Trying to grow your brand without emotion (I mean, we are in the people business, right?) is a mistake. But leveraging emotion isn’t necessarily obvious or simple. It helps to understand your talent targets’ needs and desires.

My rule of thumb for strengthening your employer brand is to separate your sentiment and reach and treat them independently. But when you try and extend reach, its a rare day that you’re extending into blue ocean. So here is some great thinking on extending your market penetration, how to push others out of the way while staking your claim.

Bookmark this: Gallup, the research company, makes a pretty compelling case to your leadership on the power of employer brand. The overall focus is on how the employer brand makes a clear impact on your corporate brand (remember, businesses only speak three languages: make money, save money, extend the brand), which would be something you might want to slide under the virtual door of leadership.

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

Google’s Official Digital Marketing Publication. The new normal requires brands to continuously evolve and change through action. We’re here to help.

William Shakespeare was a remarkable poet, actor and playwright, but let’s be real – the guy lived and died over 400 years ago – what on earth can he teach us about employer branding 2020? Turns out – quite a lot. See, Shakespeare had a knack for understanding what makes people tick. His greatest achievements weren’t necessarily the plot lines, but the unique and dynamic characters he created – their personalities, their strengths, their weaknesses, their desires, their motivations. These characters have endured through four centuries, they’re continually reincarnated on stage and screen, t...

Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m thinking about my organization’s career site, which means that I am looking at a LOT of career sites. Which actually means that I am seeing a LOT OF CAREER SITES THAT LOOK EXACTLY THE SAME. It’s painful. Often times, they are the “best case scenario” career sites by recruitment marketing platform vendors hold out as examples of great design. At the same time, fads in web design are as long lasting at those in fashion. But here are some current design trends you should look at when you think about your site design.

I will admit that my day job is forcing me to re-example some ideas I… well, in all honesty, I accepted without much inquiry. It’s a little exhilarating, I promise. One of those concepts is that of “belonging” at work. For years, we’ve heard variations on the idea of “bring your ‘whole self’ to work” which is intended to imply (for example) that black people can bring their black experiences (good and bad, and lately its a lot more of one than the other) to work and that we can’t expect people to leave those experiences at the door. We assume that we want people to feel like they belong at work, which encourage them to speak up and engage. But we haven’t always defined what we mean by “engage” or “belong.” So I was really interested when Josh Bersin broke things down on his site about what it takes to create that feeling of belonging. I would suggest that for a lot of people, the feeling that their work matters, that it contributes to a company’s success drives a sense of belonging as establishing an ERG or setting hiring targets.

Let’s talk metrics! No wait come back! If you are thinking about metrics, there are any number of ways to approach them, and none of them are “right.” I did a few presentations where I came up with three ways of thinking about metrics all on my own, and there are many others. But to start, connecting your metrics to the funnel is a smart go-to.

Who’s in charge of your company’s employee activation? Chances are, it’s no one. So I guess it’s up to you. But here’s an idea. Rather than think about employee activation as the best way to get your most authentic and credible employer brand narrative out into the world (which it most certainly is), what if you were to think about the rest of the organization first? Who are all the departments who would love to tap into that resources? If you want to make yourself invaluable, manage this ideas for them first (and your outcomes will come all by themselves).

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

Take inspiration from top brands on how to use Instagram Live to help your business stand out and attract new followers.

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?

Technically, this article has nothing to do with employer brand, but Google’s three things marketers can do to accelerate digital marketing transformation sure sounds dead on: know your own first-party data, understand your customer journey and prioritize cross-functional collaboration.

Thinking that it may be time for a bit of a re-brand? Here are some questions you should ask before you do (because this is what your leadership will be asking you).

Let’s face it: things aren’t going to get normal (or potentially much better) any time soon. Companies and brands that attempt to weather the storm rather than build a weatherproof shelter are not going to succeed, and that includes employer brands. So what are some things you should be doing now (and not doing any more) to embrace this reality?

There’s no shortage of lessons communicators can extract from the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, but one really stands out. Simple communication wins the days. The underlying principles that guide effective communications in times of great urgency apply in more ordinary times as well.

by Maury Hanigan The last several years in Talent Acquisition has brought us tremendous innovation. We are thinking more strategically than ever before on how we can create experiences that bring in the best talent to our organizations by showing them what it means to work at our companies.

Speaking of community, we’re not the only ones struggling with the idea that we want to get people excited to learn more about us before we have the right role open. Turns out, consumer brands are trying to figure out the same puzzle. The first question you should ask is: what can I help my community members do?

We always like to talk about engaging candidates, but… what constitutes “engagement?” An impression? A like? A click? Watching a video? Signing up for your newsletter (I won’t call it a talent “community” until you let members talk to each other)? How long does it take to become engaged in your brand? Perhaps we’re measuring the wrong thing. Rather than focus on an action, maybe engagement is a function of time and intensity.

We are awash in information and data. You’d think it would be easy to take some of that and turn it into brand pillars, strategies and messaging, but in reality it seems like there’s too much information. Don’t shut it out: here are strategies on how to turn info into insight.

Learn how to build your brand or increase sales through live streaming. Plus, see how major brands use live streaming to expand their reach.

Storytelling can give credibility and personality to brands, helping to build more meaningful relationships with customers. Here are six case studies that prove its value.

Look, this is something I am grappling with because I really want employer branders to think… deeper. It’s not just putting out little videos and polishing up career sites, but helping leadership think better about their brand. One of the ideas I haven’t gotten my arms around but think is special is the concept of cognitive dissonance. We want what we want, but what we want might not align with our stated values. A company who can help its customers overcome that cognitive dissonance is one who can win a long time customer. Like i said, I’m not sure how we can use this idea, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

Look, this is something I am grappling with because I really want employer branders to think… deeper. It’s not just putting out little videos and polishing up career sites, but helping leadership think better about their brand. One of the ideas I haven’t gotten my arms around but think is special is the concept of cognitive dissonance. We want what we want, but what we want might not align with our stated values. A company who can help its customers overcome that cognitive dissonance is one who can win a long time customer. Like i said, I’m not sure how we can use this idea, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

What are people looking for in a video these days of indefinite uncertainty? Positivity, exploring new ideas and difficult issues, and simply engaging with things that feel timely, according to Google.

Two HBR articles in a row?! Goodness. But this one was so good, I had to share. Next time someone starts dropping metrics and KPIs on you to start to measure up to, pull this out and treat it like a checklist: Who else is involved in making this KPI go up or down? What really causes the number to go up and down (remember, correlation is not causation*), and how much control do YOU have other it? And metrics are a two-way street, a relationship between the organization and the market.

In the similar vein, you can be helping your people not just “survive” things, but finding ways to get better because of the crisis.

Everything changed six months ago. And so we adjusted. But has it felt like we’ve built for a new future, or just build enough to “get through this?” I would bet most of you would see it as the latter. Which is too bad. Because it may never come back. It may never come back in the same way. So rather than wait until we can “go back to the way it was,” this is your time to reinvent from the ground up. It is time to take the chaos all around us (and it isn’t any less chaotic, we’ve just built a callus to things lately) and build the “next normal,” not the new one.