Employer Brand Headlines Newsletter

How to host a virtual networking event. Not a career fair or interview, but a way to help others connect to more people. Be the brand/company that's clearly helping. Please.

What kind of "live" videos work for people? Here are some ideas from the consumer side.

Are you taking advantage of the fact that candidates might hit your career site multiple times to learn more about your company and validate your claims? For example, do you have dynamic content that reflects the fact that this is a returning visitor, or someone who has watched your whole video all the way through? Or are you treating all your candidates the same?

Even before we were doing our jobs from our dining rooms, employer brand was its own kind of remote work: teams of one or two directly supporting teams around the world via video calls and emails. In order to make sure you are demonstrating your value when people can't always see your activity (which is good), here are some idea to consider.

I love talking about rejection letters (sorry... disposition messaging ...rolls eyes...) because they are deeply impactful messaging opportunities we tend to phone in. Which is why I loved this article about how Intel re-designed its rejection experience (and it is an "experience," is it not?).

Normally, in difficult times, our instinct is to reach out, literally. Human touch and physical expression—a hug, a hand on a shoulder, a quiet look of concern, sitting next to someone and not saying anything—are powerful ways to show people we’re here for them. But what do we do when all that’s left is our voice?Let's remember that the words we choose, on our career sites, on our job posts, on our outreach, on our emails, are the cheapest, most effective way we have to set frames and shape perceptions. We need to remember how important words are, especially when we are coping (and helping others cope) with... everything.

HBR makes a solid case that the best way to keep your entry and younger talent is to focus on professional development and emotional intelligence. (That's pretty much what the data at Universum has been showing for a few years now).

This is interesting because we may have entered "Covid fatigue," where we're all sick of getting those emails on how that company you bought a puzzle from three years ago is changing because of the pandemic. My take away? Less talk, more showing. Nike doesn't talk about design as much as it shows it, which is why people see it as authentically design-focused.

Adding pictures of staff wearing masks increases applications as much as 46%. Huh. It;'s almost like SHOWING how well you protect your staff encourages people to join. Weird.

Covid hasn't just flipped the table on recruiting and employer branding these last few months. It is really making talent management functions re-think things from a clean sheet of paper (which is very much a good thing). As TM starts thinking about what the nature of what a job is, how skills can be installed and developed in near-real-time, how most staff is probably only using 50-80% of their abilities at work, there's an opportunity for you to step up and partner, connecting the "why" of work with the shifting "what" and "how."

I rather liked how Shally Steckerl (a sourcer!) connected what business leadership wants with what recruiting should be delivering. Lots of great points you should adopt when you talk to leadership, too.

And here's a creative example of how to show your product off during lockdown.

This is how you can get your customers to do your job for you.

Usually when we think about employee-generated content, we assume employees should talk about work. As much as I love work, theres more to live and what your company supports than just "work." Take some cues from these companies who are asking their customers to tell stories during lockdown, and how it can dramatically extend your reach and humanize the brand.

I highly recommend this list of 14 rules of identity by Jasmine Bina, who is one of my absolute favorite thinkers in the space

Apropos of nothing, I really liked this list of the 50 ideas that changed their life. Reading it will make you smarter.

How the creative director of Spotify uses data. This is a great video, but I suggest you watch to see ways Spotify could have used data in the aggregate to tell a big boring story. But instead, it found unique slices of the data to say something interesting, about themselves, about their listeners and about the world.

What can employer brands learn from "luxury brands?" To understand their own truth. Beyond this article, I think there are a lot of interesting parallels between EB and luxe brands. Exclusivity: There's only one open role so only one person can have it. Identity-signaling: People judge you on where you work and you derive self-work from where you work. Cost: No one's ever had an easy job search, no matter how good they are. Just something to consider.

This list of five things every brand marketer needs to be doing right now is focused on consumer brand, but you don't even need to translate ideas like Lean Into Purpose and Rethink Your Brand Culture into employer brand terms to see the thought processes.

I can usually count on the HBR to take the safe road in any given situation, so seeing an article that embraces some very contrarian ideas is always worth a note. But this article on the three things most people get wrong about organizational change was pretty great. Things like "Share Your Failures" rather that "Follow Best Practices" make my heart warm on many levels. Also note the example of "Kill Our Company" (also known as Red Team exercises) where people try to figure out how to destroy their own company in order to shore up their own strategic weaknesses.

By now, you're as sick as I am of the glut of "how to manage a culture virtually" articles that have come out over the last two months. But this conversation with Jane Garza of NOBL was absolutely fascinating. Bursty work, bicameral work hours (6-10 and 2-6 instead of 9-5), and the reminder that we don't need to take all our calls on Zoom (set up more meetings on the phone so you can walk and talk).

I love it when I headline to an article just knocks me sideways and I go, "Duh! Why didn't I think of that?!?!?!" Ted Bauer asks the simple (yet profound) question: Why don't we treat interviews as real data? There's so much we could learn about our company, ouir recruiters, our hiring managers and our entire experience, but we don''t because we treat the interview as some sort of gamut both we and the candidate must survive (as if we didn't flat-out invest the system).

In case you don't feel prepared, here's HBR's guide to Corporate Social Justice.

If we are in a post-advertising world (and there's evidence to suggest it), have you started to think about your employer brand as a platform? Or have you started to think about your employer brand's place in your corporate brand platform?

Since you've likely shut down any and all in-person recruiting events for the year, here's some inspiration on how to build a better virtual event.

Some nice pre- and post-lockdown (unsegmented) data points on how employees and candidates attitudes have changed. Biggest takeaway: remote is no longer a nice-to-have (so... maybe you need to have a chat with leadership and HR about making this whole WFH thing a real thing).

Speaking of not segmenting enough, this article on common mistakes on brand awareness lists forgetting to segmentation as it's first mistake!

PathMotion took a look at all the bot-driven conversations on its platforms to see what candidates wanted to know more about. This isn't what candidates said they wanted, it's what they asked for, so if you don't know what to add to your career site and social channels, this is a solid starting point for a content map. I will caution and say that Universum's data (day job alert!) agrees with a lot of these conclusions, they aren't equally true across the board for all audiences. Just keep that in mind.

Are you sick of me saying how you need to start thinking about your employer brand beyond the funnel? Too bad! This article talks about all the ways professional systems will be changing in light of everything, and this is my chance to remind you that you need to make friends with the development team. What the company offers to learn is one thing, but connecting to to why they want to learn, to develop a story pipeline system about the people who embrace the development culture and what they get out of it is totally in your jurisdiction.

I've talked before about how much I love Oblique Strategies and how I would one day write my own deck for employer brand (tangent: the above article, which you should read all the way through because it talks about the weird shit Brian Eno came up with while recording Bowie's "Heroes," starts with a quote that should be tattooed on our collective hands, "Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences." Anyway...), but this article does a pretty solid job listing 61 ways to differentiate a given brand. A great exercise would be to list all 61 (or maybe just 30) and then list all the ways you could differentiate your own employer brand with that strategy. Congrats, you now have a LOT of good ideas you didn't have before.