Breaking Down Your Brands 🔨🦺 EBH
Take 'em apart and see how they tick.
Feeling stuck? Get unstuck.
How much employer branding do you need to have an employer brand?
Put another way, what is the least amount of employer branding do you need ot see the value in it?
🦺 The business case for branding »»
🦺 Change State’s State of the industry »»
🦺 In 24 minutes, you be able to steal some of Spotify’s tricks to activate your employer brand »»
🦺 Employer branding in the energy sector »»
🦺 When money is the only hard data point, being transparent about salary allows companies, employees and candidates to speak the same language »»
🦺 A surprisingly interesting essay on the value of purpose at work »»
🦺 When do you re-brand? »»
🦺 Branding and advertising are NOT the same thing »»
🦺 What HR leaders are worried about going into 2024 »»
🔈 Podcast: How to unlock your strategic mind »»
🔈 Podcast: If you want to change your culture, change your stories »»
🧠🔌 AI Idea of the Week: What can AI do for marketers? »»
🏛️ All 2,000+ articles from this newsletter are in a searchable archive. Go get ‘em!
Employer Brand Breakdown Lessons
Every Friday for the past few months, I launch LinkedIn Live and walk through a company's company career site, LinkedIn channel, and jobs just like a candidate would. The goal is to understand how each company is using its employer brand to attract and hire the talent it needs to grow.
It’s a series I call (creatively) Employer Brand Breakdown.
So far, I’ve looked at Moderna, Exscientia, Generate:Biomedicines, Tempus Labs, Inc., Sprout Social, Inc., Flex Technology Group, BCLC, Dynamic Aviation, Abt Electronics, and Spotify.
What have I learned after reviewing all these companies?
One: Everyone has an advantage they can utilize
Most of the companies on this list have no formal employer brand function, and yet I was easily able to discern what the company stood for and cared about based on what they showed and what they talked about.
For every Spotify with a dedicated team and resources, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller and less-funded companies that are able to find something worth talking about. Something specific to them.
Look at Moderna. They have awards that are so rare, and have so much built-in credibility, that they deserve to be displayed. That's an advantage only they have.
Two: Focus matters
You can't tell all your stories. You have to pick the things that make you attractively different, then isolate and amplify them.
The best part is that focusing is free. All it takes is the willingness to say "no" to lots of "positive but not differentiated" things to focus on what makes you special.
Here's Dynamic Aviation, a 400-person company that is showing off its "hand-made" and "human-powered" touches as possible, from the hero video that shows hands at work, to the little "hand-scrawled" section separators on the site.
The more you focus, the clearer you become.
Three: It’s the little things, so long as they point to the big thing
Brands are patterns. The more clear and more consistent the pattern, the stronger the brand.
If your brand is all about taking care of your people, you can't just say that on the career site or the job posting, you need to be clear and concrete about your benefits. You need to share stories about how your people feel taken care of on social media. You need to make sure you aren't being called out on review sites for not taking care of people.
Sometimes, patterns are visual. In Generate:Biomedicies' case, they take the colon in the name/logo and replicate it in interesting and curious ways. Why the colon? because it is a means of connecting two different ideas together into a single sentence, something the company is doing within the biotech space.
Four: Even when companies aren’t doing it intentionally, they are building an employer brand
I remain surprised by how many companies have pared their career site down to the fewest possible number of words. Exscientia is a good example of this, in that it's career site is effective 31 words, three videos and a listing of benefits and jobs.
Meanwhile, their corporate home page is littered with interesting messages that could have been copied and pasted directly into the career site to provide more "reasons why" to engage.
Rather than see this as a "failure," it's really an indication that companies know to talk about their point of view, their culture, and process in a corporate setting, but need to see the connection between corporate messaging and what employer branding is doing.
Five: Standing out remains the hardest thing to do
Employer branding remains boxed in: we're rarely allowed to say anything specific or differentiating, let alone controversial. HR and Legal seem hellbent on making sure your career site sounds like every other career site.
But an employer brand that doesn't define its differentiated value is an employer bland, destroying any value employer branding might deliver before it's had a chance to prove itself.
Six: It doesn’t take much to make your employer brand stronger
Plenty of companies list their functional areas. But employer brand thinking says, "Don't waste a single opportunity to imbue what you're building with brand meaning."
For example, Sprout Social doesn't just list "Engineering," they frame the function as a place where "Code as craft." And rather than treating their Operations/G&A folks like anonymous functionaries, they list them as the "Make-it-happen captains." In this deeply functional section, you now have a deeper understanding of what it's like to work there. And it only took a few well-thought-out words in the right spot.
It doesn't take much to make an impact.
If you'd like to watch these breakdowns, I subscribe to my YouTube channel, but I'm excited to keep this series going. If you've got a company you'd like me to review, let me know.
If you thinking about employer branding support, don’t assume you have an $80,000 problem. Let’s talk and get you prepped for 2024. You might be surprised how affordable a strong brand can be.
105 free (or almost free) ways to activate your brand »
Employer Brand Breakdown series »
Biotech Recruiting limited run email course »
Proof employer brand works »
Biotech Recruiting Chat series »
Employer Brand minute series »
The Brand Plan podcast »
The Talent Cast podcast »
On-demand video courses »
***This Newsletter Contains No ChatGPT***
-James Ellis [LinkedIn] [Website]
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