💡 Employer Brand Headlines: The "King for a Day" Edition (#133)
What promise are you making? What promise are you keeping?
My mission: move the conversation around employer brand forward.
Employer Brand Headlines, is brought to you by James Ellis.
In this issue…
The promise
Social recruiting primer
How do teams work?
Negative space
The big idea
The employer brand industrial complex (all those companies to purport to “solve your employer brand issue” without knowing anything about your brand, but would love to put you on a subscription plan if you’d just click this DocuSign…) wants you to think linearly about your employer brand.
That is, they want you to think about your brand as standing in a line with every other company with “bad employer brand” on one end and “great employer brand” on the other. They want you to think your job is to jostle with everyone else in line to get to the top and keep from “falling behind.”
They do this because stoking your (and really, your boss’s) fear leads to a sale. The more you feel like you’re missing something, that you aren’t keeping up, the more you’ll sign that DocuSign.
But it’s not real.
There is no linear scale. Your brand isn’t better or worse than that of Facebook or Sally’s Discount Data Science. (Actually, now that I think of it, you probably are better than Facebook/Meta/Zuck’s House of Inflated Ad Number as they don’t seem to know who they are these days.) Brands aren’t good or bad. You can’t measure them and sort them like pigs at the county fair.
Brands are promises.
What do you promise candidates walking in the door? Starbucks promises one thing and my local coffee shop promises another. One isn’t better, they are literally appealing to different people. If you like one, you’ll dislike the other. But that’s okay because someone will go the opposite way.
This is where the power of not trying to appeal to everyone creates strength. You get to make a promise that is real. You get to make a promise that matters to someone. The more you focus on your audience, the more you understand them. The more you understand them, the more you’ll know what promise you can make that resonates. You can create the frame through which they will look at everything else they see about your company and judge the opportunity accordingly.
So don’t let those employer brand industrial complex companies feed you FOMO. Ask them instead how they can help you make and prove your promise.
That’s how your brand gets stronger.
Yep, we’re still podcasting about a book.
The revised and annotated audio version of Talent Chooses You (this time it’s personal!) continues as we hit episode 5: More thinking about funnels. Don’t worry. It’s more interesting that the title might suggest.
Headlines!
Global Insights Briefing: Looking for new experiences
Searches for “24 7 customer service” have increased 500% in the last year, according to Google. If something increases 5 fold in a year, you should pay attention. My first instinct is to ask, “why don’t we offer 24/7 recruiting?” Or at the very least, a (not-bot) way to engage candidates when they aren’t at work, perhaps dreading having to go in the next day? But take that a step further. What if you trained your 24/7 customer service team to answer recruiting question? You could give them a book of talking points about why people like to work there, what the benefits are, what the locations are like, etc. The call center person could look the caller up on LinkedIn and the ATS to roughly qualify the candidate and set up a short call with a recruiter. Just a thought. [Google]
Wins, Sins and Great Big Grins
A tremendous primer on helping recruiters get social. And when they ask “what should we share???” you can point them to the amazing employer branding content you’re working on. [UK Recruiter]
Emotional Rescue – How to embrace feelings to save internal communication and the employee experience
On the heels of last week’s post about how engagement is a feeling rather than a product, what if you adding emotional components into your KPIs? What if you say emotional information as data points? Could you tie your work to emotional outcomes? [Vision2Voice]
How to Build a High Performing Team
Long time readers know I have a professional crush on Bud Caddell of NOBL. In this edition of his newsletter, he breaks down the anatomy of a team. I would suggest that the same anatomy (and the questions it poses) could describe a company or even (dare I say it) an employer brand? [NOBL]
Is my thinking specific enough?
The thing that makes an employer brand an employer bland is a lack of being specific enough. So take a lesson in how marketing strategists work (hard) to push and push an idea until it is specific enough. [Mark Pollard]
Pay attention to the negative space
“So, when looking to understand your audience or find a solution to a creative problem I find it helpful to try to take a step back. What is it you’re not seeing? Are their adjacencies can you explore? What is the fundamentally human thing which is otherwise left unsaid?” [A Strategist’s Guide to Art]
Inside the fortune cookie
“Everything interacts and is dependent on other things. We must think more thoroughly about what we are doing, how we are doing it, and why we are doing it.” - Dieter Rams
Thanks, everyone!
There are now more than 1,300 links in the link archive. Enjoy!
Finally, if you have a question, just reply to this email and it comes directly to me.
Cheers and thanks!
-James Ellis (LinkedIn | Twitter | Podcast | Articles)
Where the subject line came from:
XTC - King for a Day
Here’s something you don’t know about me: I am a huge XTC fan. They are perfect pop. From angular and weird post-punk in 1977 through to the orchestral stuff in 1999, every album has amazingly complex and weird but deeply accessible hooks. Like if Steely Dan produced the Beatles.
They never “made it” outside of the UK (and even then, only kinda). But I love watching YouTube videos where people hear their stuff for the first time. They are singularly British (and the only reason I know where Swindon is), and I highly recommend them.
Where to start? A few options: The bright and brilliant Oranges and Lemons (which is where King for a Day is from) or the verdant and heavily-acoustic English Settlement (with Senses Working Overtime, which was covered by Mandy Moore?!).
