Employer Brand Headlines Newsletter

Given that this whole pandemic thing isn’t going away, have you started planning on your event replacement strategy? Professional events, now unencumbered by hotel bills, can be anything now, so what do you want them to be?

Need to get an edge on your LinkedIn content? Probably. On LI’s platform, we’re all begging for attention and the rules on how to get that attention aren’t obvious. So here’s the research that makes the LI black box a little more transparent. Memorize it to give your posts the maximum opportunity to be seen by the most people.

Here’s the data on why 2020 isn’t 2008 (from a hiring perspective). Turns out that when people ask “if the economy is tanking, how come it isn’t easier to hire?” (Or it’s corollary, “If everyone’s out of work, why do I have to invest in EB/CX/being nice to candidates?”) the answer is that the economy isn’t tanking equally for everyone, so there is still real demand in many many roles, thus buoying the talent market.

It heartens me to see how even Recruiter is connecting the dots around how who you bring into your company is how you build a culture (turns out making posters doesn’t do much). This might make for some nice light reading when your culture team meets to talk about the next (virtual) picnic.

Throughout the candidate journey from awareness to offer, we’ve identified compelling ways to help candidates get to know your organization’s differentiators, as well as helping them screen themselves in and out of opportunities. And here we are, they’ve accepted our offer! To some, this feels like

As a guy who seems to always be launching this new project or that new idea, I really do try and carve out a little time every few days to just… think. Sometimes its to write a sit-down book (not some musician biography or noir pulp book I use to escape, but a book I need to be seated in a chair to absorb). Sometimes it’s to dump a bunch of thinking on my white board. And while this year has made it hard to get a safe change of scenery (I used to love airports and plains for just this sort of thing, but my favorite was camping out in a hotel lobby for two hours), it is still imperative that we all break away from our calendar and email and make space to just think, to let the mind be… idle? Well, maybe if you’ve achieved total enlightenment, that’s something you can do, but every without the saffron robes, maybe you can just make sure you give your brain some space.

Are you putting data at the heart of your EVP? Here’s a nice long article (from three people I rather respect and like) that tries to connect some dots between EVP and data. With the exception of thinking about your EVP as a catalog of your company’s traits and features instead of as an idea that aligns to and supports someone’s worldview, it suggests that we all still have a long way to go to really open our doors wider to all the different kinds of talent out there.

I point this out not because you need to know it, but employer branders always need to have a full quiver of ways to explain what employer brand is (and isn’t), so here’s a solid article from South America on demystifying employer branding.

Ooof. When you ask the question, “Does TA Understand Passive Talent Engagement?” you know what the answer is going to be, and that answer isn’t going to be positive. But what I was amused by was that after examining the wreckage of the question, the solution the author came away with was that more time and energy should be spend on marketing. Now, if you’re a marketer, you know that marketing can be broken into two kinds: direct and brand. Direct marketing is what you get when you Google “kid’s STEM activities,” the direct response to a need. Any marketing with a clear CTA is direct marketing, which hardly seems in keeping with the original question. So what the author is actually prescribing is that employer branding should be in charge of passive talent engagement. QED, right?

In fact, I think this HBR article is the other side of that coin when it says you should write down the unwritten rules of the company. Aside from pulling assumptions out from behind the curtain given them some sunlight, the exercise is a great way to reveal how you company really reacts to stimulus. I’d take it another step further and say that the unwritten rules of the company are more the culture of your company than what HR says it is, thus making it ripe fodder for employer branding architecture and narrative.

I really appreciate Charlotte Marshall popping the bubble around the seemingly-universally-agreed-upon-yet-never-discussed idea that companies need to be “fun.” More than that, that there’s only one emotional trigger at work and it is called “happiness.” She touches on the idea that a strong employer brand isn’t just a claim you put on a poster, but needs to answer questions about the experience of working somewhere. Not, “do you offer free food” or “what’s the holiday party like,” but questions that start with the phrase “what happens when…?”

In honor of World Employer Branding Day, let’s recognize that as organizations continue to manage through today’s difficult times, there’s one key strategy that many smart businesses have started to re-prioritize — employer branding. Yet even with the best intentions, many companies still fail to capitalize on the opportunities of a newly refreshed employer brand…

"The creative yet strategic art of marketing is now no more than a simple race for the numbers, endlessly and irreversibly deforming brands for momentary capital gain."

Five research-backed strategies to broaden your worldview — even when your world is shrinking.

Work’s got me thinking about my writing style as of late. My usual meandering flowery style is contrasting very clearly to the precision of PR and comms writers, so I’m spending some time over the next month reading books to help me tighten up (if you have recommendations, just reply to this email). That said, as a marketer, sometimes you just need a word that just… pops! So here are 150 words that might act like sprinkles on top of your career site text sundae. Or something.

For those of you sketching out you 2021 campaigns, you might be thinking about making a stand-alone landing page for an idea, an office, a team, or maybe just to collect talent leads before you need them. Turns out, taking your existing page and stripping out all the navigation doesn’t work. Landing pages have their own rules and strategies, so learn them before you deploy yet another boring page no one cares about.

This coming up in this newsletter once every 2-3 months in different guises, and I continue to be fascinated with it. Your brand is a function of the terroir and context as anything else. You’re all about innovation? What that means in a Palo Alto incubator is very different from a large law firm. As you try and reveal the brand, you have to be cognizant of the context in which it exists and grows. Trying to take it out of the context and turning it into an ad or a message will fall apart because there’s no frame around it giving it meaning.

Want to show that you “get it” when it comes to the new world of work? Stop treating working parents like an aberration and build team culture around them. This isn’t just being cool when a kid needs a snack in the middle of the zoom meeting, but assuming flexible schedules are the norm, that maybe meetings can be a little shorter with built-in break between them (instead of back-to-back-to-back) and that there’s value in not looking at a screen for.a few minutes every hour. These ideas might be designed for working parents, but I can’t imagine childless workers wouldn’t find these changes incredibly welcome, too.

So if you want to help recruiting succeed, do you see it as your role to leverage your marketing thinking to make their work better? If so, here’s 27 email subject lines (which work well as InMail subject lines, too) that just work better.

Can a brand help make people happy? No, really. Our brands offer people feels of opportunity, freedom, education, community, support, prestige, and any number of other things, but are they making someone happy? Beyond the initial “I got the job!” elation, can and should an employer brand create happiness?

We all love stories! Create an emotional connection with candidates using storytelling techniques to become an Employer of Choice

For recruiters and talent acquisition experts, the old normal may be gone for good.

"Companies that use a brand funnel powered by some brand tracking software are able to enforce strong marketing direction rather than decisions based on gut feeling."

Guilty pleasure: lusting over amazing visual branding work. I’ve been following Fabien Barral’s blog and work for more than two decades, which he highlights some of the best old fashioned intricate rococo and seemingly curlicue-fetish design work I’ve ever seen. If you like ornate letterpress work, this is a goldmine.

Running workshops and focus groups are an absolute art. (head nod to Christian De Pape, who is excellent at it), but if you’re about to dive head-first into your own brand workshops, here’s a list of great questions to keep in your back pocket.

Are you confusing habits with brand loyalty? Are you good enough, or are you connecting to your candidates’ needs? Here are three myths around brand loyalty which may make for some uncomfortable reading.

A quick “hell yeah!” to Stephen Brand’s article on networks of networks. So much of employer brand is focused on looking for blue oceans of talent (hahahaha… like those still exist) to shout branded messages at instead of looking at who our own people already know. Quoting: “chances are, you already know 90%+ of all the talent you’ll ever need.” To ignore the best advocates you have because they don’t report to you is lunacy, so take it seriously.

Related to above, here’s a mega list of the ’world’s most influential values’ you should go ahead and bookmark now.

If you want to build trust, if you want leadership to be seen as trustworthy, if you are building your values into a platform on which any number of concepts and initiatives will live, it starts by defining fair. Is it fair that some workers make minimum wage and the CEO makes… sightly more? Is it fair that your company only extends the legal minimum of family leave to staff? Is it fair that there are no people of color or women in your executive suite? These are prickly conversations, all of which can be made simpler by defining what we all mean by 'fair’ (and baking it into our brand).

So, if you entitle your article ’7 Ways HR Can Build a Fairer, Data-Informed Culture,’ you are really asking for hurt. You know how I know? Because I have a brother and growing up, we each had a vastly difference sense of what 'fair’ meant. I have to imagine in your average 1,000-person company, you’ll be seeing dozens if not hundreds of definitions of same. It’s a tarpit, one which the article seems to acknowledge before skipping past it.