Employer Brand Headlines Newsletter

So I was deeply impressed when LinkedIn (and I don’t often use the words “impressed” and “LinkedIn” together) posted a directory of their own alumni who were recently let go. We’re in a world where leaving is no longer the stigma it once was, but it’s rare that companies actively support their alumni. The obvious outcomes of this kind of project is that it makes LinkedIn look good, but it creates an army of people connecting with all new networks who now have very positive brand associates with LI.

I love how Forbes wrote a whole article about the power of employer brand when marketers and leadership gets involved, and then had the gall to suggest that employer brand was “territorial” about their part of the brand and didn’t want to let marketing play their game. I’ve talked with dozens (if not a hundred) EB owners and they all, to a person, would have loved for marketing to acknowledge their existence, let alone combine forces and/or resources.

So, anyone who reads my blogs or follows me on Twitter will probably know two things about me. 1). I like to be practical; Blue Sky Aspirational Thought Leadership is alright on a stage somewhere but how does it translate into day-to-day "doing it" and 2). I like to look at low cost options as a lot

With the events of 2020 having redefined all aspects of work, how you position your employer brand has never been more critical than it is today.

The researchers show that even though chitchat is superficial, “it’s about building culture and collaboration.”

"If this is how we consume content in our busy, daily lives, why would we behave differently in our even busier work lives?"

Sometimes, the biggest potential talent source is right under your nose. But how can you foster a culture in internal career mobility? Let us show you!

On the recruitment marketing side of things, we are faced with a slew of cool tools to help us place our message in front of people who just visited our career site, or are a lot like people who follow our Facebook page. There are two issues with that. One, most of us are just pushing out lame job ads to these people, as if applying for a job is the same as downloading a whitepaper (it’s not). Two, we don’t spend time thinking about how or why the tools are designed to work. We just get thrilled by the “extra clicks” or “deeper awareness” rather than thinking through how to use the tools properly. So here’s a Hubspot article on how to approach your behavior-targeted ad (I bet you didn’t even know that that was what that was called).

Tim Sackett asks a pretty controversial question over on his blog: Should companies disclose their political leanings? Tim makes good points that just because a business might lean liberal or conservative, that doesn’t mean everyone does, or even that it’s a critical component to the employer brand. My take is simple: if it matters to leadership and staff what the political identify of an organization is, and it’s not exclusive of talent from other perspectives, there’s no reason not to talk about it. But in this day and age, where “wearing a mask” is seen as somehow “political,” the return from such a position is likely very very weak (if not completely counter-productive).

Let’s talk about influencers. Not the Fyre Festival type, but the people in your ecosystem who are creating content to connect with internal and external audiences. The people who influence others to consider working here. This is more than simple “advocacy,” or even tactical referrals, this is about helping your own influencers these people build emotional connections, which is what sparks longer-term relationships.

I admit that when I read this article on “brand collaboration,” I couldn’t conceive of two employer brands collaborating and sharing ideas and identities. But then it hit me: Many of us have staff who have their own brands. Call them thought leaders or influencers, they are resources that you can use and support to drive your own brand. Like Michael Jordan and Nike, how are you going to collaborate your brands to mutual success?

Before I go any further, I must make an important distinction. This article concerns driving a brand's growth within an existing category. As such, it is Brands fighting for market share should keep these ten actions in mind.

Three ways leaders can adapt.

"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."

Hubspot has a list of 14 different blog formats. This is great when you’re out of ideas and need to think of what kind of content you could build.

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.

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.

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?

Sally Bolig (hi Sally!) took recent LinkedIn data and did a better job of pulling out the insights than LinkedIn did. Of note: Companies are posting more in 2020 than before, posts about Covid seem to be plateauing as a messaging focus, and more companies are using LI to post about hiring. (This is good stuff if you want to convince marketing to let you have a seat at the LI table). Also note how quickly we all went from “don’t talk about race and politics on your corporate site” to “well, we have to say something about BLM…” in a matter of a few weeks.

There’s a lot of assumptions around the intersection of brand value and brand quality. That is, if a company does a great job supporting its people, the quality of the brand establishes the value of the brand. But it isn’t always so cut-and-dried. Take SpaceX, a company known for its horrible work-life balance and overly-aggressive management, two thinks engineers say they hate. And yet, SpaceX is the top company engineers want to work for. How can you leverage the disconnect between quality and value?

Many businesses are redirecting their strategy to focus more on customer value and experience, from both a proactive standpoint and a reactive one.

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?

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With 800 million monthly active users, TikTok has quickly risen to become one of the most popular social media platforms for brand marketing. Here are eight of the best examples we've seen so far.

My feeling on over-indexing on candidate experience are well known (your CX should reflect your brand and work reality, not just “white glove”), but there are still great online ways to engage talent online outside of tests and (god help us all) the ATS. Here are some examples from the consumer world we could all steal ideas from.

Pop quiz: what’s the one thing that adds authenticity to your brand claims? When actual employers align to those claims. Even more so when they can internalize those ideas and even talk about the less-attractive aspects of the brand (all traits have good and bad features, and every strength becomes a weakness if taken too far). Charlotte Marshal breaks it down.

Oh, hey. Here’s Marketing Week making a clear case for how your employer brand supports your customer brand. Trust me, they don’t care about recruiting or niceties like candidate experience. They only can about making and keeping customers. Slip this under your CMO’s door.

Trying to grow your brand without emotion (I mean, we are in the people business, right?) is a mistake. But leveraging emotion isn’t necessarily obvious or simple. It helps to understand your talent targets’ needs and desires.

My rule of thumb for strengthening your employer brand is to separate your sentiment and reach and treat them independently. But when you try and extend reach, its a rare day that you’re extending into blue ocean. So here is some great thinking on extending your market penetration, how to push others out of the way while staking your claim.