Employer Brand Headlines Newsletter

Lately, I've been talking about the four drivers of your employer brand (See article on ERE): Culture, Leadership, Options and Policies. Since we're all working from home, you might be realizing how distracted we all are: kids, pets, life in general, etc. So what if you suggest making a formal policy to help employees feel more comfortable working like this (I still hear people apologizing about their kid in the background asking for a snack: dude, that's all of us!).

It feels like everyone's still hot on Instagram as a tool for growing brand awareness and engagement (I have doubts as I haven't seen great metrics on how many people search Instagram like that, and you have to pay money to get a call to action on a post, but I digress). So if you're ready to raise your instagram game, take some tips from professional Instagram managers.

Speaking of content marketing, have you started experimenting with live video yet? In a remote world, it might be exactly what you need to get people interested in what your company is doing and why they might consider applying. Here's a great how-to on how to get good at live video in a hurry.

Predictions on how content marketing will likely change in the near term is a guidebook for all your employer brand tactics (what, did you not know you're a content marketer? Oh indeed you are). Example: social and video look to continue their rise, but now that most google searches are mobile, how are you going to react?

You know I'm a story fan, so you might not be surprised to see that I loved this piece on creating a villain in your own brand story. Who opposes your company? Who are you trying very hard to NOT be? What are you working to vanquish? Villains don't just offer an element of drama, they serve as a driving purpose to your own brand, offering a suggestion of how far you'll be willing to go to defeat the enemy.

Sure, you might be measuring your brand awareness, but are you measuring brand equity? I've been thinking that the killer metric might be how much value does a candidate place in your brand. Are you able to offer a salary discount because everyone wants to work for you, or do you have to pay a premium to get talent in the door to overcome that brand sentiment?

HBR has a nice post about what new employees should do to ensure a remote on-boarding is still effective. I say, take this advice and internalize it. Work with your on-boarding manager/team and implement the ideas proactively, but look for places to insert your employer brand messages. Remember: new employees are more likely to accept your brand because they've only known a company with your brand in place.

You've heard of the five stages of grief, right? As we all do our best to come to terms with the new pandemic reality, these five steps might be a helpful guide to not only understanding our own feelings, but to understand how to position our messaging to employees. If you can tap into this model, you can come out with stronger employee engagement, which powers your own employer brand.

Employer brand is still seen purely through the lens of "filling the funnel" at too many companies. And while EB should be showing it own impact across every aspect of what the business does, it will always need to remember that until it fills the funnel, other things can't get done. To that end, here's a great white paper ATAP put together on creating, executing and managing a talent attraction strategy.

If you are being forced to re-think your candidate experience (because you can't just have them show up to the office at the moment), here are some suggestions on leveraging human-centered design to re-invent the entire experience.

If 86% of all consumers say it is "critical" of brands to show empathy, where are you in these conversations?

You might assume that HR is in the "people" business. That's partially true. They are on the rules side of people: what the staff can expect from leadership, what staff are allowed to do, arbitrating disagreements, etc. But HR isn't often in the "empathy business." And I would suggest that that's exactly what you do: understand why people like (and don't like working somewhere, extracting it, distilling it, reflecting it and amplifying it. So when I see articles about how businesses need to embrace empathy to succeed, I think, "How can EB'ers use this idea to make a bigger impact on the business?"

If you are looking for ideas on how to improve your employer brand marketing, here is a laundry list of great projects to consider. Allow me to point out that they list "improving your search rankings" and that isn't a project I hear EB'ers talk about much. Do you spend any thought/time at all to making your job postings pop up higher on job boards and Google? Maybe you should.

In uncertain times, helpful content can bring companies and consumers closer together. Learn how to build a content marketing strategy to best address your audience's needs in times of crisis.

Marketing emails are on the up, but are brands making the most of the channel, and how can they ensure best practice during this time? Here’s a look at some recent email stats and examples.

And in further tales of "everything is changing, so you better change too!" all the data and research you may have built your insights and strategies on are now... well, history. HBR has two pieces about the power of data, focusing on how you need to look at new post-Covid data because anything older is based on outmoded ways of looking at the world, and that you need a strong methodology with which to see the insights in the data. And one more, just to round things out.

In a similar vein, here are the 16 rules for brand strategy. Yes, they are about consumer brand strategy, but you should be able to take rules like, Lead with the Story, Look for the Subtext, and Empathize with your [Candidate]. These are not the typical "rules" you've seen before. For example, I adore rules like Speak Your Secret Language and Create Tension. Author Jasmine Bina also runs one of my favorite podcasts, Unseen Unknown. All of her stuff is amazing.

One of the reasons why I always dig Bud Caddell's stuff is that he's a "culture guy" who comes from business. There's not much "fuzzy-bunny" thinking with him. This article on strategy and culture post-Covid is a longer read, but there are layers to consider. One it can help you see how own business might respond. Two, it might give you ideas on how to embed your brand into your evolving culture. Three, how can you evolve your own employer branding function, treating it like an independent consulting service within your company.

File Under: Great Use of Not New Tech. Chiquita Banana put a Spotify code on their banana labels so that you could point your phone at it and listen to a playlist. Cute, right? But what if instead of just making a nice little playlist, you built a playlist of your executives on podcasts, or your recent favorite podcasts? The tech is free, so if you're leveraging podcasts in your content building (and Spotify is going HARD on podcasts right now), this might be a clever way to connect physical with the digital.

I'll admit that I started reading this article on how data can help make remote teams work better to see what kind of data they were looking at, but it's really a different article. The premise is that if you give your staff more of the data/context/info on how leadership makes its decisions, other staff will likely make similar decisions, Further, with that info, they can do better work with less oversight, thus supporting a more remote work space. Why should I care? Because this is a great way to show a candidate what you mean by "we give people lots of opportunity" or "we empower our staff," both of which are functionally meaningless. But talking about how much data and info you share internally to support this claims makes those brand claims infantely more believable, credible and clear.

Yes, we all talk about hiring or recruiting funnels, and maybe we have heard that we're supposed to communicate different things at different stages of the funnel, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone show you what that might look like. This example over at Hubspot is more consumer focused, but it gives examples of how to communicate at the various stages of the funnel based on what someone's motivations might be.

What do job seekers care about in a pandemic? Based on multiple company's TA chatbots, it turns out that 47% of people asked what the company's response to COVID was, roughly double the number of people asking about hiring. This suggests that prospects are twice as interested in understanding who the company as they are in learning about a job. Second take: If a huge percentage of your traffic comes in via job posts (job-focused), maybe preemptively tell them about your COVID response up front?

There's always a contingent looking "ahead" at cool marketing tactics. For them, I ask: are you thinking about interactive marketing yet? Be they games, AR/VR, even "choose your own adventure"-type story-telling, getting people to make choices within your marketing makes your messages more engaging and memorable. Okay, I scared you with the AR/VR thing, sorry. But quizzes count (sorta). And what if instead of "a day in the life" video, you let people choose what the employee was going to do? Get coffee or prep for the meeting? Research a client via Google or other channel? Make a series of options that people can choose and see the impact those choices make in their day. Maybe double down and work with your instruction-design people (assuming you have one of those) to show how each choice suggests that the candidate is or isn't a likely fit with your brand (without being ham-fisted about it).

Yes, you should actively be sharing your stories right now. Right now! Lauryn Sargent, who knows a thing or two about employee stories, makes a solid case for telling more stories now, not less. Whether the news is good or bad, telling stories turns anything into a more human experience, one that gets more eyeballs and sticks in the brain longer.

Even if Sally Bolig wasn't a friend, I'd still link to this article on why you need to keep up your employer brand investment even in light of the pandemic for the fact that her first main point simply asks: What are you trying to solve for with your employer brand? It's a point that tends to get skipped over, and she puts it right up front. The rest of the article is full of examples of what companies are doing well on social (many of which I hadn't seen before).

Econsultancy’s ‘Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Marketing’ report states that 49% of organisations are either already using or are testing AI or machine learning.Almost half of all marketers are testing or using machine learning. Time to level up.

Empathy is the new marketing.

A New Human Normal. "Think of this as a “KonMari” moment for brands"

1,200 Post-It Notes to Fix a Broken Culture. Yes, sometimes it takes a lot of work to dig deep and make change.

Interesting LinkedIn Stats. My fave? Pinterest is FAR MORE trusted than Facebook. I bring this up because FB is about to be a VERY problematic place to run ads, I believe.