Employer Brand Headlines Newsletter

A state-by-state analysis of where companies should recruit — now that employees can work from anywhere.

At LinkedIn's Talent Connect, former-Pixar animator Matthew Luhn explained how recruiters can use the craft of storytelling to sell candidates on their company. He also talked about why telling stories is so important to a company's employer brand and how to craft those stories in a memorable way.

Have you spent any kind of time considering your candidates’ behavior? Are they “hit the apply button” types who value the fastest possible process? Or do they want enough information before proceeding? Where are they getting that information? How are they validating it? On what basis are they making decisions? For inspiration, take a look at this conversation by brand leaders on understanding buyer habits.

Sure, infographics might feel a little 2015, but what about interactive infographics? I can see value in using them to show internal teams the value of your work, as well as putting together a fact-sheet for potential candidates.

Internal surveys are useful, but deeply flawed. They only show the perception of those who self-select into the survey. They rarely ask good questions (where everyone answering them are actually answering the same question in their minds). And most staff don’t reveal what they really think for fear of retribution. But they are useful if you know how to design and administer them.

Second, culture isn’t static. In fact, it often isn’t evident until something unexpected happens. According to analysis of 1.4MM Glassdoor scores, culture weighed heavily on whether ratings went up or down during the first months of COVID. Companies that dictated culture fared worse than companies who were transparent and allowed their culture to inform communication styles and subject. If a company understands that a culture is a function of what staff say it is, they respond better than when its rigid.

Is the culture you talk about the one that exists or the one leadership wants to be true? Yeah, sorry. That was a little blunt for this hour in the morning. Go get some coffee and come back. Good. We all know that in rooms we’re not always invited to, the Venn diagram of “employer brand” and “company culture” is often just a circle. This happens when companies want to be seen as “caring” about a thing when they don’t always understand a thing (see also: “strategy,” “innovation” and “employee engagement” amongst many many others). So they skim that HBR article (the one more concerned with clicks than understanding what we do all day) and say that culture is important and dictate one. Next stop: the power printer. So here’s a little counter-programming. First, over at Reddit, a great article from a leader who wrestled with their company culture as it went from 15 people to 75 people (h/t Recruiting Brainfood).

What is an internal company newsletter? What should it include? Find answers in the article and learn internal newsletter best practices for better results

What will happen in social media marketing and advertising in 2021? We ask the experts...

Embarrassing admission: I’ve spent a good deal of time in the NLP/Neuro-linguistic programming world of Bandler and Grinder (Hey, I was young once. And if you have no idea what I’m talking about, consider yourself lucky). Anyway, while 99% of what came out of NLP was garbage, some smart tidbits did manage to escape. Specifically, mirroring. If you want someone to listen to you and consider what you say, you have to talk more like they do.

Anyone else all-in on LinkedIn Stories?!?! Yeah, me neither. Consider me skeptical in any content marketing strategy LinkedIn attempts as their success is more about brute-force audience than smart strategy or well-considered implementation. Anyway, if you’re curious (and please share your results!), here’s a great write-up on how to approach them for recruiting.

I am legit jealous that I didn’t think of it first, but here’s Danaher’s one-stop-shopping page on how to do your research before interviewing at Danaher. So well done.

Please ignore the ATROCIOUS acrostic used, but here’s a nice article to meditate on in terms of thinking about the trends we all face and how to leverage them to strengthen your brand next year.

When you hit the wall of content creation and can’t think of anything to build, here’s a great video on how to squeeze more content ideas out of what you already have on hand.

As an avid Tik Tok user… just kidding. My wife likes to joke that the only Tik Toks I see are ones that rank well on reddit, and she’s probably right. Which is why this article was absolutely amazing. If it’s time to take Tik Tok seriously, maybe you should get some professional help. Maybe you should work with some Creators.

I have an innate love of archetypes, primarily in marketing and branding. The idea that we are hard-wired from birth to understand certain ideas, or that those ideas are so closely tied to the hardware of humanity makes me feel like these things are hackable, that we can push deeper into our own collective consciouses to find resonance. (Wow. Where did that come from? Anyway…) So here are 7 story archetypes and how you use them in recruiting.

Employer branders are expected to master an insane breadth of platforms, channels and tools, many far afield from any core recruiting or sourcing skills (here’s a list). When we get a new tool, we usually do the 101 thing, get it set up and get on to the next thing without diving too deeply into the mechanics and strategy. Which is why I really liked this article (and video) on email automation, which really has more of a 301 feel than most articles on the subject.

Jack White (White Stripes et al) is a love him or hate him kind of artist (I love him and Audra hates him). But you can’t argue with how he thinks about building music: embracing constraints, focusing on what matters, doing the same thing in different ways. If you can ignore the gear-head wonkery, this is an amazing interview from someone who has done more with less than anyone I can think of.

BBC/MoMA’s The Way I See It, in which one artist looks at a piece of art from the MoMa’s collection and talks about why it’s interesting. Great stuff.

How often do we say, in other forums, to make sure we start with the consumer and not our own egos? The consumer now owns the brand relationship, not the Four questions companies need to answer in the process of defining brand values.

A global pandemic. Economic uncertainty. Political limbo. Racial inequality. To say 2020 is an “annus horribilis” unlike we’ve ever experienced would be an understatement.But in the words of our co-CEOs, we viewed these obstacles as a clarion call for simplicity. Our collective responsibility was to find new ways to remove the complexity from the challenges before us—both for our clients and colleagues. As we look to the year ahead, what’s top of mind for branding experts? Our practitioners weigh in on how companies can differentiate themselves in 2021.

How will data, its role in advertising and marketing, and the relationship that businesses have with it evolve in 2021?

For my money, despite the fact that it is the only measure of EB value that matters, you can’t really measure quality of hire in a meaningful way. It might take a solid year to see if the person you hire is the right choice, if they are worth giving a raise to or worth promoting (the only meaningful metrics of quality), so people in HR try to find approximations for quality. There’s a lot to quibble with (and you know I do so love a good quibbling), but here’s a solid wrap-up of HR-friendly ways to measure it.

“The analysis reveals that there is no correlation between the cultural values a company emphasizes in its published statements and how well the company lives up to those values in the eyes of employees. All of the correlations between official and actual values were very weak, and four of the nine — collaboration, customer orientation, execution, and diversity — were negatively correlated.” Ouch.

Employer branding is the act of getting everyone at your company who doesn't have to listen to you to change how they think about their employer. Yay! So anything that helps arm you to create change in an org is useful to know.

Want to make it crystal clear how important your employer brand work is? Maybe bake it into an infographic.

Precision isn't the answer. Alignment over time is.

No matter how hard you try, it's impossible to know exactly how well a campaign will do. But, there's a tactic that gets pretty close predictive marketing.

Google’s Official Digital Marketing Publication. Industry leaders share year in review, 2021 marketing predictions, and strategy recommendations.

Three ways to make sure that job aligns with your values.