Dear TA Leader, part 2... 🔬 (EBH#174: Jack of All Parades)
Five more ways that employer branding supports, elevates and enhances your talent acquisition efforts.
Mission: Create a million employer brand thinkers (like you!)
First…
I had an idea a few weeks ago: a way to spot-check the health of your employer brand. It’s a model that shows how focused and impactful your brand is right now. It’s not designed for annual rankings or awards, but a measurement of how well you are sailing towards your own north star (and how much you might have deviated lately). I’ve already run more than a dozen companies through the model with some really interesting results.
If you’d like me to put your brand through the model (and compare it to a bunch of other companies), just reply to this email. Depending on demand, it might take me a day or two, but I’ll send you a useful snapshot report of what you could adjust immediately to make a difference.
The Big Idea
Ten things TA leaders need to know about employer branding (that it seems like they don’t know already). Last week I shared 1-5, so here is 6-10.
Six. Employer branding opens up new resources for Talent Acquisition
I have yet to meet the recruiter or talent acquisition leader who had enough resources to do the job. Sometimes its an old ATS that won’t allow for new scheduling functionality or just moves slowly. Sometimes its not enough headcount. Sometimes it’s not enough content to attract talent. To leadership, TA can feel like a bit of a money pit, demanding more and more resources without getting better in any obvious way. And so, TA is the first team to get their budgets and headcount trimmed in a downturn and the last to get budgets and headcount increased when things get better.
Employer brand can change the equation. Employer branding has natural connections to marketing, comms and HR, giving you a chance to tap into their resources. It is nearly impossible for a recruiter to request a branded graphic in most companies, so they either stitch something together in Canva that’s kinda-sorta appropriately branded (and looks like a recruiter designed it, negating most of the impact a nice graphic can bring), or they just stop asking. Employer branding should have connections to make that stuff happen. They should be able to engage creative and legal about the rules around video creation (and maybe someone to knock out a slick title clip). They should be the voice at HR meetings about advocacy that creates more powerful reviews and social user-generated content.
Seven. Employer branding elevates recruiters
Where did this idea that recruiters are like old-timey gold rush miners: All they need is their trusty LI recruiter seat and a requisition or 40, so get out of their way.
This model of recruiters as anti-team players, individuals who play by their own rules, accountable to their hiring manager and boss (and only sometimes) means that recruiters are plumbers: you call them when you need them, you don’t bother them while they work, and you pay the bill when it shows up. No one calls the plumber to engage in strategy sessions. You call the plumber when your basement is flooded.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Managed properly, recruiters can and should be team players, supporting one another and achieving more because of it.
With the addition of employer branding, recruiters can quickly position themselves as talent consultants rather than order takers. They can build meaningful content that keeps recruiters from feeling like their only hope is to span everyone on LinkedIn (again), and instead focus on finding a handful of perfects because they know that the employer brand function to build an ecosystem of information that makes recruiter claims credible.
Employer brand allows the recruiters to see themselves as general contractors who understand and serve the bigger picture than the plumber there to fix a leaky pipe.
Eight. Employer brand generates trust between Talent Acquisition and hiring managers
You know that hiring manager… you know, I don’t even need to finish the sentence. You know who i’m about to talk about. The pain in the ass. The one who makes demands of your team and is the first to threaten to start calling agencies (if they haven’t taken a few lunch meetings already). Yeah. That one.
Employer branding is the way any recruiter can tame that particular tiger. In some cases, it is the SWAT team that can be called in to solve problems (no one sees the job. No one applies. No qualified talent. Etc). In some cases, it is the specialist who can bring new thinking to the problem.
Without employer branding, when a role is getting stale, the only recourse is to bring in the agencies. This puts hiring managers and recruiters in a tough spot, where perceived failure of the recruiter leads to the business incurring tens of thousands of dollars in agency costs. With employer branding, they have a resource to develop content, marketing strategies, outreach plans, and a playbook that to ensure your open role will be seen by the right talent. There is a way to escalate the issue without resorting to outside agencies (and solutions designed can be reused and reapplied to the next problematic hire, leading to its own flywheel effect).
Because of that, the hiring manager can let down their guard a little, knowing that the recruiter has further options if the “standard process” doesn’t work.
Nine. Employer brand transitions you from transactional to relationship-driven recruiting
Imagine a world in which a hiring manager swings by your desk and says, “the requisition for my new XYZ manager finally got approved. You should see the official approval in a few hours. When should we meet to talk about the job posting and how to properly promote the role?” and you get to respond, “That’s great news! But I have five people in the system who have been getting regular emails and content from us who have all the prerequisites for the role and are likely existed to talk to you about it. Maybe we skip the posting and just start talking to great candidates?”
It isn’t science fiction. The advent of the ATS has forced recruiters to work within a transactional model of recruiting: staring from a blank sheet of paper to find people who will accept this role, flush the rest and start again. This model is not optimal for… well, anyone, I suppose. Employer branding supports a shift to relationship-driven recruiting, where you can attract great people and keep them engaged and interested over the long haul until the perfect role is ready for them. Employer branding can build the content that speaks to those individual’s interests and motivations, and can manage the CRM to ensure candidates stay warm.
Not only does this model lower TTF dramatically, it means candidates walk into the interview better prepared for the interview because they’ve had 6-12 months to learn about the company, the team (maybe even the manager herself) and thus have better questions and a more clear sense of what the job really is.
Ten. Employer branding connects Talent Acquisition more closely to the business
Employer branding tells the rest of the business that you aren’t thinking about recruiting the same old way. It shows that (much like the rest of the business) you are outcome-focused, willing to engage new ideas and think about hiring as a system to be developed rather than as someone who does it the same old way. (Honestly, if you looked at everything that’s changed about business in the last 40 years, the two functions that have seen the least change are TA and Accounts Payable.)
Employer branding is your statement of intent, how you tell the company that you come to play, and that your wins are their wins (and vice versa).
At the same time, employer branding should be making connections and creating allies within every part of the business (unlike recruiters who are often focused on a very narrow silo), being your own advocate and shaping expectations of the power of talent acquisition (and how to better use them).
This doesn’t mean that EB has to live in TA. But regardless of who owns EB, talent acquisition is employer brand’s first customer. And with these ten reasons, I hope you can see the kind of value it brings to that customer’s table.
This is the second half of a larger article. You can read part one by going to the EBH home and look for edition #173.
Strategy Idea
Learn a lesson from Steve Jobs circa 1997. When Steve came back to Apple, one of the first things he did was look at all the partnerships and product variations and asked, “why on earth do we have so many SKUs?” (SKU stands for Stock Keeping Unit.) So he killed partnerships, stopped selling products in other people’s store (which made Apple seem like “yet another computer” instead of “a completely different thing”), and trimmed SKUs until there were only a handful left. At the end, everyone knew Apple sold Colorful iMacs, PowerBooks and desktop computers. That’s it. That kind of focus means that it didn’t require pages of descriptions and catalogs, it meant people walking in to buy only had a few choices and couldn’t get stuck which of the hundred variations they wanted. Jump forward to today. Look at their site. At first glance, it always looks like Apple sells one thing: iPhones in the fall, MacBooks in the winter, iPads in the summer as new product launches get announced. They build the entire home around one product family. They make it look cool/sexy as hell. They make it look like the most important thing ever.
What if you did the same to your jobs? What if January was Customer Service Jobs month, where the career site home looked like the coolest splash page for customer service roles at your company. This would break you out of a LOT of legacy thinking to publishing jobs, and give you a wider canvas on which to tell your story. Focus is almost always good.
The Employer Brand Minute
This week on the Employer Brand Minute: getting employer branding jobs and how to stop thinking like a marketer. Watch them all here.
Headlines
How tight are you with your ESG (Environmental, Societal, Governance) team (person?)?
In the last few years, pretty much every company of a given size has put together and delivered an annual ESG report. Funded out of IR team’s budget, it’s target audience might be thought of as activist investors, media and a certain subset of potential customers who REALLY care about these sorts of things.
These things matter because they highlight how the business impacts people. And here you are “owning” the human face of the brand. I think you should should make friends.
Also
Finding Your Voice And Using It To Make Ridiculously Good Content
Asking “How” Not “What” Is the Driving Force Behind Today’s Most Successful Businesses
The trouble with market research is that
people don’t think how they feel,
they don’t say what they think,
and they don’t do what they say.
- David Ogilvy
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:
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:
Elvis Costello - Jack of All Parades
Elvis gained his name as the angry young man, a particular (and knowing) flavor of new wave rock to come from England. Along with The Jam, Joe Jackson, Squeeze, and (my fave) XTC, Elvis was the kind of smart that make him bitter.
But what I love most Elvis is when he pulls back and sings something softer. Don’t get me wrong, King Horse, This Year’s Girl, (Angels Want To Wear My) Red Shoes, and Lipstick Vogue are bangers, to be certain. But the sad, mournful and forlorn Elvis is magical. Somehow, his precisely crafted words feel less like punches and more like stiletto jabs. In this this song, he’s singing about ‘one true heart,’ but then he drops “And you can't keep your peace / Try to forget it / And I can't forgive you / For things you haven't done yet.”
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:
