Employer Brand Headlines Newsletter

In the recent past, there has been a sea change in the way organizations source and recruit candidates. In earlier times, organizations would source candidates as a reaction to job needs. Now,...

Fortunately, the empirical literature showing how and why diversity-related training fails also points towards ways that the training could be reimagined in order to better serve its stated purposes.

A great brand does not need to be a big brand in terms of size. But, it does need to be a big brand in terms of its power to engage people’s imagination. A great brand does not need to be a big brand in terms of size. But, it does need to be a big brand in terms of its power to engage people’s imagination.

Creativity can seem like a mysterious process. But many of the most creative people understand that you can actually break it down into a simple formula, involving what researcher Douglas Hofstadter calls “jootsing.” Here’s how understanding systems can help us think more creatively.

Last year taught us that the future is difficult to predict, but that didn't stop the plethora of webinars, articles, social posts and emails suggesting what to expect in 2021 from popping up at the end of last year. I find trends valuable to a degree, they suggest progress to be made and ways of do

I often hear employer branding being described as an exciting field. And to me it is. But what’s exciting to me may not be particularly exciting to you. If you think ‘exciting’ means that it’s an in-demand industry where your skills and perspective are valued through the business, where companies vie for your attention and […]

Volume hiring will never be the same, get ready for 2021 and beyond with this list of trends backed up with real data from tens of millions of candidate interactions. What the hell just happened? I think we’re all ready to say goodbye to 2020.

No one saw 2020 coming. At the close of 2019, economists in the US talked about the prospect of full employment, we expected Brexit to dominate headlines in Europe and Japan was poised to open its doors to the world as host to the Summer Olympics.

Here's an interesting way to re-think about how you talk about and write about your jobs. Ask yourself things like, "what was I nervous about before I started?" and " If you had to convince someone NOT to apply, how would you?" This article on what horror movies can teach us about job postings is a great read.

I've always thought about building an Oblique Strategies deck for EB folks. What, you don't know what the OS cards are? Designed by Brian Eno (the guy who turned "alien" David Bowie into "genius" David Bowie), they are cards you select when you're stuck. Designed for musicians originally, they had instructions designed to spark thinking like "go to an extreme and work your way back" or "change instrument roles." Sometimes they were very... high-minded like "twist the spine" or "question the heroic approach." I love it because it assumes that the right answer is inside you already and you just need to clear out the clutter of your own mind to find it. Anyway, if you're stuck, here are 10 strategies to re-spark your thinking when trying to turn around your employer brand.

This week's long read comes to us from strategy+business. This is a great primer on what you can do to create culture change in your organization. Sure, as employer brand people, you may grapple with the business of when you need to accept an aspect of the culture and when you should try to change it (especially when you likely have no formal power to do so), but this article may help you see ways to nudge the change into occurring.

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.