🧪 Employer Brand Headlines #146: The "Something I Learned Today" Edition
Is an EVP a luxury?
Mission: create one million employer brand thinkers
Employer Brand Headlines is brought to you by James Ellis. »» Say hello! ««
In this issue…
Is an EVP a luxury?
Keep good ideas alive
Culture audits
Finding joy in the mundane
The big idea
In one of the employer brand forums last week, someone asked a question around their editorial calendar. Specifically, what stories should they tell?
The calendar itself was wholly generic. The content pillars could have represented almost any company in the current age. There was no sense of who they were trying to reach or why that audience would care.
I’m not telling this story to make fun. Not at all, because I recognize a lot of companies who can (and do) use that approach. I bring it up because of what happened next.
I pointed out that the sole reason a company would have an EVP was to answer exactly this kind of question: who should we talk to, what do we offer that they care about, and how will they want to hear it?
The response floored me. The original poster said, “we don’t have the luxury of having an EVP.”
Luxury!? An EVP as a luxury?!
I mean, I get it. Companies and agencies have spent the last decade-plus telling you that an EVP costs a lot of money, requires some semi-obscure framework and proprietary knowledge to the point that most CHROs and CPOs walk into employer brand conversations with little understanding of the value, but a deeply inflated sense of cost.
If you are coming in cold from the outside to distill another company’s brand, that takes a little time, research and effort. But a luxury?
Have we created a kind of dogma around EVP, that it isn’t worth anything unless you pay a lot of money for it? That only external folks can do? That it is beyond the reach of an employer brand professional?
I firmly disagree. If an EVP seems like alchemy that only wizards can do, you can get most of the value of an EVP from a brand position. Or a brand promise. Or just looking at your consumer brand and using it to consider prospects. Take what you know to be true about your company, focusing on the things that made people apply and accept the offer, then remove the things you can see in other companies and you’ve got a workable brand.
You don’t need a full EVP with pillars to help you focus you work, to help you make decisions every day (which is what it is there for). Your lack of EVP is no reason to keep fumbling around in the dark putting together generic editorial calendars. A “good enough” home-made brand is so much better than no building a brand because you think it can’t be done by you.
Season 2 of The Talent Cast continues!
The revised and annotated audio version of Talent Chooses You (a star-studded cast!) continues with episode 18, where we go deep on what an EVP really is.
Headlines!
How the Best Teams Keep Good Ideas Alive
Amplify, exemplify and cultivate. And some other stuff. [HBR]
5 Things to Build a Great Company Culture
“Be welcoming” and “Lead by Example” is how you build a culture, but I would suggest what people really want is to know what the culture is like (in term terms, not the marketing drivel we usually use to describe our culture) and what the rules are going in so they can make a decision. There is no such thing as a great culture, only a great culture for a specific individual. [Under30CEO]
Don’t Choose Remote Work Without Reading This
I’d re-title this There is no one way to be successful, but if your definition of success is centered on climbing a career ladder, read this before going remote. Yeah, it’s a little wordy, but far more accurate. This idea that success can only come only from making VP by 40 is insane (as someone who was a VP, trust me: it ain’t all its cracked up to be and there’s a reason I’m not looking to do it again ever), but married to the broader trends of what work means, it seems like instructions for writing a better fax message. Again, ladder-climbers should absolutely read this, but don’t be fooled that there is only one path to success. [Dr. John Sullivan via Recruiting Brainfood]
Orchestrating Workforce Ecosystems
Work isn’t a process, it is a system. Don’t control it, manage the ecosystem it lives in. [MIT Sloan]
How to Conduct Content Audits
If you spent time in content marketing, this isn’t new, but it is a fantastic primer for anyone who doesn’t think in clickbait headlines and keywords [Managing Editor]
Turn Your Employer Brand Into a Growth Driver
Connect it to the rest of the brand and start using it to help your consumer and investor marketing folks. [LI via Recruiting Brainfood]
10 Extraordinary Tips on Social Recruiting That Will Take You Ahead of Your Competitors in 2022
“Extraordinary” is certainly overstating things, but if you need a model on which to build a functional activation of your employer brand, it’s a fine place to start, like a Rosetta Stone for your recruiters. [Recruiter.com]
A philosopher's guide to messy transformations
Our job is to make change. It is rarely a simple, clean or predictable process. So learn some tricks from some guy named Aristotle. [strategy+business]
Finding joy in the mundane
Could there be a better description of what an employer brander does? Anyway, I highly highly recommend “A Strategist’s Guide to Art” newsletter. It’s not directly related related to our world, but it is something that sparks me every time I read it.
Inside the fortune cookie
“You cannot be everything to everyone. If you decide to go north you cannot go south at the same time” - Jeronen de Flander
Thanks, everyone!
This newsletter now has more than 2,100 subscribers. Thank you!
Keep sharing issues!Search the 1,400 links in the newsletter archive.
Read Talent Chooses You for free from this open source Google Doc.
Here’s the 2022 version of The Employer Brand Manifesto.
If you have a question, just reply to this email and it comes directly to me.
Cheers and thanks!
-James Ellis (LinkedIn)
Where the subject line came from:
Husker Du - Something I Learned Today
I haven’t really dived into 80’s punk yet, have I? To be fair, I was late to the game myself. I didn’t find Husker until it had already broken up, starting with Bob Mould’s epic Black Sheets of Rain and working my way backwards. I had no idea the amazing pop-songs played three-times-too-fast-while-yelling existed. They didn’t really register on MTV, so I just missed it. And while this is loud punk rock, it is beautiful. I’ll spare you the gory backstory of the band (though Bob’s autobiography See a Little Light is a good read), and just let you enjoy this 2:02 gem.
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:
