Employer Brand Headlines Newsletter

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.

Speaking of how recruiters work, this week, Yello updated its canonical guide to recruitment operations. Hey! Come back! I know the concept of recruitment ops fills you with as much excitement as being stuck in traffic, but the reality is, if you want to change how recruiting happens, you need to make great friends with the ops folks. They can help you edit workflows to ensure recruiters are doing the things you need. You can re-write all the messaging that moves out of an ATS. You can help write the recruiting checklist to create broader EB alignment. Recruiting ops people rarely get any love, so making friends with them is like making best friends with the janitor: they have all kinds of access and are rarely seen as important.

Part of the job of employer branding is helping an organization change. Commonly, it starts by helping recruiting change, and if you've ever tried, you know the first response is "how can we make that change when we don't have [insert thing]?" Which is why I was really impressed by Coby Schneider's article on how to respond to that exact issue. For whatever reason (I blame its proximity to HR, personally), recruiting likes to have all its ducks in a row before taking step one. But you are going to need to encourage them to shake that mentality.

Going into 2019, there was a lot of talk about what the year would bring, particularly for Gen Z, today’s youngest working population. With more than 70 million of these students seeking employment over the summer, and another 220 million still enrolled in higher education, Gen Z continues outpacing its predecessors in size and scope. …

For employer branders, there's that terrifying moment when we've built something and it is time to release it to the world. All the pride and passion that went into it could go up in a puff of "meh" unless we insert one new step: testing the waters to gauge interest.

There's a natural push/pull in building an employer brand. On one hand, you want to get as many perspectives included as possible, but that leads to group-think and camel creation. Alternatively, you could do it on your own, but best of luck getting any buy-in when the time comes. What's an employer brander to do? Here are some ideas on how to get the group to solve problems together.

Better diversity programs can't happen until we all (speaking mostly to myself, here) get comfortable talking about diversity. How do you walk the line between being aware (and owning) one's privilege, and being one of those "more-woke-than-thou" types. The HBR, who might know a thing or two about privilege, have some thoughts on the subject of talking about diversity.

Here's a fun story! You spend months launching an EVP, you build our comms and messaging and candidates seem to really respond to it. Recruiters are using it, talking about how collaborative you are as a culture, how supportive you are. Your words show up in the job postings, recruiter outreach, comms messaging and everything is going great! Then the candidate you've convinced to interview based on that idea of collaborative culture meets your hiring manager who stares at their phone the whole interview. your efforts have been wasted! Worse, that candidate is going to tell everyone on a rating site! This is all to say, don't forget the power your hiring manager has to adding to your employer brand. Which also means, you need to engage them and get them on board. So here are some thoughts on how to educate your hiring manager.

Okay, I now have three friends in the past year who have joined the green economy. Not the recycling economic, but the chronic, reefer and/or blunt economy. Obviously the laws on how legal it is to own and use pot is evolving quickly state by state, but have your HR policies? Note this (just the most recent) occurrence of a company firing an employee for failing a drug test in a state where it isn't criminal to partake. Have you talked to HR about their ganja policies and have you talked about making that policy known to candidates before they apply?

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."

File under: the little things make a big difference. How to write a disposition letter (most people call them rejection letters) that doesn't make people mad.

You know what bosses like to announce? Events. You know what recruiters and EB pros hate to manage? Events. Overstatement aside, events always sound like fun until you have to manage your own. And things get worse when the boss asks afterwards what the ROI was. So before you even begin to start planning your event, answer some of these questions first: A recruiter's guide to event management.

Related to that, HBR asks if you give your employees a reason to feel proud of what they do? I'd add in, do you ask employees to share that pride when talking with their own networks?

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.

Good visual identity is about more than engaging colors and pretty creative. It needs to enhance your message and brand. That means getting beyond colors and fonts you like or are fashionable. Instead, think about the visuals as a way to invite people to learn more bout your employer brand.

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.

But there is a dark side to being committed to being data-driven. What happens when you collect enough data on your employees to spot non-productive staff automatically? And if the data can spot them... what happens when automation fires them? Sound crazy? It's happening right now. This isn't a "this is bad!" post, but these are the changes that are happening that directly impact how people perceive your employer brand.

I'm going to call it right now. 2020 is the year recruiting and hiring get real about data. Between all the data sitting in your HRIS systems, the AI that can pull it out and deliver some measure of insights, the availability of low-cost external perception research, workforce planning et al, HR and recruiting will spend the year learning how to collect, manage and make decisions with data. What pushed me over the edge is Talent Culture talking about bringing in the last foot-dragging elements of HR into a data-driven mentality: recruiting.

This week's big read is Boston Consulting Group's article on how the changing world of work is a confluence of changing tech, changing talent needs, and the value of purpose in the next decade. It's very mega-trendy, but there are great notes. For example, how will you understand and communicate your EB internally as teams get smaller and more virtual? Does your EB change for someone working from home? How do you change your strategy of turning them into advocates?

If you employer brand function owns the recruitment marketing function, here's a great article on how to better manage your ad spend.

While candidate experience is impacted by every aspect of recruiting, the number one recruiting focus for 2020 will be employer branding. In fact, 81% of all global companies we surveyed...

LinkedIn says 2020 is the year recruiting completely changes. New skills, new tools, new approaches to recruiting. So... you mean like employer branding?

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?

I really wish we could all get away from talking about "culture" as if there's some platonic ideal of culture we should all be shooting for. What I like is not what you like and that's completely fine. And while there are some good points here about fostering a stronger and more obvious culture, don't get sucked into the position that there's only one measure of quality culture.

I'm already on record (what record??!?!) for the power of embracing constraints. When you have no resources or money or time, that's when you are forced to get really creative in solving your problems (even employer branding ones). So here's the HBR talking how innovation doesn't occur despite constraints, but because of them. Sure, if you want to play "follow the leader" and "best practice bingo," you'll pay a premium to do it the way everyone else does. So embrace those constraints (or even apply some arbitrary ones) to innovate better.

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.

I know I'm in the minority when I say that I don't know that "day in the life" videos are not how I would want to learn about a company (my quibble: they can be as staged and fake as any other marketing device, and frankly, what your office looks like and what meetings look like don't tell me much). But they are obviously a part of many company's employer brands, so if you're going to build them, maybe build them well. William Tincup says the secret to a good video is a focus on hypertransparency and radical candor.

In EMEA and APAC, where tenures are longer and people change companies less, there's a deeper investment in university recruiting to establish and develop one's employer brand. In the states, however, university recruiting often has to beg for crumbs at the table. So if you're going to build a campus recruiting team, do it right. (I'm not saying the secret is to set KPis and tout successes, but it kind of is.)