Employer Brand Headlines Newsletter

Sometimes, the biggest potential talent source is right under your nose. But how can you foster a culture in internal career mobility? Let us show you!

On the recruitment marketing side of things, we are faced with a slew of cool tools to help us place our message in front of people who just visited our career site, or are a lot like people who follow our Facebook page. There are two issues with that. One, most of us are just pushing out lame job ads to these people, as if applying for a job is the same as downloading a whitepaper (it’s not). Two, we don’t spend time thinking about how or why the tools are designed to work. We just get thrilled by the “extra clicks” or “deeper awareness” rather than thinking through how to use the tools properly. So here’s a Hubspot article on how to approach your behavior-targeted ad (I bet you didn’t even know that that was what that was called).

Tim Sackett asks a pretty controversial question over on his blog: Should companies disclose their political leanings? Tim makes good points that just because a business might lean liberal or conservative, that doesn’t mean everyone does, or even that it’s a critical component to the employer brand. My take is simple: if it matters to leadership and staff what the political identify of an organization is, and it’s not exclusive of talent from other perspectives, there’s no reason not to talk about it. But in this day and age, where “wearing a mask” is seen as somehow “political,” the return from such a position is likely very very weak (if not completely counter-productive).

Let’s talk about influencers. Not the Fyre Festival type, but the people in your ecosystem who are creating content to connect with internal and external audiences. The people who influence others to consider working here. This is more than simple “advocacy,” or even tactical referrals, this is about helping your own influencers these people build emotional connections, which is what sparks longer-term relationships.

I admit that when I read this article on “brand collaboration,” I couldn’t conceive of two employer brands collaborating and sharing ideas and identities. But then it hit me: Many of us have staff who have their own brands. Call them thought leaders or influencers, they are resources that you can use and support to drive your own brand. Like Michael Jordan and Nike, how are you going to collaborate your brands to mutual success?

Before I go any further, I must make an important distinction. This article concerns driving a brand's growth within an existing category. As such, it is Brands fighting for market share should keep these ten actions in mind.

Three ways leaders can adapt.

"When you think about your brand values, firstly have it clear in your mind that values for your brand will be as integral as they would be for a human being."

Hubspot has a list of 14 different blog formats. This is great when you’re out of ideas and need to think of what kind of content you could build.

What’s wrong with corporate job interviews? Pretty much everything. Interviews are the second most used and “flawed” tool in HR (right after performance appraisals). They are used and relied on around the world for hiring, transfers, promotions, and for selecting leaders. After studying and researching interviews for over 40 years, I find it laughable when…For all the work you do in establishing and instilling/imbuing your brand throughout all the various touch points of the candidate’s brand experience (bigger than the “candidate experience”), there’s one place where it tends to fall apart: the interview. The interview is like talking 6 months of potential brand interactions and compressing them into an intense 1-3 hour live session (virtual or not). Worse than that, they are always happening and they are always out of your control. Let’s be clear a bad 30 minute interview is the difference between a positive or negative experience, between a 1 star and 5 star review, and between a yes and a no. So here’s a list of the 50 biggest issues with interviews. Ignore the fact that it is a 8-year-old article: it will let you blueprint ways in which to influence better brand experience into this crucial experience.

Employer branding is a game of fast and slow: jumping on the latest channel or talking point, but also in making sure the long-term strategy is yielding results. Of course, we always talk about the fast stuff (it’s a weekly newsletter, after all), but here is a case for remembering to be slow.

We’ve been telling candidates to develop their personal brand to make it easier for recruiters to understand who they are and what they bring to the table. The problem is, personal brands seem to be the domain of the loudmouth (hi, how are you!). What about introverts? And if we flip the concept around, does your employer brand only cater to the boisterous, obvious extroverts? How can you make sure you’re not repelling introverts in order to stand out in the crowd?

Sally Bolig (hi Sally!) took recent LinkedIn data and did a better job of pulling out the insights than LinkedIn did. Of note: Companies are posting more in 2020 than before, posts about Covid seem to be plateauing as a messaging focus, and more companies are using LI to post about hiring. (This is good stuff if you want to convince marketing to let you have a seat at the LI table). Also note how quickly we all went from “don’t talk about race and politics on your corporate site” to “well, we have to say something about BLM…” in a matter of a few weeks.

There’s a lot of assumptions around the intersection of brand value and brand quality. That is, if a company does a great job supporting its people, the quality of the brand establishes the value of the brand. But it isn’t always so cut-and-dried. Take SpaceX, a company known for its horrible work-life balance and overly-aggressive management, two thinks engineers say they hate. And yet, SpaceX is the top company engineers want to work for. How can you leverage the disconnect between quality and value?

Many businesses are redirecting their strategy to focus more on customer value and experience, from both a proactive standpoint and a reactive one.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned brand tone much in this newsletter, but that’s because there isn’t much written about it more than anything. Your tone expresses a great deal about your employer brand, so getting that tone right matters. Except it seems like most employer brand tones are either “stiffly professional” or “your wry friend,” as if there’s a singe spectrum between formal and informal. Where’s the introspective tone? Where’s the cheerleader? Or the bureaucrat? Where’s the professorial tone or the underdog? If our brands are complex, why are the tones so simple?

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With 800 million monthly active users, TikTok has quickly risen to become one of the most popular social media platforms for brand marketing. Here are eight of the best examples we've seen so far.

My feeling on over-indexing on candidate experience are well known (your CX should reflect your brand and work reality, not just “white glove”), but there are still great online ways to engage talent online outside of tests and (god help us all) the ATS. Here are some examples from the consumer world we could all steal ideas from.

Pop quiz: what’s the one thing that adds authenticity to your brand claims? When actual employers align to those claims. Even more so when they can internalize those ideas and even talk about the less-attractive aspects of the brand (all traits have good and bad features, and every strength becomes a weakness if taken too far). Charlotte Marshal breaks it down.

Oh, hey. Here’s Marketing Week making a clear case for how your employer brand supports your customer brand. Trust me, they don’t care about recruiting or niceties like candidate experience. They only can about making and keeping customers. Slip this under your CMO’s door.

Trying to grow your brand without emotion (I mean, we are in the people business, right?) is a mistake. But leveraging emotion isn’t necessarily obvious or simple. It helps to understand your talent targets’ needs and desires.

My rule of thumb for strengthening your employer brand is to separate your sentiment and reach and treat them independently. But when you try and extend reach, its a rare day that you’re extending into blue ocean. So here is some great thinking on extending your market penetration, how to push others out of the way while staking your claim.

Bookmark this: Gallup, the research company, makes a pretty compelling case to your leadership on the power of employer brand. The overall focus is on how the employer brand makes a clear impact on your corporate brand (remember, businesses only speak three languages: make money, save money, extend the brand), which would be something you might want to slide under the virtual door of leadership.

The ease with which consumers have adapted to rapid change signals a future of more disruption.

Google’s Official Digital Marketing Publication. The new normal requires brands to continuously evolve and change through action. We’re here to help.

William Shakespeare was a remarkable poet, actor and playwright, but let’s be real – the guy lived and died over 400 years ago – what on earth can he teach us about employer branding 2020? Turns out – quite a lot. See, Shakespeare had a knack for understanding what makes people tick. His greatest achievements weren’t necessarily the plot lines, but the unique and dynamic characters he created – their personalities, their strengths, their weaknesses, their desires, their motivations. These characters have endured through four centuries, they’re continually reincarnated on stage and screen, t...

Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m thinking about my organization’s career site, which means that I am looking at a LOT of career sites. Which actually means that I am seeing a LOT OF CAREER SITES THAT LOOK EXACTLY THE SAME. It’s painful. Often times, they are the “best case scenario” career sites by recruitment marketing platform vendors hold out as examples of great design. At the same time, fads in web design are as long lasting at those in fashion. But here are some current design trends you should look at when you think about your site design.

I will admit that my day job is forcing me to re-example some ideas I… well, in all honesty, I accepted without much inquiry. It’s a little exhilarating, I promise. One of those concepts is that of “belonging” at work. For years, we’ve heard variations on the idea of “bring your ‘whole self’ to work” which is intended to imply (for example) that black people can bring their black experiences (good and bad, and lately its a lot more of one than the other) to work and that we can’t expect people to leave those experiences at the door. We assume that we want people to feel like they belong at work, which encourage them to speak up and engage. But we haven’t always defined what we mean by “engage” or “belong.” So I was really interested when Josh Bersin broke things down on his site about what it takes to create that feeling of belonging. I would suggest that for a lot of people, the feeling that their work matters, that it contributes to a company’s success drives a sense of belonging as establishing an ERG or setting hiring targets.