Clients. 🔬 (EBH#169: Crash)

Those teams that frustrate you? What if they were your clients? (Spoiler: they actually are.)

Oct 31, 2022

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

Employer Brand Headlines is written by James Ellis. »» Yes, you should say hello! ««

First…

Well, my very first round of EVP Mastermind classes finished up last week. 18 amazing recruiters, consultants, employer branders, comms professionals and TA leaders went through a 6-week program to develop their own employer brand.

The results? Well, I’m still waiting for final feedback to come in, but some far, they’ve built seen some pretty cool EVPs and brands.

If you’re interested in joining the next cohort (starting in January) to build your own brand with confidence, get on the waiting list now!

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

The Big Idea

In one of my calls this week for the EVP Mastermind cohort, I dropped a term that wasn’t as widely known as I assumed.

“Eating one’s own dog food” (or, classed up as ‘drinking one’s own champagne’) is the idea that coders who have to “live” in their application to do their job are more likely to fix bugs and identify better new features than those who don’t live and work in it. That is, if you have to eat your own dog food, you’re motivated to make it taste better in a hurry.

There is a flip side to this idea you should consider taking advantage of at work. Imagine the fight (some of) you are having with your marketing team. You’ve in a deadlock because you want to build a strong brand the right way and they don’t see how this sort of thing is a value to their consumer/corporate brand. It’s a tale as old as timecards, right?

Let’s a take a step back and ask, what do marketing leaders care about? Well, according to this survey, marketing leaders are worried about competition, maximizing their CRM, pivoting because of external events, and there it is… attracting and hiring talent.

Huh! It turns out that your marketing team is actually not your obstacle, but your client.

Aside from the fact that your position as the de facto owner of the human side of the brand is a means of helping your marketing leader develop a strong public-facing people strategy to differentiate your brand from the competition. Aside from the recent trends of using employer branding as one of the few “unchanging truths” about your company when faced with a crisis. Aside from the fact that you can supply human facing content for the CRM, you are there to help them attract and hire great people.

So show them what you can do. Show them how your approach will make things happen (and how their approach will yield more of the same). Show them how you think. Show them how you work.

What do I mean? 1️⃣ Write a custom job posting that uses quotes from marketing leadership you cribbed from their last announcement at all-hands. 2️⃣ Build a quick graphic with a powerful attention-grabbing line that’s formatted for LinkedIn. 3️⃣ While you’re at it, write your best LI post about working in your company’s marketing department. 4️⃣ Identify better hashtags than. just #Marketing and #MarketingJobs. 5️⃣ Email the leader with all this stuff and ask that when they post it to their LI channel, they immediately ping their entire team to like and share the post. Let them know you’ll ask all of TA to do the same to maximize organic reach. 6️⃣ Offer to record someone from Marketing talking about what they’ve learned in this job (assuming your brand features development), then turn it into a 30-60 second branded video that you suggest be uploaded to the company’s LinkedIn and Twitter feeds (extra points when marketing owns those feeds). 7️⃣ Do it right, with an SRT file for captions and a great title card to maximize reach and engagement. 8️⃣Write a compelling post for it. 9️⃣ Then make sure plenty of people are liking it those first two hours. 🔟 Embed the graphic and video into the job posting itself.

HOLD NOTHING BACK. Hell, if ye olde Muskrat can post a video carrying in a sink to his first day at Twitter, what’s stopping you from pushing some boundaries??? This is your audition, not that you can make things happen, but to show this team that employer branding is different by design.

The fastest and most efficient way to get marketing (and comms and HR and TA) to work with you is for them to WANT to work for you. They will want to work with you when they see how you can help them. From better job postings, custom talent attraction strategies, custom content, whatever you can build to show that your intervention and effort drives value for them.

Show them that your dog food is better. Let them see with their own eyes how your way is useful to them. The second they see how you bring value to their world is the second your world gets a whole lot easier.

Strategy Idea

The “Best Friend” strategy. It’s probably safe to say that we all have best friends at work. Maybe even a bestie for life (work-related category). So when you hire someone, do you ask if they think their best friend at their last job would be interested in joining? The power here is that you can “attack the candidate” from both fronts: recruiter with the “official” stuff, and then the best friend spilling the tea. Even if only one in ten situations make this possible, you’ve got a slam dunk hire and one heck of a story to tell on social media, “Hi, I’m Jane, and I love this company so much, I ask my best friend to join, too!”

The Employer Brand Minute

Perfectly sharable (with your team, your recruiters, your boss) employer brand thinking in short video form. This week, I covered topics like taking advantage of your negatives, building advocates one person at a time, subjective and objective values, and this one about how holding open office hours will create goodwill, credibility and allies. (Remember to subscribe on YouTube!)

Create more employer brand thinkers by sharing this newsletter!

Headlines

If I had a dollar for every time I said or wrote “quality, not quantity,” I could write this newsletter from a beach. On an island. That I owned. Anyway, here’s further evidence that we live in a different kind of marketing world: Scarcity. Plenty of brands use scarcity to drive interest and action. But their idea of scarcity is pretty funny. Sure, that McRib is only available for a month or two, but it is available to anyone 12 hours a day, seven days a week who walks into one of 13,400 in the US. Us? We have ONE JOB that can only go to One Person. Oh well.

Unrelated, I see this as employer brand’s last frontier: making the rejection work for the brand instead of against it. The current model of getting 100 applications for a job creates one fan and 99 haters, math that leads to doom. This isn’t an easy fix. But it starts by collecting fewer resumes. Then you bake in more clear (non-b.s.) criteria for who gets hired. Add in actual legit (read: actionable) feedback from the hiring manager and a means of connecting the way you reveal the news to your values. There are many (many) more steps, but this is the big one.

Also:

“We have no money. We shall have to think.” - Winston Churchill

Whenever you’re ready, I have a few ways I can help you:

EVP Mastermind: 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 consulting: 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 1,600+ 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.

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

The Primitives - Crash

Three guys rocking power chords and a four-on-the-floor back beat fronted by woman is a flat-out archetype for rock and roll (see: Blondie, No Doubt, Janis Joplin, Letters To Cleo, 10,000 Maniacs, Dance Hall Crashers, Echobelly, etc etc).

There’s not a lot to say here. It’s just a catchy-as-hell one-hit-wonder from 1988 that you just might dig. Enjoy!

If you are enjoying the music, congratulations, 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: