Employer Brand Creating Trust. (EBH#159, "Young Turks") 🧪
Are you creating trust between your recruiters and hiring managers?
The mission: Create a million employer brand thinkers (like you!)
Employer Brand Headlines is written by James Ellis. »» Yes, you should say hello! ««
First…
Reminder: I am offering a huge deal (44% off) on my class teaching recruiters how to actually use their employer brand. Just use code EBHSPECIAL at checkout. Ends Aug 31.
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Also, a few people pinged me about this shirt I made for some friends to celebrate the launch Employer Brand Labs, asking for one. If you’d buy one (at zero profit to me), replay and let me know if it’s worth it to make a little store. Thanks!
The Big Idea
The connection between employer brand and recruiting is quite clear. Regardless of where EB lives in your organization, recruiting is its first client.
The connection between EB and marketing is becoming more established. It isn’t universal, but more and more marketing teams understand EB’s value to them, as a support system around the human side of the brand.
Internal comms is still coming to grips with employer brand. There’s some overlap, but the goals and audiences often don’t align well, so work will need to be done to connect those dots.
But one audience that is often overlooked is hiring managers.
The average recruiter/HM relationship is… fraught. (Yes, I’m going to paint with a broad brush here, but there’s enough truth that even if this isn’t exactly your world, you’ll see lots of resemblances.) There is a clear financial burden on the HM to get a given role filled NOW. They are generally not in the business of actively building pipelines and networks to tap. They look to the recruiter to be the expert not only in the talent market, but how to approach and engage prospects.
Recruiters, meanwhile, have a bazillion requisitions on their plate. This one req isn’t particularly special, so the recruiter will simply apply “the process” to the open role. The “process” has worked adequately in the past, and with so many roles to fill, taking a systemic approach makes sense. And (let’s be honest with each other), the recruiter very rarely shoulders the same fiscal burden as the HM. If it takes another week or month to fill a given role, the HM will feel the pinch (and see it in their P&L) while the recruiter will only see a minor fluctuation in TTF rates. It’s not that the recruiter doesn’t care, it’s that being overworked means they can’t give any one requisition a different approach. It would be like taking a shoe out of the assembly line and building it by hand: the process would fall apart.
The process is simple: build a job posting that looks an awful lot like every other job posting, post it on the exact same job boards as every other job, post “We’re hiring” on LinkedIn once or twice, maybe do a little outreach with a generic message or remember to ask people to send referrals and then wait for people to show up. At issue is that the process becomes less efficient every time it is used. Prospects become blind to your job postings that say nothing, your social posts that mean nothing, and your outreach that sounds like everyone else. Like an engine without clean oil, it will run incrementally rougher and slower, but since it still “runs,” we all still use it.
And this is where EB can be a huge asset, to the recruiter, to the business and to you.
HMs never want to feel like their req isn’t special. They don’t want to be put into “the process.” They don’t want to feel forgotten, and have to pester the recruiter for updates (Survey your HMs and you’ll hear that “lack of communication by recruiters” is almost certainly their #1 complaint).
You are the one a recruiter should call in order to make the HM feel like this requisition is in fact special.
You don’t have a process. You get to listen to the HM and ask questions (the recruiter asks good questions, but they are the same questions every time, so over time they stop feel like good questions). You get to ask things like, “would you be open to making a quick video?” or “can you tell me one thing the candidate did in their past that would make them great for this role?” or “what makes this role different from every other XYZ role on Indeed?”
Your questions should find unexplored areas of opportunity, like a speaking gig the HM has in two weeks, or an alumni connection you can use, or someone on the team who talks about the subject a lot on Tik Tok.
In my experience, being the person who deviates from “the process” creates a kind of bond with the HM. Suddenly, you’re co-conspirators, trying to tell a story or leverage a channel to solve a problem, not just waiting for a process to work itself through. Its an act of rebellion, something creative and interesting, and the HM will give you more attention, time, and leeway to do your job.
Even if these tactics don’t attract the perfect candidate this time, you have created an ally in the HM. Having allies in the business is a huge advantage when you want to make some content or need a quick quote, not to mention that they will tell other HMs about your work, creating some buzz around what you do.
The trick, however, is to not build your relationship with the HM at the cost of your relationship with the recruiter. The recruiter brought you in, the specialist who can do cool things the recruiter can’t.
This work creates trust (a word we don’t use enough of). It creates trust between you and the HM as your willingness to be creative shows how much you value the HM. It creates trust between the HM and the recruiter, because the HM knows there are more resources and strategy that can be deployed when needed.
So if you want to create more allies around the org, the place to do it is through your recruiter.
Headlines
Lots of great links this week, but I wanted to highlight this… whitepaper(?) from Paradox on ten big ideas in talent strategy. First, in 99% of all cases where the term is used, “talent strategy” is a misnomer. Strategy is a means of creating focus, of seeing the difference between opportunity and distraction, but for some reason when you add the word “talent,” it turns into a plan at best, and a laundry list of semi-related tasks at worst). It’s rare to see a talent strategy that says “no” to anything.
So I was heartened to see this document going pretty deep. Not everything is a strategy, per se, but these are not the same warmed-over ideas I see re-hashed over and over again. DEI beyond standard metrics, seeing our people as our best source of new talent and skills, and (my personal favorite for a while now) seeing beyond “the job.” It’s a good read, even though I think anything written about the metaverse and recruiting is like talking about how one might buy shoes on Mars.
One more
In this tweet thread, a female CEO talks about how hard it is to hire women in leadership positions, even as a woman. What I love about this is that 1: She gives her reasons why women don’t engage (because “there are no women for this role is a total cop-out), 2: She gives her first-hand account of how she recruits without turning it into “this is how you should do it,” and 3: it works effectively by breaking every rule in a typical recruiting process. It ignores the ATS and focuses on building a relationship. It doesn’t try to “get small” and ask little from the candidate, but instead asks the prospect for 5 hours of time to get to know the leader and the company (this is a huge investment by both sides, which is kinda the point, I suspect). Ultimately, it is rooted in “two peers finding common ground” rather than a spin-driven or adversarial interview process.
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"A good photograph is knowing where to stand." — Ansel Adams
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Where the subject line came from:
Rod Stewart - Young Turks
To me, this is the last of the rock star Rod Stewart before he took his turn as a crooner. Interestingly, it coincided with MTV, which would have been a marriage made in heaven for Stewart. It’s all in the timing, I guess. I’m also amused by this take on “what the kids are up to,” like an early-80’s synth-driven “In The Ghetto.” Is it strange? Yes. Is it slightly problematic? Oh yeah, but appropriate for its day and age, I guess. But is it a great little song? Most definitely.
FYI, this cover by Nico Vega is pretty good, turning the bombast up to 11.
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:
