Employer Brand Headlines: The "Finest Worksong" Edition (#90)
My mission: Help you understand your employer brand better and make it work for you.
In this issue
Creating change
What if we re-opened offices and no one showed up?
Measuring and changing the employee experience
Rebranding?
The big idea
Today, I went from being a Russell’s Reserve bourbon drinker to a Jameson’s drinker.
Today, I went from being someone who watches Top Chef and instead watches Gordon Ramsey.
Today, I went from being a Mac user to a Microsoft user (do we still call them PCs?).*
Why? Because that’s what marketing does.
Marketing is a lever called “change” that gets applied as a way to turn non-customers into customers. That’s the only reason marketing exists.
Ad creative, ad placement, brand strategy, box design, retail strategy, name selection, price strategy, all of it is marketing: a means to turn someone who doesn’t want to buy a thing into someone who does.
The gap between the two states might be logical: they don’t know enough about why they should buy a Mini Cooper. The gap might be emotional: they don’t feel like they are the kind of person who would drive a Mini Cooper. The gap might be fear: they worry that if they drove a Mini Cooper they might not have enough space for something. The gap might be about the future: they don’t think buying a Mini Cooper will make them happy.
Marketing closes the gap to create the change.
But creating that change has a foundation: who is changing? Getting a posh Brit to consider buying a Mini cooper is a VERY different gap and journey than getting a Wyoming business owner to buy one. Their gaps are very different. The tools you’d use to close those gaps are different. A campaign that just said, “It’s a great car!” doesn’t address those audiences’ gaps, and thus, by trying to change everyone, you are cursed to change no one.
So until you know who you are trying to change, you can’t create change.
But none of us are selling cars. We’re trying to convince people to apply for (and accept) a new job at our company. But the rules still apply. Our job is to create change. Change what people think of the company. Change how someone values the opportunity. Change how people consider a future with or without us. Change their fear of what people will think and say when they choose to work here.
If you aren’t creating change, you aren’t doing your job. And you can’t create change until you’ve done the hard work of figuring out who your audience is, what they know, where they look for information, and what motivates them.
And as a bonus, creating change isn’t a one-way street. You will also have to change your own company: Help them value employer branding, show the value of investing in recruiting and people, get them to treat every candidate who applies as a potential employee or customer, to show how talent’s expectations have changed.
In the end, a lot of employer branding is about explaining why doing what they’ve always done has created their current talent problem, so you will need to change things to fix it.
*None of this is true. I mean… not even close. C'mon…
Headlines!
Improve Your Hiring Results… By Increasing Transparency
A lot of employer brands claim a pillar of transparency and then hide the entire hiring process from candidates. Don’t do that.
Employees Balk at End to Remote Work
“While 83 percent of CEOs want employees to return in person, only 10 percent of employees want to come back full time.”
What research says about how to make hybrid work succeed
As “hybrid” work models look to become much more the norm in work, that changes what work (and your brand) offers people. It’s a deep article, pointing out the very human pitfalls of remote work, but it will help you build your own framework of what’s worth talking about and differentiating for candidates.
Recreating information osmosis in a remote-first world
Getting internal audiences to understand your brand position and share their own version of that story will ultimately rely on your ability to get employees to listen to what you have to say.
Job Postings That Work (And Some That Don't)
From the best thinker/do-er of job postings, great examples of what works and what doesn’t.
The Four Fs of employee experience
EB needs to be a (very) loud voice in the conversation around the employee experience. A bad experience doesn’t just slow down business, it has ripple effects that impact who applies and who doesn’t for years.
www.strategy-business.com • Share
Employee Engagement isn’t Measured by Clicks
Engagement can’t be measured in the micro, it has to be seen and understood in the macro.
Learning from the Gap Logo Redesign Fail
This is a nice deep dive not only into how not to redesign a logo, but what things to consider when designing your own visual brand identity.
www.thebrandingjournal.com • Share
Eight Reasons for Change in Turbulent Times
If the Gap didn’t scare you away from logo redesign, don’t do it because you’re “tired” of the current. Here are 8 actually good reasons to redesign.
Quick hits
Tip of the week
Sharpen your saw. Book 20 minutes once a week to watch a video or two on YouTube you select specifically to help you do your job better. Look up “better b-roll” and “iMovie tricks” and “better job postings” and “subject lines that work” and “how to present a strategy.” I was using iMovie (poorly) for years and one 10-minute video showed me all the shortcuts I hadn’t seen. Pick any tool or application and search YouTube for all the hidden tricks.
Inside the fortune cookie
“We cannot be for everyone. We must be for someone.” - Seth Godin
Thanks, everyone!
Don’t forget to check out the 700+ link archive.
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Cheers and thanks!
-James Ellis (LinkedIn | Twitter | Podcast | Articles)
Where the subject line came from:
R.E.M. - Finest Worksong
By James Ellis, Employer Brand Nerd
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