Employer Brand Headlines: The "C'est la Vie" Edition (#97)
My mission: Help you understand your employer brand better and make it work for you.
In this issue
Best practices
Playing the long game
CX+EX=Profit
Overly “legible”
The big idea
Everyone knows that social media videos should be short.
Everyone knows you should post LinkedIn posts between 8-10am.
Everyone knows that you should make the application process shorter and simpler.
Everyone knows that your job postings should have lots of information.
Everyone knows that “thank you for applying” messages should be professional sounding.
Everyone knows, everyone knows, everyone knows…*
These things that “everyone knows” are called “best practices.” They are the things that are “generally true” for the maximum number of people.
They aren’t specific to recruiting. There are best practices around how long a movie should be and how to optimize around a keyword for SEO. There are best practices like “the customer service rep should say your name at least five times on a call” and “salespeople should spend at least three minutes talking about the big name brands who already bought from them.”
But there are major issues following “best practices.”
These things are “best” in the aggregate. That is, they might be best on average. Your mileage WILL vary.
Everyone knows all about these “best” practices, which means everyone is using them. The practice that was meant to set you apart is now the default.
Most people using best practices don’t know why they are best practices. They are followed blindly, even when they are actually counterproductive.
Following best practices says, “I don’t know what I want, so I’ll just do what other companies do.” It is a game of Follow the Leader, which is a game you “win” by losing. All they are doing is giving themselves cover as they abdicate responsibility for choosing.
No one ever got fired for following best practices, but no one ever succeeded that way, either.
Best practices are what you do when you don’t have a plan or a strategy. Best practices are what you choose when you want others to think for you.
Every best practice has plenty of examples where rejecting it was the far better play. In 1998, when every computer had a floppy drive, Apple unveiled the iMac without one. It deviated from computing best practices, but it was in service of a much larger strategy: people were going to move files around on the internet, so embrace that new model. They did it again a few years ago when they got rid of the headphone jack. Apple follows its own strategy, not what best practices dictate.
If you have a really good reason for a long video, do it. Some of my most viral social posts were posted Sunday afternoon, which everyone knows is a “dead zone” on LinkedIn. I can think of plenty of reasons why you’d purposefully complicate and slow down the application process, or write a short job posting.
So stop blindly following best practices. Design a strategy that suits your needs and follow it, not the crowd.
*In my mind, you can sing this part like Tom Waits of Leonard Cohen.
Headlines!
Why Following “Best Practices” Could Be the Worst Thing You Could Do Today
Huh. Interesting.
www.brandingbusiness.com • Share
Playing the Long Game in Talent Acquisition!
Tim nails: you can’t win the talent game by playing the short game.
Zoom or Gloom – What Will the Future of Brand Workshops Look Like?
It’s true. If you aren’t willing to re-think what a brand workshop is trying to do and how you can’t just post them to a Zoom room. And a car can’t go nearly as far as a horse can on a bag of oats. But maybe, just maybe, we can do better than 3-hours in a conference room saying the same things over and over again to each other.
The 'double helix' of Customer eXp and Employee eXp
Your employees determine the fate of your business on so many levels. If only you knew how to attract talent that levels up your business…
Shifting Sands: Turn Uncertainty Into Action or Lose Relevance
Any article that starts, “Are you leading in a perpetual state of beta?” is a must-read. You can’t always create uncertainty in your org (or candidate’s) mind. So how do you surf on it?
A Big Little Idea Called Legibility
Do you struggle to put creative messages out into the world or adding a little poetry into your job posting? Are you pulled back to the world of boring literalism? Then this article is for YOU.
26 marketing principles I rely on
Read it. Bookmark it. Reread it. Print it. Underline parts. Quote it on your whiteboard.
Conscious Consumerism (and the lies we tell ourselves to sleep better)
Jasmine Bina once said that successful brands remove cognitive dissonance. This deck (which is gorgeously done, and should be stolen from recklessly) brought that idea back.
Repairing fractured retail brands
This is especially true in EB, where no one brand really “owns” a given space.
The empty office: what we lose when we work from home
Having survived many many listserv arguments marked by 17-response-deep bullet-by-bullet arguments, I can see a case for coming to a “rough consensus” through humming. (read the article)
It’s fascinating how “meritocracy” went from a revolutionary idea (supplanting bloodlines as the reason people are chosen or heard) to its own kind of bloated reason why things don’t change.
www.strategy-business.com • Share
Quick hits
Tip of the week
Seth Godin talks about how innovation comes not from a completely wild idea out of left field (that rarely works), but by understanding the “genre” we are working in enough to know how to push one idea within the form forward. Example: why are job postings “like that?” The better you understand the form, the better you can find one thing to change that creates innovation. You don’t have to re-invent all the parts, just focus on one and do it well.
Inside the fortune cookie
“You have to be willing to look like an idiot in the short term to look like a genius in the long term.” - Shane Parrish
Thanks, everyone!
Reminder: My books are free and open-source over at employerbrandbook.com
There are now more than 850 links in the link archive. And as always, when you reply to this email I will read your questions and comments. Is there any article I should be commenting on? A book? A podcast? Is there something you what to know? How can I help? Just reply to this email and it comes directly to me.
Cheers and thanks!
-James Ellis (LinkedIn | Twitter | Podcast | Articles)
Where the subject line came from:
Robbie Nevil - C'est La Vie
By James Ellis, Employer Brand Nerd
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