This one made me smile and groan at the same time. As hiring is so tight in the Bay Area, employees at top companies are selling referrals and references to their employers. That is, for $50, you can get someone at Google or Facebook to recommend you for a job at Google or Facebook. Because those companies get some many resumes/applications, they mostly only look at those with internal referrals, and thus a third-party black market sprung up. (Further proof that William Gibson was right when he wrote "the street finds its own uses for things.)

This is a great article on the seven trends in ecommerce for 2020, which are all applicable to any employer brand pro: personalization, digital savvy, and developing a real candidate experience STRATEGY (remember: if you invert your "strategy" and it isn't a strategy, you didn't have a strategy in the first place).

Universum’s Employer Branding NOW 2020 survey, now in its fifth year, shows best-in-class talent leaders are quickly adapting to the new-normal of Covid-19. STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN, July 2, 2020 – Universum’s much-anticipated Employer Branding NOW 2020 study, conducted during the pandemic’s surge months in early 2020, shows the World’s Most Attractive Employers do not expect a hiring …

Second, Strategy+Business has a list of best business summer reading books, spanning from high level concepts around what humanity means, to building better experiments at work.

Author and employer branding expert James Ellis shares his 16 top employer branding book recommendations to take your branding to the next level.

If you're thinking about a CRM of some sort, here are the top reasons why people subscribe and unsubscribe to emails (and yes, they are VERY different lists)

A (brief) primer on setting up employee resource groups at your company.

"Learn more about how to shift and evolve your content marketing during and after a crisis, to speak to your community, get connected, and stay relevant."

Need some ideas as to what kind of content you should build? Look to your own social media metrics.

I have mixed feeling about this article on why every company should make professional development a core element of their brand promise. One, yes, many many many candidates and employees want development, but even when they want it, they don't want/value it the same way. Some want classrooms and certifications. Some want mentoring and coaching. Some want the freedom to experiment and fail. And yes, there are some great talents who don't look to their employer as a source for development. Over at the day job, we have lots of data that lots of people want development, but it is by no means universal. Development is popular among some talent, but to say that every brand should define their brand around it is a little myopic. That said, it's an area where many companies ignore to their detriment.

We have to face it: all "employee experience" conversations HAVE to start with a conversation around "are we doing enough to make our people feel safe?" That's why I thought this article was better than most of the "we need to make people feel valued and appreciated" conversations you get here (Maslow was right with that hierarchy stuff).

Let's talk Tik Tok! Or maybe we shouldn't! Just as the all-dancing, all-singing social platform starts to gain traction as a legitimate branding platform, it gets branded as a state agency intelligence operation. But when has a little espionage stopped "the kids" from singing? (That's the entire plot of Val Kilmer's Top Secret, btw.) So if you're ready to ignore potential Trump/Bezos bans of the social channel, here are so suggestions on how to do it right. My favorite? Think of it as an education platform first.

I really believe that the biggest mistake in company's employer brands is that they skimp on doing their competitive analysis. Sure, you can say that you're innovative, but if you're competing against SpaceX (Mars!) and Boston Dynamics (creepy robots!), the bar is a little different than if you're competing against governmental agencies or deeply regulated industry sectors. Just saying. So here's a good primer on doing your own competitive audit.

Allison Kruse has really carved out her own space on how to effectively use content marketing in employer brand communications. So when she writes a big ol' article on how to use content marketing thinking to address and overcome employee advocacy challenges, I have to share it.

Friend of the newsletter Alex Her pulled together some good examples of how companies are pivoting their employer brand communications now that it seems the “new normal” is here to stay.

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.

This was a pretty solid list of resources around understanding, audits, and showcasing your brand. Aside some usual suspects, there are a few new ideas here.

More and more businesses are looking to their own brand purpose to create a stronger brand foundation as everything seems to change every second around it. If your company is thinking about purpose (or you’re starting to spark those conversations), it might help to understand how purpose works and how businesses can leverage purpose strategically (also, companies don’t have purpose, people have purpose, and you’re in the people business, remember?).

Is your brand memorable? Do you know how to make it more memorable? Here’s an interesting article suggesting focused visuals to command attention and create those brand memories that last.

What you reward is who your company is. But how do you reward people in a remote work situation? Stories Incorporated has some ideas on the subject.

Speaking of remote work, I admit I started reading this article on building a long-term remote work plan to see how we EBers could influence the process, but I was struck by their process. They start with an ideal end in mind and think backwards on how to achieve it. Have any of you considered what your ideal EB situation would be and worked backwards from there? I might be trying this soon.

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.)

One of the challenges EB is grappling with in the face of mandated remote work is how to collaborate, brain-storm or just workshop an idea together. EB, because it connects all the parts of the company, is inherently collaborative, and Zoom (et al) doesn’t really get many people’s creative juices flowing. So here are some ideas on how to brainstorm when no one can share a room with a white board and those massive post-it notes.

The danger of building your brand around your stated values is that what you say your values are and how you live them are often very different. Proof? MIT Sloan’s study of 700 large companies found ZERO correlation between what a company says its values are and what it’s work culture actually is.

When I was younger, I looked forward to my weekend family visits to Blockbuster to pick out a movie rental. In 2005, as a freshman at…

I get a lot of gruff when I say this, but. firmly believe it. When you’re posting to Facebook and Instagram, you aren’t competing with their employer brands, but with Ryan Gosling and 90 Day Fiancé memes. So if you want to stand out, you have to raise your sights higher. So here are 10 (non-EB) Instagram accounts who are killing it. These brands are telling compelling stories in a single image, and that’s what you’re up against. Suddenly, that pick of 20 employees standing next to each other in two rows like it’s 2nd grade picture day doesn’t cut it.

Brands are things humans build feelings around. Are you thinking about what emotions you want to encourage and when?

Connecting with consumers is the key skill essential for building stronger brand bridges. It requires an end-consumer orientation for evaluating14 considerations and questions that will help in building a successful strategy for your brand.

"We can train ourselves to alter the self-organizing patterning systems by learning how to coerce our minds into taking alternative routes."