The mission: Create a million employer brand thinkers (like you!)

EBH is written by James Ellis. »» Yes, you should say hello! ««

First…

Last week I mentioned I was offering a class to recruiters on how to actually use their employer brand.

This week I’m offering Employer Brand For Recruiters video course to newsletter subscribers (and your teams) for 44% off. For $250, you (or a recruiter you love) can level up your day-to-day recruiting activities in a hurry, shortening your time to fill rate, growing your pipeline, and even closing more candidates in about a week. Just use code EBHSPECIAL at checkout.

»» Details on the class «« | »» Coupon code ««

Got an idea for my next course? Reply to this email me. I’d love to hear it!

The Big Idea

31 years ago, Simon Barrow took the tenets of product marketing and applied them to recruiting and }boom{ we have employer branding. Since then, the world has made some pretty dramatic changes. Sure, there’s “the internet” and “climate change,” but in just the last year, we’re seeing some really big shifts.

It hits like this:

Jobs aren’t really “jobs” anymore
Gig economy, creator economy, freelance nation, starting one’s own business and “working” for the previous employer under a different economic structure. At the same time, so many jobs people are hired for are new titles (I mean, when was the last time you were interviewed by someone who knew more about employer brand than you?) so there’s little structure/criteria/expectation when you bring talent on. When you are hired as an EB pro, no one tells you what you should do, they look to you to tell THEM what you’re going to do. That same is true in emerging tech fields (AI, ML, crypto, etc) and in “old” roles being applied in new ways.

Companies are becoming more complex
It used to be, if you worked at IBM, you wore a white short-sleeve shirt and a dark tie while the dress code at Facebook was hoodie-tastic. As companies grow based on weaker ties (see “jobs aren’t jobs” above), they themselves no longer feel homogenous or even unified. This isn’t strictly “diversity” as much as it is a sense that any company of size are a series of barely-connected fiefdoms. As their culture isn’t as easy to define and illustrate, it becomes harder to tell people what they should expect from working there.

People’s relationship to their work is shifting
The weak ties to work go beyond culture. Why someone goes to work, what they expect to give and get from that relationship is changing. The macroeconomic stuff (inflation, income disparity, cost of housing spiraling, student loans, etc) has made it less effective for someone to “fall in love” with the company. For a long time, we used to expect (or at least demand) that employees bring their passion. (Remember Subway’s “sandwich artist” campaign? Do you really think anyone making sandwiches in a Subway saw themselves as an artist?) We all see the puppet’s strings being held and we negotiate for what strings we allow and won’t.

Talent is in charge

Just look at salaries, perks, demands for equity, demands for work/life balance, sign-on bonuses, demands that businesses take political stands, etc etc. I know it doesn’t always feel like it when you’re in the midst of a job search, but I can assure you: if you’ve got clear talent, you’ve never had as much power over your prospective employer (or current employer) as you have today.

I feel like that puts us in a bit of a bind.

So much of employer branding was able bypassing the transactional nature of recruiting, they “I have a job with a salary and you have a butt that will fit the seat, let’s trade” kind of world. We leverage people’s intrinsic motivations to get them to be more attracted to impact or a sense of community because that’s what the company “offered.”

When every single person joins a company to get something different (and the company is complex enough to support each different desire/demand), what exactly are we branding?

Is the answer to go big, thinking in big, broad terms that can apply equally to all parts of the company? I fear the issue here is that with 50MM companies in the world, they will all sound the same. I feels like every pharma/healthcare/hospital system already says “we’re here to save lives” as if that somehow differentiates them from any other.

Is the answer to go smaller, marketing teams and micro-cultures at a given org? Is it like picking majors at a college were not ever program works the same: where everyone knows that developers at Company X are well-funded, have strong line-of-sight to the customer, work in tightly-knit cliques with a competitive edge, but the over on the manufacturing side, the line staff are offered perpetual professional education and training to help their skills grow?

Or is it embracing the complexity, knowing that we simply cannot distill a promise to everyone in the same 10 words. If the world is becoming more complex, why do we expect our EVPs to become simpler? Isn’t the smart move to find ways of becoming more transparent, of sharing more of the experience of working on a given role? That shifts some of the burden to hiring managers, who would have to talk about the role with some measure of depth (and if their first drafts of job postings is anything to go by, they will need some guidance).

I suspect the trends aren’t going away, so the question is: how will WE shift our thinking to continue to attract and hire great people?

Links I read this week that shaped my thinking here:

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“A military force has no constant formation, water has no constant shape: the ability to gain victory by changing and adapting according to the opponent is called genius.” - Sun Tzu

Thank you!

This newsletter now has more than 2,600 subscribers. Wuuuut?! Thank you! Keep sharing the 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)

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

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Where the subject line came from:

The Dead Milkmen - Punk Rock Girl

Look. Not everyone likes the Milkmen. I get it. But they are true to the spirit of punk: unrepentantly goofy, unwilling to take themselves seriously, deeply mediocre musicians and song-writers, but having fun and thrilled you’re having fun with them, too. This was their “big hit” even though it is clearly a parody of… everything. A simple melody, a tounge-in-cheek message, and a willingness to not care that you’re not supposed to play accordion in a punk song. For me, “Stuart” off the same album is the better track, as it pre-sages Qanon, but let’s not go there today.

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:

A simpler employer brand? EBH#158: "Punk Rock…