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.

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.)

There’s a lot of assumptions around the intersection of brand value and brand quality. That is, if a company does a great job supporting its people, the quality of the brand establishes the value of the brand. But it isn’t always so cut-and-dried. Take SpaceX, a company known for its horrible work-life balance and overly-aggressive management, two thinks engineers say they hate. And yet, SpaceX is the top company engineers want to work for. How can you leverage the disconnect between quality and value?