The phrase "recruiting through the op-ed pages" may becomes shorthand in my head for finding unique ways of getting your employer brand story out into the wild without using the "usual" channels.

Employer brand is still seen purely through the lens of "filling the funnel" at too many companies. And while EB should be showing it own impact across every aspect of what the business does, it will always need to remember that until it fills the funnel, other things can't get done. To that end, here's a great white paper ATAP put together on creating, executing and managing a talent attraction strategy.

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

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.

You’ve seen the video going around showing what it would look like if we interviewed doctors the way we do developers, right? It’s great. Total must-watch. Anyway, it brings up an idea I hadn’t really heard before: Overfit. As I help the day job re-write job postings, I wonder if lots and lots of companies are suffering from trying to meet the demands of overfit. I mean, the job postings we write are semi-outdated by the time we start screening, so overfit seems like the absolute wrong course-correction. Shouldn’t we be trusting recruiters to spot talent without hand-holding them with requirements and qualifications?

Here’s the data on why 2020 isn’t 2008 (from a hiring perspective). Turns out that when people ask “if the economy is tanking, how come it isn’t easier to hire?” (Or it’s corollary, “If everyone’s out of work, why do I have to invest in EB/CX/being nice to candidates?”) the answer is that the economy isn’t tanking equally for everyone, so there is still real demand in many many roles, thus buoying the talent market.

I point this out not because you need to know it, but employer branders always need to have a full quiver of ways to explain what employer brand is (and isn’t), so here’s a solid article from South America on demystifying employer branding.

Ooof. When you ask the question, “Does TA Understand Passive Talent Engagement?” you know what the answer is going to be, and that answer isn’t going to be positive. But what I was amused by was that after examining the wreckage of the question, the solution the author came away with was that more time and energy should be spend on marketing. Now, if you’re a marketer, you know that marketing can be broken into two kinds: direct and brand. Direct marketing is what you get when you Google “kid’s STEM activities,” the direct response to a need. Any marketing with a clear CTA is direct marketing, which hardly seems in keeping with the original question. So what the author is actually prescribing is that employer branding should be in charge of passive talent engagement. QED, right?

I really appreciate Charlotte Marshall popping the bubble around the seemingly-universally-agreed-upon-yet-never-discussed idea that companies need to be “fun.” More than that, that there’s only one emotional trigger at work and it is called “happiness.” She touches on the idea that a strong employer brand isn’t just a claim you put on a poster, but needs to answer questions about the experience of working somewhere. Not, “do you offer free food” or “what’s the holiday party like,” but questions that start with the phrase “what happens when…?”

In honor of World Employer Branding Day, let’s recognize that as organizations continue to manage through today’s difficult times, there’s one key strategy that many smart businesses have started to re-prioritize — employer branding. Yet even with the best intentions, many companies still fail to capitalize on the opportunities of a newly refreshed employer brand…