🧪 Employer Brand Headlines #149: The "Hold Me" Edition
Is employer brand only for big companies?
Mission: Create a million employer brand thinkers (that means you!)
Written by James Ellis. »» Say hello! ««
In this issue…
Who needs employer branding?
Organizational debt
Brands and feelings
EB as crisis management
The big idea
It doesn’t matter the size of the company, every company needs employer branding.
Big companies have massive brand sentiment from any number of PR mentions in the news and huge social media followings.
Medium companies get to leverage consumer brand awareness, marketing budgets, comms channels, the sheer size of recruiting/sourcing teams.
Small companies don’t have those advantages, though their need for talent that is aligned to the mission and reward structure is just as great as anyone.
The assumption is that employer brand is only meaningful for large companies, mostly because only larger companies can afford employer brand management. Economics dictate that while employer branding is a force multiplier for recruiting, you need a critical mass of recruiters to justify the spend.
But that doesn’t mean that employer brand is the playground only for the big name companies. Every company needs to invest in their employer brand.
Because if you don’t establish and support your employer brand, your candidates will do it for you.
Season 2 of The Talent Cast continues!
The revised and annotated audio version of Talent Chooses You (all singing, all dancing!) continues with episode 21, where we look a how content maps can help tell you what content to build (and where to use it).
Headlines!
How To Eliminate Organizational Debt
As a concept, organizational debt has been on my mind lately (I spent a lot of time on planes this week). All the shortcuts and optimizations about how your business worked made sense in a certain context, but 2020-2022 has been the period of destroying assumed contexts. The same idea applies to brands: all the things you built, from the messaging to channels and processes, were based on assumptions that are no longer true. So how will you erase that brand debt? [Medium]
Why Are Brand Values So Important (And How to Define Them)?
As many of our leaders, clients and stakeholders still conflate values and brand, this is a really nice primer on how to talk about (and work with) a company’s values as a means of driving the brand. [The Branding Journal]
The Critical Link Between Brands And Feelings
The math here is simple: EB is how your are perceived. That perception is framed and fueled by emotions. Thus, you have to care about emotions to shape people’s perceptions of your brand [Brand Strategy Insider]
Making a case for employer branding investment
A quick illustration on how employer brand should matter to more than just recurring or HR, it matters to the CMO, the CFO, and the CEO. [LinkedIn]
One Strategy For Building Global, Local And Personal Brands
“Brand success will be determined by how well organizations manage at the intersection of these three forces of globalization, localization and personalization.” [Brand Strategy Insider]
Employer Brand Crises Management Is On The Rise
I’ve been saying that employer brand is PR’s go to move for crisis management since I watched Papa John get pushed out of his own company despite being its face for a decade, only to be replaced by commercials filled with local franchise owners. It’s only become more clear since then. [Blu Ivy]
Design Your Organization to Match Your Strategy
The problem isn’t always the problem. Sometimes, how we’re structured determines, fuels or quells the problem, which is good to know when you’re trying to influence how your company solves problems. See this related story on how culture reinforces strategy. [HBR]
From The Great Resignation to The Great Recalibration
Even exec search firms are starting to see the power of employer brand as the ground beneath them shifts. See also this article from Fast Company. [GraceBlue]
The Nerd on Video!?
I stayed up late to talk to some lovely Australians about employer branding, companies who lie, Inception, job intangibles, and the most attractive people in the world (that last bit starts at 16:50) [VideoMyJob]
Inside the fortune cookie
“Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes the visible.” - Paul Klee
Thanks, everyone!
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Keep sharing issues!Search the 1,500 links referenced 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, reply to this email. It comes directly to me.
Cheers and thanks!
-James Ellis (LinkedIn)
Where the subject line came from:
Fleetwood Mac - Hold Me
We move from last week’s hit that never really was to one of the biggest bands in the world. A long way from it’s rowdier heyday of Rumors (or its even messier follow-up Tusk), this is a shimmering, polished piece of pop nothingness. For my money, this is when Lindsey Buckingham really takes over the band, obsessing over the control board (a trait that that dominates his solo epic Out of the Cradle). Note the way he layers guitars at 2:10, or the almost complete absence of Stevie Nicks, it is probably one of my favorite Mac tracks of all time.
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:
