Employer Brand Headlines Newsletter

Oof. When HBR is arguing against “talent management optimization,” you gotta ask: why aren’t we treating each and every employee like an artist? How is it that Taylorism is still alive and well?

Technically, this article has nothing to do with employer brand, but Google’s three things marketers can do to accelerate digital marketing transformation sure sounds dead on: know your own first-party data, understand your customer journey and prioritize cross-functional collaboration.

Thinking that it may be time for a bit of a re-brand? Here are some questions you should ask before you do (because this is what your leadership will be asking you).

Let’s face it: things aren’t going to get normal (or potentially much better) any time soon. Companies and brands that attempt to weather the storm rather than build a weatherproof shelter are not going to succeed, and that includes employer brands. So what are some things you should be doing now (and not doing any more) to embrace this reality?

There’s no shortage of lessons communicators can extract from the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, but one really stands out. Simple communication wins the days. The underlying principles that guide effective communications in times of great urgency apply in more ordinary times as well.

by Maury Hanigan The last several years in Talent Acquisition has brought us tremendous innovation. We are thinking more strategically than ever before on how we can create experiences that bring in the best talent to our organizations by showing them what it means to work at our companies.

Speaking of community, we’re not the only ones struggling with the idea that we want to get people excited to learn more about us before we have the right role open. Turns out, consumer brands are trying to figure out the same puzzle. The first question you should ask is: what can I help my community members do?

We always like to talk about engaging candidates, but… what constitutes “engagement?” An impression? A like? A click? Watching a video? Signing up for your newsletter (I won’t call it a talent “community” until you let members talk to each other)? How long does it take to become engaged in your brand? Perhaps we’re measuring the wrong thing. Rather than focus on an action, maybe engagement is a function of time and intensity.

We are awash in information and data. You’d think it would be easy to take some of that and turn it into brand pillars, strategies and messaging, but in reality it seems like there’s too much information. Don’t shut it out: here are strategies on how to turn info into insight.

Learn how to build your brand or increase sales through live streaming. Plus, see how major brands use live streaming to expand their reach.

Storytelling can give credibility and personality to brands, helping to build more meaningful relationships with customers. Here are six case studies that prove its value.

Look, this is something I am grappling with because I really want employer branders to think… deeper. It’s not just putting out little videos and polishing up career sites, but helping leadership think better about their brand. One of the ideas I haven’t gotten my arms around but think is special is the concept of cognitive dissonance. We want what we want, but what we want might not align with our stated values. A company who can help its customers overcome that cognitive dissonance is one who can win a long time customer. Like i said, I’m not sure how we can use this idea, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

Look, this is something I am grappling with because I really want employer branders to think… deeper. It’s not just putting out little videos and polishing up career sites, but helping leadership think better about their brand. One of the ideas I haven’t gotten my arms around but think is special is the concept of cognitive dissonance. We want what we want, but what we want might not align with our stated values. A company who can help its customers overcome that cognitive dissonance is one who can win a long time customer. Like i said, I’m not sure how we can use this idea, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

What are people looking for in a video these days of indefinite uncertainty? Positivity, exploring new ideas and difficult issues, and simply engaging with things that feel timely, according to Google.

Two HBR articles in a row?! Goodness. But this one was so good, I had to share. Next time someone starts dropping metrics and KPIs on you to start to measure up to, pull this out and treat it like a checklist: Who else is involved in making this KPI go up or down? What really causes the number to go up and down (remember, correlation is not causation*), and how much control do YOU have other it? And metrics are a two-way street, a relationship between the organization and the market.

In the similar vein, you can be helping your people not just “survive” things, but finding ways to get better because of the crisis.

Everything changed six months ago. And so we adjusted. But has it felt like we’ve built for a new future, or just build enough to “get through this?” I would bet most of you would see it as the latter. Which is too bad. Because it may never come back. It may never come back in the same way. So rather than wait until we can “go back to the way it was,” this is your time to reinvent from the ground up. It is time to take the chaos all around us (and it isn’t any less chaotic, we’ve just built a callus to things lately) and build the “next normal,” not the new one.

Bryan Adams kicks his article off by saying, “talent acquisition professionals and employer brand leaders can often fall victim to an over-reliance on conventional thinking” so you knew I was going to mention this one. His call is to go beyond “typical employer branding” is music to my ears. It’s a call to stop being passive, to stop just focusing on polishing up and providing the “nicest” face on the company and taking a more active role in shaping the brand. Don’t tell stories, make stories. Love it.

To help bloggers in their quest for SEO authority, and non-organic traffic, our link-building expert reveals 3 types of posts that get the most backlinks.

Since organized brands were first introduced over 100 years ago alongside industrialism, they have changed their nature and role in society. Brands have When our favorite brands exceed the expectation we have of them, by giving us a surprise, we get more excited and our interest in and loyalty to the brand increases.

I know I’m bringing up Google a lot today, but I was interested in all this data they had around what messages work for video games. Like applying for jobs, video games aren’t simply transactional: they assume that the user will be spending a lot of their time on them, so the pitch isn’t necessarily what you’d think. For example, video game ads that focus on features and direct calls to action didn’t work when depth of control and motion tended to drive engagement.

Want to strengthen your brand story telling? Go back to your fundamentals (so sayeth Google). Understand emotional state, understand what emotions you want to create, and nail your tone.

It’s nice to see an article admit that everyone offers a competitive salary, benefits, opportunities for growth and flexible working conditions. So what happens next? What happens you have to build an employer brand beyond that?

Weren’t we just talking about branding as a means of solving for cognitive dissonance? Here’s another article on building brands on conflicting desires.

From digital ad spend overtaking traditional and the growth of mobile to the most resilient advertising channels during the Covid-19 pandemic, here are 13 stats that show how advertising is changing in 2020 and beyond.Here are some stats which (once you get beyond the obvious), show you how much the ad market has changed in the last 6 months. For example, mobile isn’t big, it’s bigger than anything else (so you need a mobile strategy, and relying on “programmatic” isn’t enough). Google’s ad revenue went down for the first time… ever. Podcasting keeps growing. E-sports is a real thing. And expect that digital will dominate out-of-home ads.

For my money (and I’m no expert), the litmus test for doing useful D&I work with your employer brand, isn’t to solve for the easiest cases (women make less than men, but they still tend to get hired, albeit at a lower rate), but to solve for the toughest. As one of the least “accepted” groups, perhaps if you solve for trans people, you end us solving for a lot more audiences. And Google’s got some ideas on how to do exactly that.

That said, here are a bunch of resources on building more inclusive language.

My pet bug bear these days is surface-level D&I work. These days, there may be no more important issue we grapple with than making sure all people are treated equally, so you’d think I’d love articles around eliminating bias in job postings. My issue is that it supports the flawed perspective that we can “process-away” bias and inequality. When a “non-biased” process meets an intentionally based person, the person wins every time. My fear is that by leaning on these “safe” measures, we feel good, like we’ve done something to move things forward, when what we’ve really done is provide a smokescreen for biased intentions and behavior. Non-biased language on a job posting doesn’t stop someone from being sexist or racist from and making sexist or racist hiring decisions.

According to Gallup's most recent data, employee engagement is at an all-time high. Huh?