What’s wrong with corporate job interviews? Pretty much everything. Interviews are the second most used and “flawed” tool in HR (right after performance appraisals). They are used and relied on around the world for hiring, transfers, promotions, and for selecting leaders. After studying and researching interviews for over 40 years, I find it laughable when…For all the work you do in establishing and instilling/imbuing your brand throughout all the various touch points of the candidate’s brand experience (bigger than the “candidate experience”), there’s one place where it tends to fall apart: the interview. The interview is like talking 6 months of potential brand interactions and compressing them into an intense 1-3 hour live session (virtual or not). Worse than that, they are always happening and they are always out of your control. Let’s be clear a bad 30 minute interview is the difference between a positive or negative experience, between a 1 star and 5 star review, and between a yes and a no. So here’s a list of the 50 biggest issues with interviews. Ignore the fact that it is a 8-year-old article: it will let you blueprint ways in which to influence better brand experience into this crucial experience.

We’ve been telling candidates to develop their personal brand to make it easier for recruiters to understand who they are and what they bring to the table. The problem is, personal brands seem to be the domain of the loudmouth (hi, how are you!). What about introverts? And if we flip the concept around, does your employer brand only cater to the boisterous, obvious extroverts? How can you make sure you’re not repelling introverts in order to stand out in the crowd?

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?

Companies have to hire the best, but that won’t be enough. They’ll also need to rethink how they reskill and upskill their people.

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.

Throughout the candidate journey from awareness to offer, we’ve identified compelling ways to help candidates get to know your organization’s differentiators, as well as helping them screen themselves in and out of opportunities. And here we are, they’ve accepted our offer! To some, this feels like

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…

For recruiters and talent acquisition experts, the old normal may be gone for good.