💡 Employer Brand Headlines: The "The One Thing" Edition (#130)
Talent acquisition starts by overcoming inertia
My mission: move the conversation around employer brand forward.
Employer Brand Headlines, is brought to you by James Ellis.
In this issue…
Overcoming inertia
Messy is good
How creative work happens
The big idea
I assume you understand that your job is to convince a total stranger (someone who doesn’t know you, doesn’t trust you, doesn’t know how wonderful you are, etc) to change their life. You are saying, “I don’t know anything about your current situation, job, boss, or life, but I’d like you to consider throwing all that away and joining my company.”
Written out like that, it’s a wonder anyone ever engages with us (or our recruiters).
But it is true. Our job is to arm recruiters to sell our opportunities to strangers. These strangers probably already have jobs, places where they know the ins and outs of their, where they know how to get things done (or at least get by).
It doesn’t matter if they have jobs which are… well, let’s call them “suboptimal.” Maybe they are jobs they don’t feel connected to or satisfied at. Jobs where they spend a lot of time complaining about their bosses, politics, or paperwork.
In a word, they have inertia.
Do you have a local restaurant you go to that isn’t very good, but you go again and again because you know what to expect?
For many people, the “amazing opportunity” you pitch is worth far less than the suboptimal job they know.
It probably seems strange. You work at the company. You know how great it is. You’d be happy to tell someone why you’re happier, how this company ended up being a huge upgrade for you.
But from their standpoint, it makes perfect sense. They don’t know you. They don’t know what your previous experience felt like. And they know you don’t know their experience or feelings. To them you are making baseless claims. And you’ve got an agenda: someone is paying you to tell people how great the company is.
The burden on every talent acquisition team is pretty clear. You don’t have to be somewhat better than their current situation, you have to be clearly and credibly better than what they already have. And since you don’t know what they have, what exactly can you say?
This is where brand position matters. Can you tell a stranger they will be happier working for your company than their own? No. You really really can’t. (You can try, but you will sound unbelievable, and not in a good way.) But you can talk about what you offer, about what you promise people who work there. You can talk about what you care about, what motivates you, and what behaviors you reward. Your job is to make those ideas attractive and crystal clear. Give them weight, heft, and concreteness.
Inertia is all about patterns. Wake, shower, coffee, email, meeting, etc. Overcoming a prospect’s inertia starts by breaking patterns. Say something surprising. Break a rule. Make them double take. I some times say that my job is to make people stop and say, “Oh. Huh!”
So when you think, “should I spend a little more effort and energy to go beyond ‘employer blanding?’” Know that the reward of saying something interesting and credible is overcoming inertia.
Podcast update
The revised and annotated version of Talent Chooses You (the revenge!) continues with episode 2, Hiring is a game of quality, not quantity. Available wherever you podcast.
Headlines!
‘Messy is the new credibility’: How to communicate in a noisy world
There’s so much data and research that shows that providing a “postcard perfect” picture of your brand actually undercuts your credibility, but this is a perfect summation of the same idea. [Ragan]
U.S. Employee Engagement Drops for First Year in a Decade
The biggest problem with this kind of data is that it is aggregated. Yes, engagement has dropped. But it isn’t dropping everywhere. The places that seem to do the bare legal minimum for their employees are getting the bare minimum engagement. The places that engage credibly and authentically with their employees get engagement in return. What’s changing is that people are expecting more from their employer in return for engagement. [Gallup]
How Your Company's Attrition Rate Could Be Impacting Your Business
What’s the last time you talk to HR/PeopleOps about attrition? This article is more primer for attrition thinking, but the real takeaway is that EB has a lot of offer the business on this very expensive problem [Hubspot]
Brands Need Creativity And Cross-Functional Teams
Whatever you do, do not isolate yourself within a function, department or team. Your best work occurs when you interact (and get your butt kicked a bit) with others [Brand Strategy Insider]
How to Make Your Recruiting Email More Effective
Is the bar really so low in recruiting outreach that saying “do your research” needs to be said? Well, based on the invites and outreach I get, the answer is a sad ‘yes.’ Before you pitch an “ingenious strategy for recruitment outreach,” make sure your recruiter isn’t spamming the hell out of everyone with a LinkedIn account. (And in case that felt accusatory, as an EB’er, you shouldn’t be spamming people, either). [Recruiter.com]
The Pandemic Changed Everything About Work, Except the Humble Résumé
There are books that could be written about how myopic this percept of resumes is. One page? Made for robots? Static design formats??? (Shame on The Muse for feeding into these myths.) The resume is. commercial. Maybe the commercial can only be 30 seconds, but you have limitless options within that space, so if you see all commercials as the same, it’s a function of how mediocre commercial agencies are, not of the medium itself. And talent is waking up to this idea. Rather than skillsets with a pulse, they are real people, whose motivations and ambitions would align with that of the company/team to ensure maximum engagement and productivity. Closer to home? Maybe it’s on us to education recruiters and HMs that the candidate that intentionally defies best practice isn’t a “bad candidate” but must be seen as someone who can break with convention to say something meaningful (unless you really like listening to how “there’s no talent out there…”) [NYT]
I Am a Meme Now — And So Are You
What if we cannot change people’s minds about who we are? Just something to think about… [via Farnam Street]
The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson's Get Back
I do adore The Beatles. And I loved the Get Back… TV show? supersized movie? Near-real-time documentary? And I think this article nails why. Those songs you know by heart (love them or hate them) did not appear in someone’s mind one day. They started as… bit of scraps of a glimpse of an idea. But until you sit down and work at it, that little chord change you labeled as “Scrambled egg” will never turn into “Yesterday.” All good artistic work (and yes, our work is DEEPLY artistic) requires work. And craft. There is almost never an epiphany. Or a lightning bolt. You slog, you write, you sketch, you blab on a whiteboard and every so often, you see something that you can build on. It’s true for amazing songs, and it is true for employer brand work. [The Ruffian]
Inside the fortune cookie
“How determined people seem to be to aim for exactly the same target again and again” - Brian Eno
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-James Ellis (LinkedIn | Twitter | Podcast | Articles)
Where the subject line came from:
INXS - The One Thing
