Employer Brand Headlines Newsletter

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?

Interested in running a poll on Instagram? Use this guide to learn how to use the feature.

Ready to get deep? To jump off the really high platform? Here we go. Instead of thinking about your video strategy in a “let’s make a video about the London team” way in which you try and take enough footage that shows what you’re trying to say kind of way, what if you really began to think about telling real stories. Google has some examples of hardcore marketing storytelling told via sequential videos. My money says we’re going to be spending a LOT of time thinking about building these kinds of videos in the next year or two.

Katrina Kibben (is there anyone who thinks more or better about job postings? I doubt it), asks the killer question: for entry-level job postings, why even have bullets at all?

Speaking of text, let’s talk job postings. (Yay!) There are a number of schools of thought on how to write better job postings. Personally, I lean towards a structured/modular approach (goal: ensure every job posting is a B+), but there are creative approaches and strategic approaches. Jacynta Clayton offers some great ideas on how to build a more creating posting (rhyming?! Genius).

If you see employer brand as crafting the rosiest picture possible around a company, the safest play is to write great stories to paint that picture. Done right, using text primarily to talk about your brand can hide a multitude of sins, effectively letting a brander put lipstick on the proverbial pig. But a brand isn’t just (or even) the words you use. It is found in the actions of your company.

As mentioned earlier, it does feel like so many companies have the same pillars and recruitment messaging. To be fair, so many companies are structured the same and have the exact same perks and org chart, so it probably shouldn’t be surprising. Which is why I loved this article equating a company’s branding elements to ingredients in a basket on TV cooking show Chopped. The chefs get the same ingredients, so the skill is in how you bring them together and build something far bigger/better than its components.

One of the very clear axes (plural of axis, not a thing for chopping wood) by which you can communicate your culture and brand (though it isn’t often used), is the way a company invests in individual professional growth. Is the employee in charge of their own growth (a la every agency I’ve ever seen), the employee is in charge but the company will pay, the company encourages and supports upskilling, etc. If you want to be known as a place where people are expected and supported in their growth (you’d think that was every company, but you’d be very very wrong about that), it means getting your CEO involved.

How is your employer brand? This post will help you evaluate your employer brand, consider important factors and ways to improve company culture and reputation.

Complete case study on how Mondelez built its global employer brand (video)

If you’re looking for a good book, take a look at Brain Surfing by Heather LeFevre. Imagine if a very smart brand strategist decided to take an eat, pray, love style trip to meet the world’s most interesting brand strategists. Good stuff.

While we’re talking podcasts, if you feel like getting smart in a hurry, the two-parter of Adam Robinson on The Knowledge Project is something I go back to on a semi-regular basis. They are very long meandering conversations, but I swear, I come up with work ideas every time I listen to them.

Podcast recommendation: Sweathead. It skews very agency-heavy/strategy director-heavy, and the quality of the podcast seems to hinge on the guest, but I have heard some really interesting episodes lately. I recommend The interviews with Ryan Ford, Blake Desormeaux, and Jenny Chang.

Long-time readers of this newsletter will know about my love/hate relationship I have with HBR. When they aren’t mis-representing what EB is, or clinging to a fairly outmoded sense of who is in charge of an individual’s career, they occasionally drop an article like this one around how “feel good” messages don’t always motivate your employees. Personally, I would have re-written around how not all employees respond to feel-good messages (or any one kind of message, frankly), but good for them to at least consider that employees aren’t interchangeable cogs…

Your job posts and ads may be a candidate’s introduction to your company, so you want to be sure they both differentiate you and set the right expectations upfront. But if you’re finding that they just aren’t bringing in the kind of candidates that you’d hoped for, it may be time to get creative.Need some creativity in your job posts? (I checked and yes. yes you do.) Here are some crazy job posting ideas (an Animal Crossing office… sure!) not in a “here are great ideas to steal,” way, but more in a “share this with people who push back on changing "Duties and Responsibilities” to “Things you’ll do all day.” They need to know what the ceiling for creativity really is these days.

Keep that in mind when you go investing in digital/social ads for your employer brand: for all the talk about amazing targeting, its still mostly bull. (For more ranting on the subject, check out Bob Hoffmann’s Ad Contrarian newsletter). And so I offer everything that’s wrong with ads in three tweets.

Metrics, anyone? EB Rock star Shaunda Zilich writes up a nice piece on EB metrics. I was going to quibble with it until I realized that the best part of the article is unstated: Metrics are gibberish until you decide what your strategy is first. You can measure oodles of things and easily get batted around like a leaf on the wind unless you have clearly defined what you are trying to do and deciding the metrics on that. Once I saw that, I realized how great the article was.

Meaningful progress toward diversity, equity, and inclusion requires action. Whether you’re a startup or an established company, salary transparency can help.

Ask these questions at your next interview.

You’ve seen the video going around showing what it would look like if we interviewed doctors the way we do developers, right? It’s great. Total must-watch. Anyway, it brings up an idea I hadn’t really heard before: Overfit. As I help the day job re-write job postings, I wonder if lots and lots of companies are suffering from trying to meet the demands of overfit. I mean, the job postings we write are semi-outdated by the time we start screening, so overfit seems like the absolute wrong course-correction. Shouldn’t we be trusting recruiters to spot talent without hand-holding them with requirements and qualifications?

The new rules of talent management? Well, you have to figure out how to build culture while in isolation, how to convince HR/TA to look for talent outside the standard distances, how to use tech (duh), and how to take advantage of video as the ‘great equalizer.’

Employer brands can’t all be the same, so why are they all espousing the same ideas. They all seem to care about opportunity, and innovation and caring for their employees (in the same kinds of ways). So I love that Coinbase is taking a (very sharp) turn. They are very publicly rejecting the idea that companies have to take a stance on social good. It’s not that I don’t think companies shouldn’t care about social good, it’s that I love when a company is willing to do something different. The best part is that they didn’t dictate the position to the world, they gave staff a chance to jump ship as the boat changed course.

For my money, designing a brand is only the start. Successful brands need to be connected to segments within your company. Locations, sure. But what about teams, or offices? It’s all about localization.

I’ve talked before about different attributes that can help define your brand (how does your company approaches personal/professional development, what’s the level of internal transparency, amount of hierarchical structure, etc). Here’s one I hadn’t thought of before: Courage. How does your company reward courage? Can you disagree with your boss? Do you have to do it quietly one on one, or are you allowed to disagree more publicly? What about disagreeing with leadership? Answers to these simple question (assuming leadership and front-line staff agree on the answer), go a long way to defining your own company.

Throughout this series, we have focused almost exclusively on how video will help you convert strong candidates into applicants. And now that they’ve become an applicant, it’s time to shift gears a bit.