Spotify (While I'm a customer, I have no other relationship to Spotify). Why? While it is effectively selecting pillars you'd see in many other companies, the way it expresses and things about those pillars says more about what it's like to work at that company as the pillars themselves. Like Tony Bennett or Aretha Franklin, it's the singer, not the song. While I get to talk/think about EB data all day, people are sometimes troubled by the fact that company EVPs are often little more than carbon copies of other companies. But this is when creativity, based on a platform of solid data, can really sing. Like two houses with the same floor-plans, it is the upkeep, location and decoration that makes one house feel sterile and cold while another can feel cozy. The data creating the pillars doesn't make creativity, but they provide certainty on which bold creative decisions can be made.

One of the biggest employer brand challenges is in getting recruiting teams to help carry the brand message out to candidates. They might complain about it being "idea of the month" or not understand how building a strong brand makes their lives easier. All they see is change. Firefish has a nice intro on how to work with getting recruiters on your side. Aside from flattery and giving them a strong sales pitch, I suggest the biggest impact comes from giving them something for free. Find one pain point they have that you can "own" under the banner of employer branding (job postings, social content, videos, a library of outreach InMails, etc). Pick your favorite recruiters and give your gift away for free. Then let those recruiters tell the other recruiters how effective the new thing was. Those recruiters will ask for your help, and once you've given them a few gifts, they will be willing to play your game with a far more open mind.

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.

Meanwhile (same report), further proof that the world of work continues to evolve as 73% of employees feel like they should have a role in shaping the company (see previous article about creating strategy buy-in). That in itself reinforces my own belief that reporting on declining employee engagement is an outcome of feeling disconnected from the decisions being made. Three out of four want to be part of the change, but according to Gallup, only 17% feel engaged? That's a problem.

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?

It took me a minute to realize that this article on how to help your employees to own your corporate strategy is actually an employer brand article in reverse. That is, rather than explaining what employer brand is, it focuses on the fact that a strategy that isn't embraced and implemented by engaged staff is really just a good idea and little more. The article suggests making strategy communication a two-way street and asking for staff to commit to the strategy. Sounds great but if you have two identical companies differentiated by the first having a strong employer brand, you can connect your corporate strategy more easily to understanding what your staff expects to get out of working there far more than the company without a strongly held brand. In a company with different micro-cultures, how do you connect a single strategy to all of them? You'll have to go team to team, culture to culture, doing the hard retail sales work to make a connection. In a company with a strong brand, all those micro-cultures have already found a way to localize your core brand. It's like all those disparate audience are already hard-wired to understand the strategy because they are all aligned to a common set of concepts.

Here's a nice short article reminding us that employer brand folks are there to help manage perceptions in other people's minds. It seems obvious, but it feels like we forget very quickly when things get busy.

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.

There's something to be said for employer branding existing in the details, that it is strongest when it exists in the places where you'd expect it. Which is why I love this company's example of using its own website source code to tell a meaningful story about what it stands for.

What's the future of brand storytelling? Google collected some smart thinkers and posed that question. And while there was a lot of talk of "digital-first," I wonder if their own recruiters and employer branders would 100% agree.

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.

I'm loathe to point to anything Elon Musk companies are doing in employer branding (when your CEO/Founder has developed a massive cult of personality, it's like having EB cheat codes). But I did like to see this example of how they use their employee manual to instill and reinforce the brand.

More data points on how different Gen Z is from Millennials. Example, Gen Z-ers are more black and white in their thinking and that they are more inclined to look for and select a niche or specialization sooner, rather than be a generalist and see what happens.