⚡ Employer Brand Headlines: The "Like the Weather" Edition (#110)
My mission: move the conversation around employer brand forward.
Employer Brand Headlines, brought to you by James Ellis
In this issue
Feel the tension?
Multiple brands?
The great resignation opportunity
Work changes the system
The big idea
Let’s make something clear: your job is to create change.
You change how your company recruits.
You change the story your company tells prospects and employees.
You change your brand position.
You change the metrics.
You change the process.
It’s just a lot of change.
And what everyone knows is that change is hard. Most people would rather do… almost anything else than change.
And when your job is to create change (especially among those who don’t want to change), you have to get comfortable with tension.
The connection between change and tension isn’t tenuous. It’s a direct one-to-one connection. Creating change is creating tension. The connection is so strong you can use the tension as a barometer for the change you’re trying to create. If you don’t feel tension, you’re not creating change. You’re not doing your job.
This doesn’t mean you should be an asshole. It means you should be looking to create tension by asking how to push the brand farther, asking tough questions about if you should publish the vaccination policy on your jobs or if it’s time to post salaries next to the titles.
Creating change isn’t easy, but it is important. So get good at tension.
Headlines!
U.S. young talent chose their ideal employers in 2021
My friends over at Universum released this year’s US talent report on who the most attractive employers are. No real surprise that Apple, Google, Tesla and SpaceX own the top slots (some more). What’s interesting is Pfizer’s dramatic rise (gee.. I wonder why). The connection between corporate brand position and reputation and your employer brand couldn’t be more clear.
Employer brands - when one doesn't quite seem enough
This seems to be the current industry fixation: how do you build a brand rigid enough that connects to the core corporate brand, but retains its flexibility s it gets localized to different audiences?
meplural-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org • Share
Developing a Rock-Solid Employer Branding Content Strategy
Say your “brand promise” all you want. But no one (I assure you) is actually looking for your brand promise. So how do you seed and fertilize that idea in the minds of prospects? Content.
employerbrandwagon.com • Share
‘Great Attrition’ or ‘Great Attraction’? The choice is yours
That line about how the Chinese symbol for ‘crisis’ is a combination of chaos and opportunity is apocryphal, but the idea is still sound: if you view this as a crisis, it is. But if you view this as an opportunity…
The Long and the Short of It maps exactly onto the challenges of global marketing
This is just one big metaphor for getting everyone in the company to embrace your employer brand.
5 Reasons Your Employees Don’t Understand Your Company’s Vision
Turns out, writing your missing to be as bland and unobtrusive as possible wasn’t the best strategy.
Why the sales funnel is the cockroach of marketing concepts
It’s a long read, but VERY worth it. This will change your thinking on the “candidate journey” for the better.
All the Feels: How Companies Can Benefit from Employees’ Emotions
Humans understand via emotion: we feel something first, then we rationalize it milliseconds later. Thus: trying to explain “why this company” via a feature list and benefits doesn’t work nearly as well as sparking an emotion first.
knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu • Share
Summary: Robots and AI are coming (and are here). When you describe the role of the recruiter as “finds candidates, communicates party line, sends offer,” then yeah, give that job to the robots. But is that all recruiters really do? I don’t think so.
Pause Your Everyday Duties with #AdoptABreak
There’s an obvious path and then there’s the weird path that seems strange and confusing that will lead you to the same place. The trick is: the first path isn’t memorable but the second path becomes an idea that stays in your mind for a long time. This is a great example of finding the less obvious path.
Three sides of the same story
Work is a SYSTEM. When you change one part of the system, all the other parts react/change in order to make up gaps. So when you decide “we’re all remote” that change comes with a million other changes. And given how over-optimized we had all gotten 2 years ago to a “8-10 hours in an office” world, everything is changing.
Duh.
The trouble is: we’re trying to limit change. We’re remote? Get on Teams/Slack/Whatsapp. Suddenly, we’re besieged by incoming ‘dings’ for our attention. (Now that Slack has Salesforce $ and advertises on TV, does anyone else have a pavlovian response to the “Slack alert” sound they play in the commercial? I wonder if they realize it makes their 12 million users instinctively anxious?)
You can’t change one part, you have to be ready to change it all. Why does that matter? Because the company that embraces that idea and tells that story (not just the “looking through a drinking straw” story of “they shut the office down for a week because we were all burned out” story, because the moral of that story is that the company managed to burn everyone out, but the bigger “we re-thought everything” story) is going to be at the forefront of the best companies to work for.
Inside the fortune cookie
Strategy is the art of staying one step ahead of the need to be efficient. -Jules Goddard
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)
Where the subject line came from:
10,000 Maniacs - Like the Weather
By James Ellis, Employer Brand Nerd
In a sea of content, how do you stay up to date on employer branding news? How do you know what's worth reading and what's just a waste of time?
So glad you asked! Here's a weekly digest of the best content to make you smarter about employer branding, curated by James Ellis.
In order to unsubscribe, click here.
If you were forwarded this newsletter and you like it, you can subscribe here.
Powered by Revue
James Ellis, 421 W Melrose, Chicago, IL 60657