One powerful statistic made me rethink the way we, as marketers, approach gaining our audience’s attention. What you would read in the New York Times in The role that the brain plays in how brands communicate with audiences and which of those brands gain attention.

This evolving employer brand philosophy will not only serve you well under new leadership – it will also ensure you build a more meaningful, effective, and impactful employer brand.

Each part of 2021 will be a distinctive marketplace with a discrete set of opportunities. Brands must plan accordingly. The ‘More COVID’ Part Of The Year Each part of 2021 will be a distinctive marketplace with a discrete set of opportunities. Brands must plan accordingly.

Kraft Heinz Canada conducts an anonymous social experiment, asking people to #DrawKetchup. Interestingly, most of the participants drew a Heinz ketchup bottle.

Being remote doesn't mean you can't share compelling video content.

It has become popular to talk about brand in terms of a story. Let’s be as clear as possible with this, a brand is not a story. If it is then it’s created It has become popular to talk about brand in terms of a story. Let’s be as clear as possible with this, a brand is not a story.

It is increasingly accepted that a brand is not only the elements such as the logo, website, product, etc, but is also the values, beliefs, mission, What makes us think that the old, static model of 'positioning' a brand makes any sense?

Learn how to create local employee stories that can support your global employer brand and employee value proposition (EVP) from the Recruitment Marketing team at Philips.

Twitter LinkedIn Shares These articles have been written by the first cohort of the Practice Makes Unperfect programme – a course that

I invite you all to consider employer branding as a business function, instead of just an HR function. And yes, marketing (as many other areas) should be involved.

A great brand does not need to be a big brand in terms of size. But, it does need to be a big brand in terms of its power to engage people’s imagination. A great brand does not need to be a big brand in terms of size. But, it does need to be a big brand in terms of its power to engage people’s imagination.

I often hear employer branding being described as an exciting field. And to me it is. But what’s exciting to me may not be particularly exciting to you. If you think ‘exciting’ means that it’s an in-demand industry where your skills and perspective are valued through the business, where companies vie for your attention and […]

I've always thought about building an Oblique Strategies deck for EB folks. What, you don't know what the OS cards are? Designed by Brian Eno (the guy who turned "alien" David Bowie into "genius" David Bowie), they are cards you select when you're stuck. Designed for musicians originally, they had instructions designed to spark thinking like "go to an extreme and work your way back" or "change instrument roles." Sometimes they were very... high-minded like "twist the spine" or "question the heroic approach." I love it because it assumes that the right answer is inside you already and you just need to clear out the clutter of your own mind to find it. Anyway, if you're stuck, here are 10 strategies to re-spark your thinking when trying to turn around your employer brand.

There's probably nothing I like more than someone who is being willfully contradictory, to zig when it seems the world says to zag. To wit, Emily Firth's article on why employee-generated content will NOT save your employer brand. She makes solid points (its over-used because it seems like an "easy" way to create content, but since there's rarely a solid plan with what to do with said content, or even how to nurture it, it rarely yields anything useful), but I see this as someone waving us away from the extreme end of an idea. Employee-generated content (when done right, where there's a "care and feeding plan" in place to nurture it, etc), can be useful. It just isn't a silver bullet.

Richard Mosley does a nice piece on how Ireland is an interesting case in what happens when a not-massive city becomes a hub for corporate HQs. What was once a sleepy city (compared with London, Paris and Berlin, certainly) is not a center of business activity. As you may suspect, hiring quality talent has gotten difficult, to say the least. The parallels to US cities not named NYC, LA, or SF are obvious. Fifteen years ago, Seattle, Austin, Denver and Fort Worth have seen 20%+ growth in the last 8 years to meet hiring demands.

"Ryanair’s success is remarkably simple. It understands people, and what drives their decision making, better than almost any other company on the planet."

There's a whole movement on "positive psychology" (meaning: psychology focused less on "fixing" you and more on making you feel better) that branders can learn from. For example, people feel better when they have a reason for doing what they are doing (see: the old joke about two stone masons building walls, one of which sees themself building a cathedral). This doesn't mean you should over-index on "purpose," but rather on the work that is serving your purpose. That is, don't just shout about the mission-driven purpose, but remind people that the work itself has purpose.

I'm on record as saying that candidate experience is an often-misunderstood (and over-valued) concept, that (much like EB itself) it isn't something you buy or implement, but is a reflection of who you are and how you operate. Great candidate experience should show off your values and the real experience of working there, not just be obsessed with some vague notion of "white glove service." So I love it when other publications talk about CX from the same experience.

I loved this article in Fistful of Talent about seeing one's job of EB owner as more than just being the EB cheerleader. Too often, we embrace cheerleading simply because aren't given the power or control to make change. But our jobs aren't about control, they are about influence, and how much do cheerleaders really influence things? Instead, be a brand champion.

I'm helping a friend walk her employer brand project through leadership, so I'm super sensitive to how hard is it to get leadership buy-in. Then I see this article on how to get leadership to buy into consumer branding, and I realize we aren't quite the proverbial red-headed step-child we often think we are. Even marketing has to work hard to get buy-in, so why not steal some good ideas from them?

When I talk about how to build an employer brand in a company with diverse microcultures, I usually reference a company's legal team and sales teams as the most disparate groups. One is driven by taking risks and the other is driven by negating them. But the trick is, I really don't know much about how corporate legal teams work, do you? Which is why I'm pointing to this article entitled "Does your legal team spark joy?" To me, it was an interesting perspective that even the dry and boring legal team can have and develop their culture. As they support the business, you can be supporting them by telling a more interesting and intimate story about them.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with investing in tech, but you can't use it to replace your brand mindset. But how will robots change branding? Well, if your brand is tech-driven, it will definitely flip over the apple cart. But if your brand is idea-driven, it's a very different story.

The bitter and cynical black-hearted part of me really loved this article on brands and emotional dishonesty. All those brands projecting sunny dispositions and unrelenting positivity, are they really getting what they want? Are they applying a short-lived salve to soothe people's pains without actually changing anything? And in the world of employer brand, where there's no such thing as "short-term fixes," what would happen if brands embraced emotional honesty?

Is your employer brand charismatic? This article is really focused on how to build one's own charisma, but the notes sound like I'd want to see in a strong employer brand. Example: "use of metaphors to simplify messages, stir emotions, invoke symbolic meanings, and aid recall" and "The articulation of moral convictions and shared sentiments to demonstrate alignment with the followers." Sounds like a great brand to me.

I've been in a lot of meetings and rooms where someone asks, "why don't we do what XYZ is doing?" I wonder if that's a function of all corporate recruiting being functionally the same that they don't recognize that branding should actually be different. But that's a tangent we can investigate later. Here's an article that talks about why brands that imitate are going to get in deep trouble.

Very few of us come from a classic "brand management" background, so articles like this on the state of brand management are a nice peek into how their worlds are changing, too. (Turns out, we're all making it up as we go along.)

Because employer branding as a function is so incredibly complex, it seems like the people who do it each have their own "process" for development. Some people are copy-writers, some people approach it more visually. Some people leverage their tech stack. And others work the internal politics side to develop something that will have immediate buy-in. Those are all possible ways to do it. But what if you had something stronger, something that yo could build creative on top of, something that was tech agnostic, or could shut down petty squabbles internally quickly? Because such a thing might exist? What is your employer brand built on?

Maybe I'm biased, but I love case studies and articles that show perfectionism actually limits the power of your brand. So embrace your flaws to maximize your brand's influence.