♟️ Employer Brand Headlines #143: "You can't get what you want 'till you know what you want" Edition ♟️
The cold-start problem: How to approach a brand new employer brand role
Mission: Blow up the standard for what people expect from employer branding
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In this issue…
Eating the elephant
Working from a friends house
Stop bragging
How to unlearn
The big idea
Once again, the job of employer brand is to distill and represent the actions of every single function and person in a company to people who might want to join. To be clear: it is a BIG job.
But you knew that.
So what’s my strategy for eating the elephant? How do I approach the job when I’m starting out at a new company (as many of you are, it seems)?
One: You need to make a lot of friends pretty quickly. Yes, you need to make sure the recruiters know how you can help and how they should reach out to you (and what for). Yes, you need to start building relationships with MarComm, primarily to understand how they work and identify ways in which your work could help them down the road. Yes, you need to put together a target list of good people across the business to help you learn their world, but also so you can start planting seeds about ways you can help them hire. Yes, you need to get a little visibility from leadership, but that should be organic. Don’t approach them until you’ve started to build a reputation. This process will take… the entirety of your tenure, but that’s no excuse to start day one.
(There are a few people in this world who I think of as political savants in EB, who are less involved in day-to-day work but know how to build relationships and get things done at a higher level. They tend to be among the few to have VP titles. I would love to hear from them how their approach differs from mine.)
Two: Get a win in 30 days. Part of your relationship building campaign is to discover gaps and opportunities for you to help. Maybe the company needs some strong boiler plate language to describe the company to candidates. Maybe they need a document that maps the interview process for people starting the candidate journey. Maybe it is a refresh on the top 5 job postings. Maybe you can see how to take the various existing content pieces and bake them into the career site to maximize value. Maybe you can do a deep dive on LinkedIn, showing what in the last 12 months worked and didn’t. Find something that makes an impact that you can fix now and get it done.
Three: Tell stories. Getting a win gives you a little credibility (especially since most people at your company still don’t quite know what you do) so capitalize on it and tell some stories. The format is up to you, and is probably defined by your limitations and constraints within the org. Example: At one job, my boss thought the authenticity of a quote or a story wasn’t as important as polishing language, making it read very corporate. So I pivoted to video where it was impossible to polish up language in a video too much. Maybe its a series of quotes in social media-shaped cards. Maybe it is profiles based on forms people fill out about themselves. Maybe it is Tik Toks. Your call.
Hints: When you post someone’s story, tell their boss with a note about how great that person is and how you appreciate them sharing their story to attract more candidates. Embed the stories in appropriate job postings. Send them to recruiters with a short paragraph they can use as outreach or social advocacy. Ask the subject to share it. Squeeze all the juice out of the lemon, but also use it to build networks (see step one) and to build credibility. And if you should see a slack about how the story got quoted in an interview, or how when the HM posted the story to LinkedIn it got 6,000 views and dozens of connection requests, tell you boss!!!
Four: Incept the brand. You can probably spend the next 6-12 months on step three, but there’s a guerrilla marketing process happening while you do that you need to keep in mind. In about the first 2-3 months, you’ll get a pretty strong idea what the “employer brand” is (notice the use of quotes). I’m not talking about a full-fledged EVP with pillars. I’m talking about a brand promise or a brand position, a sense of what you are all about and what you offer. If you try to build a full EVP, you’re asking to make your life harder. Why? Because every business leader has been trained to think that an EVP project costs six figures, that it requites an agency or at the very least a consultant to do the heavy lifting, and if you hadn’t figured it out, businesses hate spending money they don’t have to. But if you focus on a position or a promise, you’ll be able to get 80-90% of an EVP’s value for no money.
The trick: tell no one. Quietly pressure test your idea on people as you relationship-build. See how they respond, how it resonates. Then, when you’re in the story-telling mode, ask question and frame the content collection process around your brand promise. The outcome? You’ll be publishing “stories” about the company that somehow seem to evoke and reinforce a few core ideas. As people engage with the stories, you’re telling them “this is who we are and what we’re all about” and influence their own thinking when they tell their story. After a few months, when its time to loop in leadership, they will have seen your stories and you will have incepted your brand thinking in their minds. They will tell you the brand because you’ve been telling it to them for months.
So over the course of the year, you will be establishing credibility and value, building a metric ton of content you can use (and re-use) to tell your story, developing relationships, and developing an easy-to-bless employer brand. That recipe puts you in the driver’s seat for the forthcoming… year? Three? It is a foundation on which you can build budgets, big projects, and (very importantly) promotions.
Season 2 of The Talent Cast continues!
The revised and annotated audio version of Talent Chooses You (recorded in one take!) continues with episode 15: Where does your employer brand come from?
Headlines!
Vulnerability in Employer Branding: Why to Avoid Bragging on Your Career Site
The mistake is to try and be a cheerleader when you should think of yourself as a storyteller. [TalentLyft via Follow the Bear]
Workplaces are in denial over how much Americans have changed
Most companies won’t stay “remote first” forever. But we need to acknowledge that while the pendulum will swing back from that extreme, we aren’t going back to “the way it used to be.” How you communicate that to prospects will attract (or repel) an audience. [The Guardian]
Why WFFH (Working From a Friend’s House) Is the New Remote-Working Trend
It’s not so much that I think that this is “the new thing,” so much as I appreciate how creative people are starting to get in designing their work lives. [The Sunday Times]
Why Unlearning is Your Workforce Multiplier
We talk about workplace and workforce agility a lot, but that’s not just about accruing new skills, but in the intentional ability to unlearn what no longer serves you. [Thinkers50]
No One Applying? Change Your Job Titles
Proper marketing is more about what product you chose to bring to marketing and how you position it as it is how you advertise it. Jobs aren’t any different. [Katrina Kibben]
Quick Hits
Why Leveraging Employee Social Media Policy Helps Your Brand?
How to Improve Employee Retention During the Great Resignation—and Beyond
Inside the fortune cookie
“They laugh at me because I’m different; I laugh at them because they’re all the same.” - Attributed to Kurt Cobain
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-James Ellis (LinkedIn)
Where the subject line came from:
Joe Jackson - You Can’t Get What you Want (‘Till You Know What you Want)
Joe Jackson is a big band leader who was born 40 years too late. Its a funky-as-all-get-out rhythm section with a killer horn section and all the production 1984 can muster to propel Joe Jackson’s tightly arranged pop gem. Totally worth a listen.
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:
