Being intentional.🔬 (EBH#176: Out of Touch)

Are your social posts just filling space, or are you actually saying something that supports the brand?

Dec 19, 2022

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

Employer Brand Headlines is written by James Ellis, Employer Brand Nerd.
Contains no ChatGPT

First…

The EVP Masterclass Workshop (where that recruiters, TA leaders and HRBPs can develop their company’s employer brand) or the EB Mastermind Group (where employer brand thinkers brainstorm and work together to activate their own brands) are both gearing up for their next session in January. If you have questions, grab 15 minutes with me. It’s like an Ask Me Anything but it’s just you and me!

These courses aren’t for everyone, but if you’d like to see how they could help you attract and hire talent, let’s chat!

If someone shared this with you, you should subscribe. Every week you’ll get a little bit smarter about employer branding.

The Big Idea

So to catch you up: I offered people a free report on how well they were activating their employer brand (want me to run a report on your company? Request one here). I ended up building a LOT of reports. And while I hope the individual reports were useful, the process gave me a nice perspective on what companies are doing generally (and where they would be better). So I wrote that up for ERE.

But the last point in the article about missing intentionality is so important to me, I thought I would go deeper for you (see how much value you get by subscribing? 😁).

So let’s start with a simple premise: your target audience is generally motivated by one of a few core drivers. Things like status, money, career growth, professional development, mission/values, support, etc. A talented person driven by mission/values is going to be way more interested in a B corp who gives people in need an X when someone else buys an X than in a hedge fund who’s sole goal is to maximize fund value. Different motivations lead to different companies.

The process of developing one’s employer brand often involves identifying the one or two of those core motivations that the company cares about most, rewards, and supports. Goldman Sachs’ brand is focused on performance and money where Amazon’s brand is about innovation with some empowerment thrown in. Pinterest’s brand is all about how it supports its people/teams and DoiT’s brand leans on how it develops its people.

Now, the brand is meaningless until you show how you live that brand every single day. Better burned a lot of pixels trying to tell people it was a great place to work, that it was doing all it could to support its people, then fired a bunch by Zoom. What’s their brand now?

So that means threading the brand ideas into anything public facing, so that people can see it’s not a poster on the wall, but something truly lived.

But how?

Here’s an example of a piece of content almost every company gets around to posting: We care about diversity.

Now, we all know saying “we care diversity” is a pretty empty claim. So you’d want to give it some weight, some meaning. Here are some directions you could take it:

Message 1: We invest in our DEI programs to attract diverse talent from all over the planet because diversity is inherently good.
Message 2: Diversity of people tends towards a diversity of viewpoints, which helps us perform at a higher level.
Message 3: We care about diversity because we want people from any background to feel welcome so the can add their value.

Boiled down to its essence, these messages are all trying to show the same thing: a commitment to diversity. What’s different is the motivation behind WHY they are committed to it.

In the first message, the motivation is altruistic, that diversity is a core value so therefore, diversity. This is a mission/value driven message, one that might not play well at a hyper-growth valley startup or fintech, but supports mission/purpose-driven companies.

The second one is about performance: we care about diversity because it allows us to perform at higher levels. This motivation would be weird at a purpose-driven company, but makes perfect sense at a trading company or private equity firm.

The third one reinforces diversity as a means to make all individuals within the company feel better supported. This is a team/support motivation, one that might be perfectly suited to a biotech startup or a healthcare company that wants to be known as a place where each person feels supported.

To be clear, there is no inherently right or wrong post here. They all work, but they don’t all work equally well for every company and every brand. The message needs to align with the broader employer brand so that it actually adding supporting evidence that its core claim is true at every level.

Misaligned motivations undercut the power of the brand, where companies end up saying a lot but targets can’t form a clear picture of what the company is about, what they can expect from working there.

This idea doesn’t just work for diversity messages. Every. Single. Post. Needs. To. Support. Your. Brand. Every post needs to mean something, so it might as wall be something that proves your brand promises and claims.

From “happy holidays” to “we won an award” to “here’s a pic of our staff watching the world cup” to “we’re volunteering together,” any post can be reframed to connect to your brand, driving value.

But most companies don’t. They post things seemingly to fill space, driven not by the message but by the editorial calendar that insists on X posts every Y days. In turn, they are missing the chance to find yet another way to support the brand. They are lacking intentionality, and it leads them down a dark path towards employer blanding, or worse, complete commoditization.

Want to understand how well your employer brand is being activated? Request your free report here.

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Strategy Idea

The Tortoise Beats Hare Strategy. You’ve probably seen some version of the idea where getting 1% better every day yields something like a 35x results over the course of a year. And while there’s lots to quibble with in how its described, the idea makes a lot of sense. Want your brand to succeed? Pick one small thing to do today. Don’t shoot for the big win, but instead focus on small daily wins. A new ally. A new recruiting convert. A new success story from a team who is hiring much better now. Looking at old social posts and learning something moving forward that increases reach and impact. Cataloging all your visuals into one place and re-sharing the folder (even if there isn’t anything new to see). Changing the titles and title cards on your videos to something that will perform better. There are so many ways to make a win and each one makes you more effective, more influential, and more valuable.

(Further examples in the power of incremental momentum)

The Employer Brand Minute

In two months, I rolled out 44 short videos around employer branding. It was quite a sprint for me (though I learned a ton!). I’m taking a few weeks off from the videos to re-think what would be most useful to build next. Any thoughts? Ping me. Otherwise, you can watch all the existing videos here.

No really… who needs to read this kind of stuff on a regular basis? Share it with them!

Headlines

Some weeks, I struggle to find half a dozen articles worth sharing.

This is not one of those weeks.

Remember, all the articles I have ever linked to are archived here (more than 1,700 in a searchable database).

"I don't have talent, so I just get up earlier." – Henry Rollins

Whenever you’re ready, here’s how I can help you:

EVP Masterclass: Develop your own Employer Brand/EVP alongside other recruiting leaders in my next guided cohort.
Employer Brand for Recruiters: Video on demand to teach recruiters how using their employer brand properly makes them more effective. Group rates available.
Coaching and support: Email me and we’ll set up time to talk 1:1 about how I can help you or your company take advantage of your employer brand.

Cheers and thanks!

-James Ellis (LinkedIn)

Resources:

Download 105 free (or almost free) ways to activate your employer brand.
Read Talent Chooses You for free from this open source Google Doc.
Search all 1,700+ links historically referenced in the article archive.
Here’s the 2022 version of The Employer Brand Manifesto.
220+ episodes of The Talent Cast podcast.

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

Hall and Oates - Out Of Touch

I have a real soft spot for Hall and Oates. Aside from being one of the first two albums I ever bought with my own money (Private Eyes, along with The Police’s Ghost In The Machine), they are a band who struggled for a loooong time to catch a little fire, but when it did, they turned into an inferno. (for a nice non-Behind The Music recap of the band, check out Slate’s Hit Parade podcast on the duo.)

Anyway, this song is late in their catalog. At this stage, they were pop hit making machines, producing insanely slick albums still sound amazing (my favorite little studio trick is how in Family Man the bassline steadily moves up in prominence until the third verse where it just dominates the sound) and leveraging video to present a fairly safe pop image to the kids watching MTV. But the song itself is far better than the situation might suggest. They give it their all and put together a single that layers on synths on synths without ever sounding artificial.

Enjoy!

If you are enjoying the music, congratulations, you have great taste in music and/or 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:

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