⚡ Employer Brand Headlines: The "The Boy In The Bubble" Edition (#127)
What does employer branding want?
My mission: move the conversation around employer brand forward.
Employer Brand Headlines, is brought to you by James Ellis.
In this issue…
Better bait
What does employer brand want?
How is your brand used?
CEO vision
The big idea
Why spend time trying to write job postings that are interesting? That aren’t just bullets of tasks and tedious (and inaccurate) expectations and requirements?
Why spend money getting a career site that lets you show more than tell, that isn’’t a web interface on an ATS?
Why talk to all your business leaders and hear exactly how they talk to their teams and the terms they use to describe their approach?
We are constantly asked to justify ourselves and our work (and, in all fairness, sometimes we ‘perceive’ that people are demanding we justify our existence), and we often react but trying to get… smaller. Simpler. Easier. Less
I admit is it easier to write a job posting that reads like word salad from a Department of Labor white paper. Or to build a website that works like a carbon copy of millions of others. Or to just phone it in and note try and dig for the poetry of what your company and why people love it.
When you feel the urge to polish the sharp edges off of your brand messaging, remember this: Your bait determines your result. In a world where everything sounds the same, why would an exceptional talent choose your same-old-paint-by-numbers language? They wouldn’t. Do you want a new head of marketing who responds to a site that could be confused for dozens of others, or the one who can see something truly human in your messaging?
If you put out generic messages and ideas you will only attract generic talent.
One other thing
Hey. So you know that I am turning my book Talent Chooses You into an audiobook released free as a podcast. The first episode comes out next week (January 19th), but as an appetizer (or an aperitif, if that’s your thing), I’m rolling out an early episode. It’s called What Does Employer Brand Want? and it’s something I’m really proud of. I hope it gets your gears turning when you think of your own employer brand work. If nothing else, I hope it reminds you to subscribe to The Talent Cast podcast (found pretty much anywhere you get podcasts).
Headlines!
If you build a brand without considering its use you’re wasting your time
“…to understand a brand’s meaning, we have to understand how it is used by customers.” [Marketing Week via Follow the Bear]
As the pandemic makes life more complex, people crave simpler brands
I struggle with this myself. I want to jam all the cool things about the company into brand. But here are massive (and very complex companies) building very “simple” brands. It’s a good lesson. [Siegel+Gale]
Netflix memo encourages recruiters to avoid talking about Dave Chappelle
For the folks in the back: 👏 Everything 👏 your 👏 business 👏 does 👏 impacts 👏 your 👏 employer 👏 brand [The Verge]
6 ways to better compete for talent in 2022
Offer more money, make a better culture, making hiring faster… these incremental ‘off-the-shelf’ ideas are the same ones I see in a dozen other similar articles designed to make you feel like you’re somehow making progress but really only staying trapped in the murky middle. Be clear! Be interesting! Be so damn interesting, someone will stop what they are doing and apply! [Fast Company]
Bringing The CEO’s Vision To Life
Want to move your work forward? Show how it serves and supports (and drives) the CEO’s vision. [Brand Strategy Insider]
Brand Strategy is Business Strategy Requited
This is like a zen koan, something you could meditate on. [What’s the Idea?]
What is Brand Architecture? Definition, Models, and Examples
Brand house? House of brands? For those of you juggling a multi-brand world, this might help provide some foundational thinking. [The Branding Journal]
Ask These 5 Questions to Decide Your Next Career Move
I’m reverse-engineering this article to highlight the idea that what talent really wants is a sense of progress. Offer candidates that. [HBR]
Psychologists argue we’re not as choosy about romantic partners as we think
In general, I find these pop psych articles… icky. But there’s an interesting idea here, that people are as choosy as their options. We like to think that talent has a hard-and-fast set of expectations and demands, but I’d suggest most people do it the other way around: setting expectations based on what’s available. [PsyPost]
Inside the fortune cookie
“It’s hard to convince anyone to listen to you when you sound like everyone they already ignore.” - Lee Clow’s Beard
Thanks, everyone!
There are now more than 1,200 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:
Paul Simon - The Boy in the Bubble
