Employer Brand Headlines Newsletter

Tom Peters (one of my professional heroes) once said to a room full of executives, "Benchmarking is stupid. You pick the current industry leader and then launch a five-year program, the goal of which is to be as good as whomever was best five years ago five years from now." (He once told a room full of American automotive executives that, having spent millions in design and research to launch the Dodge Neon, "Congrats, you invented a 1986 Honda Civic.") So you have a sense of my bias against benchmarks: They care pictures of the past and too many people seek only to recreate someone else's past. That said, SmashFly just launched its own benchmarks for recruitment marketing. (Fair warning: you get to the top of their benchmarks by doing all the things they think you should do, not because you necessarily do it well). Takeaways? Engage with candidates honestly, transparently and deeply and you'll always be ahead of the curve.

Hubspot has an article of six examples of how to better use social media to increase your subscriber list. Lots of lessons for anyone who is integrating social and email communications to expand their brand reach.

You can't convince anyone of anything using only logic (see: reddit political forums, twitter political chats, et al). You need an emotional reaction, after which, the listener will find the logic to justify their new position. I ended up podcasting a bit about this idea, but here's a solid article if this is a subject that interests you.

Maybe we simply reject the concept of "rejected candidates" and think of it as "talent recycling." Maybe changing the label will get companies to start to realize that the process of enraging a hundred people (who talk VERY LOUDLY to their own communities, I assure you) just to find one person to whom to make the offer (which will be rejected 40% of the time!), is insane. To that end, FireFish has some rudimentary (and yet somehow NOT standard practice in most companies) ways to get more out of your recycled talent.

I have yet to find a professionally satisfying "talent community." Why? Because "community" speaks to two-way conversation and most talent communities are email blasting tools with new labels on the tin. But I have to imagine that we must (by now) be on the precipice of actually getting talent communities right. Why? Because companies around the world are finding the value of building communities of customers and prospects, so that thinking will trickle down to us at some point. Right?

To steal a line from David C. Baker, you can't read your label if you're inside the jar. If you are trying to see and distill your own employer brand, your biggest obstacle is you (and your biases you can't see). By way of example, my colleague Dennis Billgren reminds us that you might "know" that what US tech workers want is more work-life balance and autonomy. So why does Tesla and SpaceX (notorious for NOT having those things) consistently rank at the top of most desired employers? What you think you know isn't the same as objective knowledge, especially in employer branding.

Big Read of the Week: Employer brand walks a tightrope between reflecting what it and influencing it towards where it should be. To that end, we need to be a little big disruptive all the time. But the word "disruptive" tends to scare people (especially people in HR). Which is why I really enjoyed this article on how love (yes "love") can and should be used to empower your disruption strategy.

Let me ask you a question: would your overall employer brand be better/stronger if everyone felt like they had a hand in crafting their own jobs, if they were able to shape the tasks, people and purpose of the job to better match who they were? The concept of "job crafting" (new to me) has been studied for the last 20 years and the impacts are very interesting. While the article is geared towards, "you should try to craft your job," what if you started to think how you support and encourage others to craft their jobs to make them feel more satisfied and fulfilled at work? That sounds like an interested employer brand strategy to me.

Some days, it really is this simple. If you want to be a stronger ally, load the dishwasher at work.

A reminder that we all need to be thinking in virtuous cycles to not just make an impact, but to ensure those impacts expand.

Branding Magazine says people see brands as people. For use, our brands ARE people. Which means that we need to be thinking psychologically about how our prospects see us.

Don't let a focus on "authenticity" keep your brand from evolving and growing.

Marketing Land is a daily, must-read site for CMOs, digital marketing executives and advertising campaign managers.

Google released a whole lot of insights around how and why people watch video online. The data, based on 12,000 people on YouTube, shows why people watch video online, broken down my age ranges and geography. Some takeaways? No one cares about your production values if the content is interesting and/or teaches something. Feeding audiences' passions is a much better driver than celebrities or is mobile-optimized (turns out having a good concept and purpose beats polish and optimization tricks). It turns out that while you're competing with Ryan Gosling for attention, you can still win. Great stuff here.

Working remotely means more virtual meetings. Yay? Rather than play conference call bingo, here are great tips on how to run a virtual meeting more effectively for everyone.

What if you had to solve employer branding challenges and had no idea what employer branding was? You'd probably end up re-inventing it yourself. Which is effectively what this article does. But it's interesting to see how someone outside the space would approach the same issues we wrestle with ever day.

A great guide to using quizzes to attract talent.

"With an erosion of trust in our institutions, people are choosing to vote with their wallets by supporting brands that have values that align with their own."

How does your brand change what it values? Here are six possible ways to approach how you change in light of the crisis (based on a study of how brands changed in 2009 after the initial housing collapse). Thinking through these ideas is how to position your brand to be far more effective and valuable once things calm down.

I'm really surprised I haven't heard more chatter about this essay at HBR. They suggest that one strategy to encouraging retention is to focus on hiring women. They also bring up data suggesting employees (even millennials) want to be loyal. As someone who is marries to a career coach, I can affirm that NO ONE likes or wants to look for a job unless they absolutely have to, so maybe companies don't really have to bend over backwards to increase retention.

We probably all have favorite ways companies are changing what/how they are working because of CV. Here's a great wrap-up of how 50+ companies companies are changing their products and internal processes. (Keep this list handy when your leadership is talking bout what changes you can make and you'll look like a genius when you can name other companies making similar changes.) And here is a list of brand who are going a step further to change their comms to encourage social distancing.

We probably all have favorite ways companies are changing what/how they are working because of CV. Here's a great wrap-up of how 50+ companies companies are changing their products and internal processes. (Keep this list handy when your leadership is talking bout what changes you can make and you'll look like a genius when you can name other companies making similar changes.)

Did you see that celebrity "Imagine" video? Cringe! To quote Elvis Costello, "Was it a millionaire who said 'imagine no possessions?'" Anyway, authenticity is only going to matter more during this crisis, but that doesn't mean it's any easier to foster or communicate. So here's some good thinking on how to re-think your digital comms to avoid that kind of cringe.

Have you started planning on how you're going to shift any live events to a virtual setting, I can't guess what you're waiting for. Here is a helpful guide to serving your event via Google on how to approach the problem.

Have you started planning on how you're going to shift any live events to a virtual setting, I can't guess what you're waiting for. Here is a helpful guide to serving your event via YouTube.

interesting pieces about what employer brand really means. To Emily, the employer brand is the company's conscience.

interesting pieces about what employer brand really means. To Steve, the brand is the connection between the company and the employee.

Why is an employer brand important? I am a total employer brand nerd. I talk about employer branding.I wrote an essay on how this is the time in which your employer brand is truly revealed. It is during a crisis that we see that we were putting our faith in pretty words to attract talent, or if we were portraying our organization in a meaningfully different way. I'm hoping its a little more inspirational than the this little description makes it sound.

If you occasionally feel like you tell the same employer brand story over and over and over (guilty!), you might appreciate some different ways to tell a story. Take any profile, article, posting, or video and re-tell it in a new format and it will feel fresh and news (I mean, George Lucas was just retelling a samurai story in space and he's a billionaire).

So if our game needs to be elevated, one way it to start taking notes from the creative folk who help us choose what shoes, toothpaste and cereal to buy. Here's a good start to getting your gears turning: using dissonance to create tension and attraction. It's sometimes risky, but the payoffs can be game-changers.