♟️ Employer Brand Headlines #142: Bring on the Dancing Horses" Edition ♟️
Are good job postings impossible?
Mission: Blow up the standard for what people expect from employer branding
Employer Brand Headlines is brought to you by James Ellis. Say hello!
In this issue…
The impossibility of a good job postings
What is your employees’ purpose?
Does your company love its employees back?
The big idea
What’s the big problem with job postings?
To HR, they are a semi-legal description of the role and the duties that have the half-life of discount meat: only kinda-correct at the moment of publication and only getting worse by the second afterwards.
To the hiring manager, they are an unnecessary hurdle, something to be put off until the last minute and then cobbled together with the least amount of effort because everyone knows what a Senior Manager of Project Development is anyway.
To the recruiter, they are a headache, something to be dreaded because they don’t actually understand the job enough to describe it to someone who an expert on the subject, so they are forced to steal bullet points from other jobs at other companies.
But to you and I, job postings are magical. As they are the first impression most people will have of your brand, its purpose is to suggest a distinctive brand in someone’s mind in fewer words than your average blog post.
That’s a big ask.
Job postings are almost always rigged games. Too many people with too many with too many agendas with too little time or adequate copywriting skill trying to do the legal bare minimum isn’t a recipe for something that attracts, engages and inspires action.
You didn’t think this job would be easy, did you?
So when you see a good one, wherever it comes from, take a moment. You’re looking at a tiny miracle, something that simply shouldn’t be. Take it as sign that it can be done.
And steal liberally. 😊
Yep, we’re still podcasting about a book.
The revised and annotated audio version of Talent Chooses You (recorded in one take!) continues with episode 14. The two big focal areas in this episode is that your employer brand already exists, and that it is created like a bird’s nest.
Also, I’m doing an AMA with RecruitmentMarketing.com tomorrow. Here’s the link if you’d like to listen in (or if you want to ask a question).
Headlines!
Aligning the Candidate Experience with your EVP
This article argues that leveraging tech, feedback and human interaction is how you connect your CX to your EB. One, that assumes that your EB is one that demands that kind of CX (which is a horse I’m tired of beating), but two, that misses the biggest gap: what candidates want and what companies want to give are so deeply disconnected as to beggar belief. Example: we all say how important candidate feedback is to the candidate, but I can’t find a single instance of HR or Legal allowing that to happen. Candidates want it, but we aren’t willing to support them in that way. In which case, tech and feedback (in this instance, useful feedback shared with the company with the candidate getting nothing in return) are just ways to paper over the issue. [Drift]
Purpose is a two-way street
Companies LOVE to talk about their purpose, but how often do they ask about their employee’s sense of their own purpose? [strategy + business]
Should Your EVP Be Aspirational?
Let me re-write this headline: “should your promise to employees be something that I can’t make happen yet?” No. [Blu Ivy]
7 Actions for Increasing Trustworthy Brand Value
There are VERY few parts of a brand who rely on an assumption of trust as string as employer branding, but we do things every day to undercut that sense of trust. [Brand Strategy Insider]
On Loving a Company That Doesn't Know How to Love Me Back
This is a long read that isn’t really about employer branding. But I was struck over and over again by this sense that here was a customer who wanted to very much to feel like she belonged to the brand tribe, but never felt like the brand really “got” her. How many people in our companies feel the same way, not about a product they buy, but in a company they give 40, 50, 60 hours a week towards? [Culture Study]
Break the Link Between Pay and Motivation
Can you buy motivation? [MIT Sloan]
Why Most Companies Should (Not) Publicly Celebrate History, Heritage & Awareness Months
Interesting counter-argument to the expectation that we should all publicly celebrate various awareness months. [Brilliant Ink]
How To Improve Your Emails With a Handwritten Signature
It’s the little things that help us stand out [HubSpot]
Inside the fortune cookie
“Any word that’s really important is also confusing. Words like trust, love, friend, fair, honest, lead, connect, authentic, justice, dignity–they have dozens of different meanings. Perhaps that’s because they’re important. It’s worth spending a moment to understand what we mean when we say something that might mean something else.” - Seth Godin
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-James Ellis (LinkedIn | Twitter | Podcast | Articles)
Where the subject line came from:
Bring on the Dancing Horses - Echo & The Bunnymen
I’ll admit it. I was a very late convert to Echo and the Bmen. I don’t remember why, but I associated them with a kind of plaintive whiny sound I hate. Maybe I just confused them for the Blow Monkeys (who are like ABC without a sense of irony, which may be the only reason to like ABC). I don’t know. But there’s some great stuff. My personal favorite song is The Killing Moon, which is a haunted dirge of a pop song, but makes for a pretty weird subject line. If nothing else, enjoy the artistic aspirations of the video and some pretty amazing haircuts.
If you are enjoying the music, congratulations, you’re old. Just for you, I made a Spotify playlist of all the subject line 80’s songs I’ve referenced over the last year and a half. You don’t even need hairspray to enjoy it:
