"When you think about your brand values, firstly have it clear in your mind that values for your brand will be as integral as they would be for a human being."

Employer branding is a game of fast and slow: jumping on the latest channel or talking point, but also in making sure the long-term strategy is yielding results. Of course, we always talk about the fast stuff (it’s a weekly newsletter, after all), but here is a case for remembering to be slow.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned brand tone much in this newsletter, but that’s because there isn’t much written about it more than anything. Your tone expresses a great deal about your employer brand, so getting that tone right matters. Except it seems like most employer brand tones are either “stiffly professional” or “your wry friend,” as if there’s a singe spectrum between formal and informal. Where’s the introspective tone? Where’s the cheerleader? Or the bureaucrat? Where’s the professorial tone or the underdog? If our brands are complex, why are the tones so simple?

One of the very clear axes (plural of axis, not a thing for chopping wood) by which you can communicate your culture and brand (though it isn’t often used), is the way a company invests in individual professional growth. Is the employee in charge of their own growth (a la every agency I’ve ever seen), the employee is in charge but the company will pay, the company encourages and supports upskilling, etc. If you want to be known as a place where people are expected and supported in their growth (you’d think that was every company, but you’d be very very wrong about that), it means getting your CEO involved.

Metrics, anyone? EB Rock star Shaunda Zilich writes up a nice piece on EB metrics. I was going to quibble with it until I realized that the best part of the article is unstated: Metrics are gibberish until you decide what your strategy is first. You can measure oodles of things and easily get batted around like a leaf on the wind unless you have clearly defined what you are trying to do and deciding the metrics on that. Once I saw that, I realized how great the article was.

You don’t have to record a polished video to make a great video, but you do need a strategy. Marketing Land has some great ideas on how to extend your video’s reach.

Like a strong brand, diversity isn’t a project or campaign. It has to be something a company (and leadership) embraces and invests in quarter after quarter and year after year.

Need to get an edge on your LinkedIn content? Probably. On LI’s platform, we’re all begging for attention and the rules on how to get that attention aren’t obvious. So here’s the research that makes the LI black box a little more transparent. Memorize it to give your posts the maximum opportunity to be seen by the most people.

It heartens me to see how even Recruiter is connecting the dots around how who you bring into your company is how you build a culture (turns out making posters doesn’t do much). This might make for some nice light reading when your culture team meets to talk about the next (virtual) picnic.

As a guy who seems to always be launching this new project or that new idea, I really do try and carve out a little time every few days to just… think. Sometimes its to write a sit-down book (not some musician biography or noir pulp book I use to escape, but a book I need to be seated in a chair to absorb). Sometimes it’s to dump a bunch of thinking on my white board. And while this year has made it hard to get a safe change of scenery (I used to love airports and plains for just this sort of thing, but my favorite was camping out in a hotel lobby for two hours), it is still imperative that we all break away from our calendar and email and make space to just think, to let the mind be… idle? Well, maybe if you’ve achieved total enlightenment, that’s something you can do, but every without the saffron robes, maybe you can just make sure you give your brain some space.

Running workshops and focus groups are an absolute art. (head nod to Christian De Pape, who is excellent at it), but if you’re about to dive head-first into your own brand workshops, here’s a list of great questions to keep in your back pocket.