Dear TA Leader... 🔬 (EBH#173: Stop Making Sense)
If only your talent acquisition knew what you did, they'd be investing in you a whole lot more.
Mission: Create a million employer brand thinkers (like you!)
Employer Brand Headlines is written by James Ellis, Employer Brand Nerd.
#Sponsored
First…
I’m starting to get a lot of interest in my next project: a mastermind group for brand activation. You, me and four other employer brand pros would get together every other week and talk about our challenges, brainstorm solutions, and watch each others’ backs as we put plans in motion.
A mastermind like this is a four-month commitment, because this kind of change, this kind of work doesn’t get flipped on like a light switch. But this is a situation where more perspectives and more voices can move (your) mountains. Read more and ping me if you’d like details. The first one may start as early as January.
The Big Idea
Ten things TA leaders need to know about employer branding (that it seems like they don’t know already).
One. Employer branding is a force multiplier.
In general, so much friction between employer branding and talent acquisition would just evaporate once TA sees that EB isn’t abstract and conceptual. Yes, that part is there, but an employer brand’s value is measured on how it changes prospect and candidate behavior.
To make that happen, the brand needs to be woven into every single touchpoint at every single stage of the candidate journey. It needs to be in the outreach email, the job posting, the career site content, the videos, the descriptions of the benefits and culture, the interview questions, the Glassdoor responses, the event messaging, and even the offer letter (not kidding).
Now, if you have a strong brand, it will increase response rate of the outreach by 10% (making the math easy for political science majors like myself). It will increase interest in the job posting by 10%. It will engage 10% more of the right candidates on the career site. It will be shared 10% more in good fit candidates. It will increase your offer acceptance rate 10% (by itself, the easiest way to measure ROI).
Individually, it will make each touchpoint and tactic better. In the aggregate, you’re looking at a 200% increase in recruiting value (measured however you measure it). That’s multiplying the value of everything you’re already doing.
Two. Your employer brand is the core of your strategy.
I have a long track record of shouting into the void that most of what passes for “talent strategy” is really just a reiteration of the company’s TA stack in “to-do” format. A strategy can be defined as “the means by which you leverage your company’s strength and applying it against a competitor/situation/talent market’s weakness to achieve an out-sized impact. Once TA embraces the idea that strategy isn’t a plan or a set of tactics, but something different, it has the chance to achieve that outsized outcome.
Michael Porter (Harvard prof who teaches business strategy and wrote seminal books on same) says that strategy is as much what you choose not to do as it is what you do. A strategy separates opportunity from a sea of distractions. And brand is a filter that focuses thinking, messaging, and doing. So it stands to reason that a strong brand is the core of your talent strategy. It helps to focus your thinking so you aren’t chasing tactics (and candidates who aren’t ever going to be a fit).
Recruiting thinking is sales thinking. Employer brand thinking is strategic thinking. Embrace it and your own talent acquisition thinking will get sharper in a hurry (Value: make a bigger impact with less resources).
Three. Employer brand is a flywheel.
It is easy to get an employer brand and think, “okay, got it. Let’s post this places and be done with it.” This is especially true if you’ve never gotten branding support before.
But branding (and it’s older sibling strategy) can’t be considered in a single moment. It creates a flywheel.
Example: You decide that the thing your company rewards is a “get it done at any cost” mindset, so you want to attract primarily people with that mindset. So you start building content (social media, videos, job postings, blog posts on the career site, etc) about the people who work there and how they sometimes have to make herculean efforts to get something done. You talk about how they are rewarded (both in terms of monetary compensation, but also, these are the people who get rounds of applause at the all hands meetings) for that kind of thing. People who like to be rewarded for that apply and are hired, reinforcing a culture of “win at all costs,” making those values more tangible because everyone is living them every single day. So you build more content about it (because you have more people with those stories) and you start getting really granular: he’s the story of a female data scientists who gives 110%, the story of a black engineer who worked 18-hour shifts for a week to ship something, the story of a mid-level LQBTQ+ Latina manager who made the call to keep her team after hours to build something amazing. That granularity makes these claims ever more credible, attracting more and more of these people. Eventually, you’re famous for this approach, getting press from impressive sources about your amazing work culture, which in turn, attracts more of the same people…
Good employer branding begets more of the stories that attract the right people, making it easier for your recruiters and hiring managers to hire great fits. And it only gets better over time.
Four. Employer branding better bonds TA to HR.
While TA often lives under the HR umbrella, they aren’t natural fits. Recruiting is about sales: finding, engaging and closing talent. HR is about the creation and application of rules. These things do not go together like chocolate and peanut butter.
In many companies, recruiting and TA is expected to stop the moment a new hire shows up. Sure, maybe the recruiter does a quick check in on day one to make sure things are going smoothly, but recruiters are (VERY) rarely measured on how long their hires stick around. Sure, we might pay lip service to wanting to hire people who will build some tenure to avoid the costs associated with empty seats and a new hiring process, but its not like “average tenure of hire” is a standard metric in a recruiter’s dashboard.
The work of retention (generally expressed as company culture and employee experience) falls on some other wing of HR. Whether its an employee experience team, a culture committee, or just a ragtag band of HRBPs and HR Generalists who know these things lead to longer retention numbers, these things are effectively 100% disconnected from TA.
Employer brand connects the dots. People who stay are people who have great employee stories to tell (this is referred to as “EB catnip”). Great stories are a kind of recognition program to those employees (who then stay longer: see “flywheel” above). EB distills and packages culture into something external people can see as attractive (which makes it more attractive to people internally as well).
Five. Employer branding is cheap
What did you pay in RPO and agency fees this year? I’m gonna say that a strong, articulated employer brand that made specific, attractive, different and real claims (and used storytelling to “prove” those claims), could have cut that number (conservatively) by half.
Half.
Imagine if your ads were 50% more effective? Or your job posts were 50% more effective at attracting great talent (hello, lower Indeed spend!)? Or you increased your offer acceptance rate by 20% (I’ve seen and made bigger increases happen) so you didn’t have to burn recruiter time on “try again” candidate searches? Or if you had warm candidates sold on the company and ready to talk to you the moment 10% of new requisitions were approved?
Think of how much money all those changes would save you.
Compared to all that, employer brand is a bargain. Not, “I got a coupon” bargain, but a “I bought an undiscovered Monet at a garage sale!” bargain.
The second half of this list comes out next week. Make sure you’re subscribed to the newsletter to get your copy Monday morning!
Strategy Idea
Is it really a strategy? One of the big issues when talking about strategy is that there’s no shared definition of whether something is a strategy or something else (a plan, a set of tactics, a to-do list, etc). My favorite litmus test for strategy is something I stole from Jasmine Bina: If you reverse it, is it still a strategy? For example, someone (in leadership, I’d wager) says your TA strategy is to be the most attractive employer, would it be possible to win of you were the least attractive employer? No. So it’s not a strategy. If you think, “our strategy is to tap our consumer brand to bring our employer brand message to a wider audience” the reverse would be to ignore your consumer audience and focus on people who have never heard of you. That’s a strategy!
The Employer Brand Minute
If you’re enjoying these, what’s a good topic you think I should cover (besides the value of employer branding, using visuals and headlines in job postings, brand activation and this one (below) on the danger of playing games you can’t win)?
Headlines
It’s Thanksgiving week, so I’m keeping this section simple this edition…
It’s the process of working that helps you understand where you’re going.
- Brian Eno
Whenever you’re ready, I have a few ways 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:
Search all 1,700+ links historically referenced in the article archive.
Download 105 free (or almost free) ways to activate your employer brand.
Read Talent Chooses You for free from this open source Google Doc.
Here’s the 2022 version of The Employer Brand Manifesto.
220+ episodes of The Talent Cast podcast.
Where the subject line came from:
Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense
Look. This thing is amazing. I’ve seen the whole thing through… dozens of time. I darn-near wore out the cassette soundtrack in the late 80’s. To me, there are bands who are better, albums that are better. But this thing is per-fec-tion. There is so much thought put behind it, it asks questions and leads you to ask your own questions (sometimes quite literally). It is paranoia, revolution, and hope all rolled up into a bouncing, joyous ball. There’s an amazing breakdown of the soundtrack on the Strong Songs podcast (which really underlines how MUCH thinking is behind it all), but ultimately, this is a true work of art. 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:
