🧪 Employer Brand Headlines #154: The "Don't Change" Edition
If you aren't here to create perfect matches, what do you think you're here for?
Mission: Create a million employer brand thinkers (that means you!)
Written by James Ellis. »» Say hello! ««
Thanks for reading Employer Brand Headlines! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
In this issue…
Creating perfect matches
A freebie
Culture culture everywhere but no one knows what it is
Why is brand strategy so hard?
The big idea
I really love that our jobs as employer branders (and employer brand thinkers within recruiting, marketing and comms teams) are generally ill-defined. I’ve been at this game to remember when our biggest issue was trying to shake the expectation that we were swag mavens and masters. Then we were the Glassdoor whisperers. Or the person who posts to LinkedIn.
Today, it feels the pendulum has swung well the other way. Instead of being pigeon-holed as tacticians and task-owners, we are jack of all trades, expected to own comms channels (from strategy development to vendor management), job postings (copywriting and design), EVP (ideation through localization), events (booth design to event planning), advocacy (legal guidance, content development, and engagement generation), attraction (ads, social media, conference sponsorship and content creation), this list is long (and still includes swag management and review site facilitation).
Most EB pros I know either feel half-adrift in the demands placed upon them or unaware of all the possibilities this provides them (because they still think their main job is to write job adverts or post things to LinkedIn).
So let me offer some… well, let’s not call it wisdom. Let’s call it a different perspective.
Yes, if you say “yes” to everyone with a request, all these domains will be yours to own, and you’ll spread yourself so thin as to make no impact and feel absolutely wiped out by the end of the day.
So instead, focus. I don’t mean focus on a single channel or skill set (having competencies in multiple spaces is a huge advantage), but focus your intention.
What is the of that “day in the life” video? Is it fill that Thursday whole in your social media calendar? Is it to appease that hiring manager who is desperate to fill an open role and this was the best idea she could come up with? Is because you have a videographer on staff and you might as well keep him busy?
How about your LinkedIn channel? What metrics are you looking at to ensure that you are achieving something useful? How many people see your content? How many people look at your jobs? How many people go to that “About Company” page you made?
The missing element here is intention. What are you trying to make happen? How will you know you’ve succeeded? But with so many channels and tactics to use and keep an eye on (each with their own metrics and audiences and needs), it is very easy to lose sight of the forest for all the trees.
When the day is done, whether we or our bosses know it or not, we are tasked with creating matches between who we are as a company, what the role is all about, and the person who is going to excel.
This isn’t about getting lots of eyeballs to a role that only one in a thousand will be qualified for. This isn’t about being famous to people in a country where we can’t recruit. This isn’t about making the company sound amazing for a role we don’t for.
This is about writing something or recording something or posting something or building something that lets the exact right person understand that not only should they want what the company offers, but that the open role is perfect for them, and only them.
Does that sound obvious? Then why are you posting jobs to every job board you can find using language that sounds like it was written by two lawyers who don’t like each other? Why does your career site look like every other career site if not to avoid turning anyone off, whether you’d ever want to hire them or not? Why make a video designed to appeal to as many people as possible, and whose sole metric is how many people watched it?
This is why employer branding is so important: it defies the standard thinking in marketing to try and be all things to all people, and instead focus on creating perfect 1:1:1 matches, the kind of that truly grow a company.
Everything else is a waste of your time, energy and resources.
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 26 where we look at the three (very different) hats any employer brand professional will end up wearing at they work.
A little gift!
Need some ideas on how to activate your brand but have no budget? Here’s a free ebook that might be helpful…
Headlines!
Culture: Transformation’s invisible enabler
I talk about culture a lot in this newsletter. Beyond the adage that culture eats strategy for breakfast, its that your culture is at once the most important element in your company and the least understood. Do you have executives thinking that they can dictate culture? Do you buy tools that fix your culture? Do your leaders conflate culture with perks? If so, your company has no idea what it is talking about.
Culture is the means by which things get done. It is the behavior, not the values that define the why we do the behavior.
Do you do it collaboratively or do you expect people to take agency? Are you hierarchical where one person makes a decision and there will be no further discussion, or do you need to shop an idea around to make sure people get it and buy in? Do people feel like their job is to extract as much value from their jobs as they can, or do they see themselves as serving a greater purpose? How do decisions get made? How do things get delivered? That’s culture.
I harp on this stuff because culture is so core to what we “sell” (can I get bigger quote marks to indicate irony? No? Just the one size? Fine. Maybe this strange aside will indicate what I mean adequately), and yet most companies don’t know what it is, let alone how to accurately describe it to a complete stranger (which is, you know, among your many jobs). So part of our success comes by campaigning internally to help everyone understand what culture is, what its power is, and how you intend to illustrate it to the world. [strategy+business] (see also Company Culture Is Really Important, But The Way We Talk About It Is Wrong and From People to Reputation – The Definitive Guide for Internal Brand Culture)
Quick Hits
Inside the fortune cookie
“The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.” - Jerry Saltz
Thanks, everyone!
This newsletter now has more than 2,300 subscribers. Thank you!
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:
INXS - Don’t Change
How have we gone this far into 80’s music with something from INXS? I mean, you can’t even THINK about 1987/88 without bringing up the four top ten singles from Kick?
But before they took over radio and MTV, they were a cool, weird Aussie band who were putting put a steady stream of minor hits (until they got smart and got interesting with their video for What You Need and become an IT band in ‘85). I’m not saying this stuff is better than KICK and what came after it (because Not Enough Time is amazing), but Listen Like Thieves and Shabooh Shoobah have some many great songs. Yes, their early videos are… rough. But this band consisting of three brothers and a future rock god, put out a lot of great songs before they became an eighties icon.
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:
Thanks for reading Employer Brand Headlines! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.