Employer Brand Headlines Newsletter

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.

We're all so primed to being "understood," that in a lot of ways, it limits our thinking. If you care most about being understood, you end up softening or dumbing-down your strategy or idea, sometimes negating the idea altogether. So maybe being "misunderstood" is an interesting litmus test for your idea. Example: the history of Amazon, who has been misunderstood its entire corporate life.

I've long stated that employer branders are crazy because their job involves being responsible for every aspect of the company that impacts the brand (i.e. all of it), without any of the authority to change things. Recent news only adds a new element to this madness: rampant uncertainty at every single level. But uncertainty isn't just survivable, but an opportunity for you to elevate your work, your company, and your ideas. How? Change your mindset as you embrace uncertainty.

You know things have changed when even the recruiters and HR are willing to throw away the old rule book and design things around the new normal. Case in point: Robin Schooling's article on how all the old HR rules are being thrown out suggests that employer branding needs to step in NOW to partner with HR to invent the future. Remember: your brand can only be as good as your internal policies let you be.

We're seeing companies praised for pledging to not lay anyone off, for leaders taking deep pay cuts, for companies giving away its own resources to support a common good.

"Not only is it a safety issue, it's a business issue," Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban told CNBC.

Paging Captain Obvious: HBR finally has decided that job postings are a good way to attract better talent. Hey, who's snitchin?! Anyway, I just did a webinar on how to write better job postings faster, so if you want to see the recording, you'll have to ask me nicely. Just reply to this email.

I have to wonder if all this WFH has caused tech companies to roll out all its planned features early to keep our attention. Evidence? Facebook Messenger for groups, Youtube features to compete with Tik Tok, Facebook live gets accessibility features, and even reddit is rolling out new features. The best part? These features are free! Go engage your candidates!

How did Pixar, already known as a fantastic story-teller, change how it approached story and brand issues to reach the next level? By building an internal "brain trust." (For the record, so much of what we see as "great creative" isn't about inspiration, but about the systems and processes we put in place to foster that creativity.)

In 2019, WhatsApp reached 2 billion global users and solidified itself as the most popular mobile messaging app worldwide. Here's how brands leverage it.My feeling is that Europe and Asia have embraced WhatsApp far more than America (1.5B users globally, but only 23MM in the US) but that just means we can learn some lessons on how to leverage it. The best part? WhatsApp is free.

here's a whole report on the state of diversity within marketing and how people feel like they see themselves in marketing.

Since it's the topic of this week's The Talent Cast, I've got diversity on the brain. Maybe that's why I jumped at this list of 25 stats to help you explain why diversity is important to your company and employer brand.

Usually, when I get looped into "should recruiting have it's own social channels" fights, the fight is based on feelings and politics. How controlling is marketing being? How willing are you to care and feed the channel? Etc. But Hubspot offers a smart set of arguments as when when you should (and should not) launch your own dedicated social channels.

I don't want to be one of those "productivity-or-die" people. This situation is intensely stressful, so if you don't feel like using your WFH time to write a book or start a side-hustle, you'll get no judgement from me. But, if you want to learn something (and there is a webinar glut at the moment, so it's not hard to find stuff to learn), Google has a list of 9 free online courses that would really help you elevate your game.

This article should arm you with a better argument with tech recruiters and tech hiring managers at to why their normal way of hiring is deeeeeeply flawed. I point it out because tech recruiting is one of those places that doesn't always embrace the power of employer brand, and when you read this article, it should become pretty clear where the disconnect it.

Remember, your brand is less a set of words, images or concepts, but of the stories people tell themselves and (obliquely) each other about why they work there. So here's a great piece on how you can use narrative to as a means to influence decisions.

I had a fun conversation over at Chad & Cheese on employer branding in a post-COVID world that got some surprisingly positive mentions.

How do you recruit on campus when no one's on campus?

If it seems like all the emails you've been getting all seem to say the same stuff, it's not just you. Here's a poem someone based purely on the first lines of recent emails (it's a winner).

Prediction: we've reached "peak inspiration" with our brand messaging. We needed that sense of hope to get through the initial freak-out, and some companies did a great job with it. But leaning too much on inspiration can feel like eating too much of that chocolate bunny. Beyond peak-inspiration? Getting the work done. Where we get back to the pleasures of doing good work.

NYTimes has a bunch of data on how people's internet use has changed since their lockdowns. This might be useful as you plan how you reach out to people in a COVID world. My big takeaway is that where phone-driven apps had been growing steadily, the fact that we're all locked at home with our laptops and TV means that they are taking up a LOT more of our screen time.

What's the line? Nothing may happen for a decade, but then a decade can happen in a week? We're living in a VUCA world. All the conversations we've been having below the water line around the purpose of a company, the why, the change the company is trying to make in the world, has suddenly become THE conversation.

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.