⚡ Employer Brand Headlines: The "Let's Go Crazy" Edition (#115)
My mission: move the conversation around employer brand forward.
Employer Brand Headlines, brought to you by James Ellis
In this issue
Stop pandering to candidates
Offense and defense in job postings
Which metrics matter?
Do you smell that?
The big idea
One of the interesting outcomes of living in the modern world (yes, we are living in the modern world, regardless of what political news might suggest) is that we all generally assume things… work. We assume when we turn the key, the car will start. We assume when we click the mouse, the web page will load. We assume the clothes we buy will last more than four or five washings.
When every day 99.999% of the things we expect to happen do in fact happen as anticipated, we change. It wasn’t long ago that people bought cars based on reliability, but now reliability is assumed.
So if every product meats the base metrics of usefulness and reliability, why do we buy the things we buy?
Because of how they make us feel.
Why Nike over Adidas or New Balance? They are the 99.99999% the same. But when we buy one, we are choosing (and reinforcing) the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.
Why bring this up? Because our thinking around candidate experience is broken.
Best practice/best thinking around CX is that you should be offering a white-glove service, one where the candidate is shown a perfect picture of the company while ensuring that the candidate feels wanted. We bend over backward to tell the candidate how much they are appreciated and how much they are valued by the company. (There’s a whole other conversation as to why we don’t apply the same thinking to our actual employees, but that’s for another day.)
The candidate is assigned a coordinator who makes sure the candidate knows the next steps, has the link to the next interview, has been given the relevant materials. We give many candidates swag. We give some candidates our consumer products. We ask them to say nice things about us online.
But we’re in the modern world where candidates ASSUME someone is giving them the relevant materials. They ASSUME the link will work. They ASSUME they will get some swag, like they assume someone will offer them a glass of water.
(Yes, I know MANY, if not most, companies can’t even meet these basic standards: hiring managers and interview panels read their phones, ask repetitive questions, are rude or dismissive, trust the testing platform to determine technical skill, etc. But that’s just shitty hiring.)
Modern CX always sounds like: Do you like this? Do you like me? Am I pretty? Am I smart? Please like me!!!!!
On the off-chance that you even asked the question, “what do I want a candidate to feel?” when designing your candidate experience, you probably thought, “I want them to want to work here.” It is manufactured positivity that serves only to instill the vaguest sense of attraction in a stranger.
That’s not a feeling. That’s pandering.
Stop it.
Headlines!
The Leadership Gap: Young workers most concerned remote work will impact career success
I’m not saying that acknowledging young talent’s fear and showing how working hybrid/remote won’t stymie their career is how you attract great talent… oh wait, no. That’s exactly what I’m saying.
How to write (actually) good job descriptions
Higher-level thinking on job postings. I’ve bookmarked it for myself.
Why Talent Retention is the Competitive Differentiator in Today’s Workforce
It’s a lot easier to keep what you have than find more.
Holy Shift: The “Great Resignation” is On
What I love about SHRM is that they can turn any massive tectonic and cultural shift into a series of simplistic bullet points. Ignore the sense that the compact between worker and employer is being erased and written in real-time, and just pay more. Nailing it…
www.yourthoughtpartner.com • Share
An ocean of Employer Branding metrics to choose from
There’s nothing wrong with this list of metrics. The problem occurs when people game/optimize to the metrics instead of using the metrics to learn how to attract better candidates (not just more candidates).
I am a big advocate for the employer branding industry.
Want employer brand to be taken seriously in your org? Talk about how you support business objectives,
4 Keys for Your Employer Brand Strategy
I like the ideas here, though I disagree. There’s a sense that only empathic employer brands are strong/correct. A strong brand is one that is clear about what it cares about and validates that concept with every fiber of the organization. Would I personally prefer to work in a company with empathy? Yes. But I know plenty of people who rather make a million dollars in a hedge fund. Positivity isn’t the game. Clarity is.
“Hacker X”—the American who built a pro-Trump fake news empire—unmasks himself
Ignore the subject/topic of the article, but watch how the “hacker x” was recruited. He could have been fitted with swag and bonuses, but instead, the process was designed to make the candidate feel like they were being let in on a secret, which proved to be irresistible bait. It’s all about creating an intentional feeling.
Use this 7-point plan to create a collaborative culture and drive lasting innovation
Am I a sucker for a framework, or what?!
Instagram Promotions: How to Create One in Minutes + 3 Best Practices
Nuts and bolts on how to use Instagram to drive more awareness (and visits) to your site.
Please don’t read this. It’s musician/producer Brian Eno talking about scents. It has nothing at all to do with employer branding. Reading it will not help you write a better job posting or InMail message. But it might tickle some rarely-used parts of your mind on how brand associations are formed. Will you embed a smell into your branding? Probably not. But this is an interesting essay on how the mind is changed by experiences, however ephemeral.
Inside the fortune cookie
“If one wants to be active, one mustn’t be afraid to do something wrong sometimes, not afraid to lapse into some mistakes.”
— Vincent Van Gogh
Thanks, everyone!
There are now more than 1,000 links in the link archive. Enjoy!
Reminder: The more people at your org who read my books, the better your job will get! employerbrandbook.com (They’re free!!!)
Finally, if you have a question, just reply to this email and it comes directly to me.
Cheers and thanks!
-James Ellis (LinkedIn | Twitter | Podcast | Articles)
Prince - Let's Go Crazy (2018 Remaster)
^^^^ If you pay attention, you might notice that the beat is computer generated (on the LINN, which you have heard a zillion times, I assure you). Not only that, it is SIMPLE. snare, kick, snare, kick, snare, kick, snare, kick. 1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2. It does not deviate one iota for the duration of this song. It doesn’t swing, it doesn’t accent. It is the definition of flat. And yet this song rocks. Prince is a genius.
Where the subject line came from:
By James Ellis, Employer Brand Nerd
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