Employer Brand Headlines Newsletter

Historical perspective: companies that shirk their brand investments during a downturn pay a steep price.

Introduction to a Three-Part Series.

Feeling like you're behind the curve (and the 8-ball) on adjusting to the new reality? Don't feel confident taking a big leap forward? Don't feel like your leadership knows how to help you change? Take some queues from consumer brand shifts as they try to figure how to reach customers who aren't buying.

Before I roll out some cool new stuff (I'll be able to announce it in a few weeks, I hope), I've been thinking about metrics a lot. So this article on how to think about and measure your brand equity really stuck with me. (Pro tip: use the term "brand equity" more at work to elevate your own personal brand.)

I will admit right now that I have yet to see a "talent community" which is actually more than just a mailing list and job posting spam. A community is a place where there is two-way interaction including between members, not just a set of targets to blast with email. (By the way, if you read that as "that's why I shouldn't build a community, you're missing the point: there's a huge opportunity here to build a community because everyone wants one and no one's done it right yet!) So it might make sense to take this opportunity, as you pivot the brand and figure out your strategy going forward, to think about getting serious about your own community.

Is it time to surge? If you're business isn't in one of the industries being crushed by the pandemic (retail, movie theaters, travel, live events, etc), you might be surprisingly well-positioned to level up. So if you can read past the example of Southeast Asian economies, here are the seven reasons the a company will surge. Take a moment and give each of the seven drivers a few minutes of thought. I bet you can come up with a bunch of smart projects to facilitate your surge (oh, and feel free to link to the article when you discuss the projects, to show that you are taking your cues from a higher order of publications).

I loved this piece from Branding Mag on "upbranding," the process of elevating your own brand relative to the competition. The goal is help your brand stand out and appear more valuable (something we probably all would like) by tapping in emotional and rational drivers. The kicker for me was the idea of working t appear more exclusive, something not everyone could have. As our brands hire on quality instead of quantity, exclusivity is a close cousin.

Speaking of "pivot," how deep are you in pivoting your content strategy? Here are two good guides on how to make a quick change of direction from Hubspot and Talent Brand Alliance.

Speaking of "pivot," how deep are you in pivoting your content strategy? Here are two good guides on how to make a quick change of direction from Hubspot and Talent Brand Alliance.

Emily Firth puts this idea front and center, claiming that now is the time for EB to show the value it can bring to the company beyond pipeline-filling (and she's 101% right).

There are some nice examples here, but the real power is in the headline: Content is king as brands make themselves useful. Useful?!?! Wow. But it's a fair shot. Brands are so often seen as fuzzy-bunny nice-to-haves, the thing you invest in once things are nice and cushy. True of consumer and employer brands, the Covid pivot means brands themselves are reinventing what they can be to the company. And for us, it is absolutely true.

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

This might make you feel good (or at least a slight twinge of schadenfreude) to see that marketing likes to complain about how it isn't take seriously in the board room, much like how many of us feel disrespected by marketing. Strangely, the solution to both problems is to stop relying on internal metrics and focus on real business metrics.

How has Google changed its marketing tactics in light of the pandemic?

Some great quotes from business marketing leaders on how COVID has changed their view of how they can market their business to the world. It doesn't take much to read between the lines and see all the room for employer brand to be a strategic partner to marketing. But don't wait for them to come to you: go make that appointment to chat right now!

I loved this article on how "combinatorics" (that term had to have been invented by an MBA with a math background) can help find tune your value proposition. If you ignore the jargon, there's a heck of pitch here: because you don't really understand what your talent prospects want (because you haven't tightened your focus enough), you can't differentiate.

We all know how COVID is changing work, but it is time to stop thinking about "work" in terms of a "job." Our jobs are going to be more fluid and driven less by tasks and much more by outcomes. Add to that disconnection from a core office, and technology that allows anyone to tap into more remote systems and we're entering a time when the very concept of a job will be re-thought.

Last week I had some crazy technical issues. which is why the newsletter went out a day and a half late. In all the chaos, I didn't link to an article on how you can use the four drivers of your employer brand to better respond to the pandemic.

And if you'd like to understand how data can underpin a stronger, more resilient employer brand, I wrote something up to try and put it all together and create a string business case for data investment, even when everything seems "up in the air."

Let's talk data. First, ignore the misleading title of how COVID has impacted employer brand, but this article from LinkedIn shows how companies are changing their messaging strategies to reflect the new reality their employees and prospects are facing. I was interested in what content was getting the most engagement, but be aware that often a post talking about how a company is taking care of its employees is going to get more engagement because employees are effectively endorsing and upvoting the concept.

A lot of very smart people I read were talking about an article that came out from Marc Andreessen (co-writer of Mosaic browser, and all-around smart VC guy) saying that now was the time to build. The argument is obvious: when things are down, smart money takes the opportunity to surf the new wave of change, and the only way to be ready for that wave is to have the idea/business/product/model/function started before the water swells.

Cool tool: Take a conference call or webinar and turn it into a podcast. Anchor (which is owned by Spotify), can take your recorded call, strip out the audio and host it as a podcast for you. It something you could do with some other tools, but a one-stop process might get our company interested in getting on to the podcast train.

I've been thinking about recruiting in closed/finite tale pools (people with security clearances, veterinarians, clinical researchers with MDs, aeronautics engineers, etc) lately for the podcast and I was wondering if this is a situation ripe for micro-influences. Vets know vets. If you want vets (et al) to get interested in you, get a vet to say nice things about you.

Over at TalentCulture, there was a nice interview about how important data is going to become to all of HR (yes, it was sponsored by SAS, who deal exclusively data, but the interview was solid). I was struck by the idea that rather than focus on "here's how data will help you!" kind of conversation, it was really about how once everyone is trained and versed in seeing and thinking with data, the solution doesn't change, the whole question changes.

Think about all your metrics. How many are based on your company how your recruiting is "performing?" But how many are around what candidates think about you? Funnel metrics are about how people act, but do you know why they apply? What are your Candidate Performance Indicators?

Need to ask for budget? Right now, many companies are shutting down anything without a clear ROI (meaning: brand marketing is going dark to make room for more "butts in seats" pushes). So here's some data that shows that consumers still want brand marketing to help answer their "bigger" questions. It's an easy leap to say that candidates already know how to find the jobs, but they will likely have "bigger" questions around the brand they need answered before they will ever think of applying.

Speaking of communicating, Recruiter buried the lede over on this article on how to be a better communicator when everything is Zoom/Teams/Hangouts-based. The best part is at the bottom, where they talk about the importance of being memorable. While i'm enjoying my tour through everyone's dining rooms, it is hard to tell one conversation from the next these days. So yes, spend a few minutes thinking of (on-brand) ways you can be more memorable in your conversations.

We don't talk about corporate comms much (well... we complain about it sometimes, but that doesn't count). Hubspot has a nice writeup on how to level-up your corporate comms strategies. What? You didn't know you were in the corporate comms business? You think someone else does that? Yeah, you're going to be far more effective at building internal allies and advocates once you learn to lean into the corp comms stuff.

While we're here, McKinsey dropped a whole lot of data on how Covid is changing... well... everything.

"While some businesses will be more affected than others, this is the time for all businesses to think and operate in new ways."