🧪 Employer Brand Headlines #153: The "Can't Hardly Wait" Edition

Is your company working to make its employer brand relatable?

James Ellis

Jul 11

Mission: Create a million employer brand thinkers (that means you!)

Written by James Ellis. »» Say hello! ««

In this issue…

Can you relate?
Netflix isn’t listening anymore
Recruiter 3.0

The big idea

Fifty years ago, businesses had all the power in the employer/employee dynamic. They established the cadences by which someone was promoted. They mandated culture and “the way we do things here.” The dictated dress codes. They were the ones who decided what constituted a valid resume (and then demanded a cover letter because the resume was no vehicle for communicating much of value). They told you how to apply, when they would be available for an interview, and what the salary would be.

Twenty years ago, things had only changed slightly. The internet cracked the foundation of that relationship, but the building still stood as before. The business had the job so you jumped through their hoops. Maybe you put a few infographic-y filigrees on your resume, but for the most part it looked a lot like it used to. Maybe you had a little power to negotiate at the offer, but the second you accepted, your power evaporated. Don’t believe me? Think back to how businesses generally still have a period once a year for offering promotions and raises. The employees didn’t make that decision, the business did.

But look around today and you see something very very different. Companies are going out of their way to show not just that they care about their employees, but that they are just like their employees. This isn’t about the perks that FAANGs have been throwing around, this is about more town hall meetings in more companies, culture and values teams, the ability for staff to stand up to executive decisions.

Watch companies try to demand that staff return to the office after 2+ years of remote work. Twenty years ago, when the company called, people answered. The only place you’d see push back would be in gossip websites (anyone else remember “F*ck’d Company”?), the occasional news article where the employee’s name would be redacted, or private comms. Today? Companies expending considerable resources in communicating their (generally very weak) reasoning why people should resume their commutes and communal coffee rituals. Remember: companies hate spending money unless they absolutely have to. But the pushback from front-line staff has ended commonly in a 2-days-a-week-onsite compromise (where staff find themselves in a conference room talking to people via Zoom, just like they did at home). There’s a lot less dictating happening these days.

It is easy to say that the power that talent wields has shifted the dynamic, but there’s something more at play. There’s the added dimension of millennials and zoomers becoming the majority of employees. Macroeconomic shifts that shape these generations are added to internet speak/think and it is apparent that the meme generation is taking over.

In response, businesses are forced to be (I almost can’t believe I’m typing this) “relatable.”

Oodles of branded swag gifts, open common areas so people can hang out, executives abandoning corner offices, AMAs, expectations of skip report meetings and that your boss is there to help you in your career goals in or out of the company, open digital spaces to talk about pets and music and sports (or anything but work), the list goes on and on.

In the bigger world, our social media and internet choices are leading us to see only what we wish to see, creating a space where we choose not by features or function, but by how well we relate to it.

Don’t believe me? There’s a coffee company (I won’t name) that sells the same coffee anyone else does, but its geared towards pro-military/pro-MAGA coffee drinkers. It is very successful not because of the product, but because of how people relate to the position. There are micro cultures forming around encouraging one another’s side hustles, reels for DIY concrete stuff (DIWhy?), subreddits shorting the stock of a handful of companies, newsletters for people who live in their van, etc, all showing you people you could be (or maybe just hang out with). Patreon and OnlyFans make it easy to hear directly from a creator’s mind about how and why they do what they do all so that you feel like you can relate to them.

No one is famous so much as they are friends we can’t call for a ride to the airport.

Companies are following suit. The meme-ers want their employers to be “real people” who participate in social media challenges and get the reference when called “sus.” They expect to be part of the inside jokes and codes that shape a company’s culture. They will respond to a CFO’s slack about the stock trading window being closed with Mean Girls or Usher gifs.

Melcolm X @MelcolmRuffin

Me: I’ve already seen 200 of the Usher memes. I’m sure they’re done now. My Twitter timeline:

I suspect that this is an opportunity for employer branders (and people who think like employer branders). This might be the entry into useful Tik Tok-ing (et al), showing that your company “gets it.” Why not an employer brand Discord channel, where you play video games and talk about what your company is like? Or a Hulu or Netflix watch party where you watch Stranger Things and talk about work?

The challenge for the foreseeable future isn’t just to show that you are different, but that you can relate to them.

Create more employer brand thinkers by sharing this newsletter!

Season 2 of The Talent Cast continues!

The revised and annotated audio version of Talent Chooses You (guaranteed to get your toes tapping) continues with episode 25, where we go through a laundry list of good ideas of things to do when you’re just plain stuck.

Headlines!

Netflix doesn’t want to hear it any more

For the last 10-15 years, FAANG (and their adherents) have had a pretty clear culture playbook: Make employees feel like they have skin in the game by offering lots of stock, being transparent with decisions, offering more access to executives (usually via town halls or all hands meetings) and giving people as much autonomy as possible. This idea, more so than free lunches and ping pool tables, has been the blueprint for “the culture” of “modern” companies. (See: Google’s “don’t be evil” and Netflix’s culture deck and its subsequent book.) It has trickled down into non-FAANGs widely, becoming the vernacular of biotechs, fintech, agencies, even manufacturing.

But as we get to the place where push comes to shove, where stock numbers are tumbling, where a muskrat shows up and offers to buy the company and then tries to weasel out of it, when layoffs happen, where the feds on multiple continents talks about breaking companies up, we start to see cracks form. So much of the idea was that people actually mattered, that they were the path to value creation. But when “the people” start to question the means by which the company makes money, will we see more companies tear their sacrosanct culture/values decks up in favor of making quarterly numbers? And how will you re-position your brand when prospects are expecting something you can’t validate anymore? [The Verge]

Who is Recruiter 3.0

From Eva Baluchova, a great breakdown of the future of recruiting, or at least what will soon make for a great recruiter. I give points to Eva for not calling it “Recruiter3” or some such NFT-influenced nonsense. But more interestingly is the list of hard and soft skills recruiters need (and know they need) to become better at their profession now and in the future. I suspect things like coding (or at least working with AI) will become very important in the next 2-3 years, existing more broadly instead of existing in a few tight nerdy pockets. I also applaud the inclusion of things like negotiation and sales skills, which aren’t taught to recruiters hardly at all. Also see this related article on rethinking the recruiter experience by Tim Sackett. [LinkedIn]

Quick Hits

Inside the fortune cookie

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” - George Orwell

Thanks, everyone!

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Cheers and thanks!

-James Ellis (LinkedIn)

Thanks for reading. I bet you know some people who would really value this kind of thing.

Where the subject line came from:

The Replacements - Can’t Hardly Wait

This is a perfect song. I don’t care if you think you like Minneapolis punk or not, this is a great song, like something lifted from Bruce Springsteen and then sung with a little bit of a knowing sneer. Despite the title, it feels so wistful and forlorn to me, like the sound of a train whistle in the distance you’ll never reach (I’m sure those horns at the end help).

This is from “Pleased to Meet Me” their so-called sell-out to a major label (read Our Band Could Be Your Life for more on the subject), but to me this is a maturation of band. (Well, “maturation” might be wrong, but let’s leave their reputation as messy drunks to someone else.)

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:

Employer Brand Headlines