Employer Brand Headlines - The "New Year, New Look?" Edition (#52)
Welcome to the new-look Employer Brand Headlines. It’s the same great content, just easier to read!
In this edition:
Are you creating emotion?
Can your Instagram compete?
How is remote work changing… everything?
Are you working with purpose
Have you changed enough?
The Big Idea
It feels like we pay a lot of lip service around how important our role is in changing people’s lives. Whether its telling more fascinating stories to create desire, building narratives that candidates can put themselves inside of, or highlighting the things our organizations reward, we like to talk about how we help a person make a choice, one of the most significant of their lives.
So why do we spend so much time trying to make our processes “seamless” or “frictionless?” Think of the biggest and life-shaping experiences in your life. How many of them could be called “frictionless?” Whether it was getting into college, surviving that grueling semester where you were really pushing, finishing a marathon (or a 5k), having a child, etc, they were all fraught with emotional moments.
We strive for easy candidate experiences, but if it is easy, those experiences become forgettable.
Have you mapped our your candidate journey and listed what emotions you anticipate your candidate is feeling and how you are feeding into them, moving them forward or just resolving them?
Brands are things humans build feelings around. Are you thinking about what emotions you want to encourage and when?
Other notes on creating emotional peaks in experiences here.
On to the Headlines
I get a lot of gruff when I say this, but. firmly believe it. When you’re posting to Facebook and Instagram, you aren’t competing with their employer brands, but with Ryan Gosling and 90 Day Fiancé memes. So if you want to stand out, you have to raise your sights higher. So here are 10 (non-EB) Instagram accounts who are killing it. These brands are telling compelling stories in a single image, and that’s what you’re up against. Suddenly, that pick of 20 employees standing next to each other in two rows like it’s 2nd grade picture day doesn’t cut it.
Is Net Promoter Score dead? Sure, this is a consumer-brand kind of article, but at least once every few months I hear someone suggest that EB use a NPS-style metric to show its impact, and this article makes it clear that NPS is no better than the other weak-sauce metrics we already use. The problem? NPS is too limited in scope. It asks the simple question because it is simple to ignore the bigger messy issues. It’s a metric designed to ensure the best-polished brass on a sinking ship (h/t Todd Raphael).
The danger of building your brand around your stated values is that what you say your values are and how you live them are often very different. Proof? MIT Sloan’s study of 700 large companies found ZERO correlation between what a company says its values are and what it’s work culture actually is. (h/t Hung Lee’s Recruiting Brainfood)
One of the challenges EB is grappling with in the face of mandated remote work is how to collaborate, brain-storm or just workshop an idea together. EB, because it connects all the parts of the company, is inherently collaborative, and Zoom (et al) doesn’t really get many people’s creative juices flowing. So here are some ideas on how to brainstorm when no one can share a room with a white board and those massive post-it notes.
I’m not pointing fingers, but let’s be honest: its easy to define an employer brand when we treat work as a place to go and not as a thing you do. (This article on the future of working kind of made me realize how much we define the issues we solve to make the answers easier to accomplish. Turns out people are messy, and when you can’t just focus on the place, it gets messy to try and explain why people do what they do.)
Speaking of remote work, I admit I started reading this article on building a long-term remote work plan to see how we EBers could influence the process, but I was struck by their process. They start with an ideal end in mind and think backwards on how to achieve it. Have any of you considered what your ideal EB situation would be and worked backwards from there? I might be trying this soon.
What you reward is who your company is. But how do you reward people in a remote work situation? Stories Incorporated has some ideas on the subject.
Is your brand memorable? Do you know how to make it more memorable? Here’s an interesting article suggesting focused visuals to command attention and create those brand memories that last.
More and more businesses are looking to their own brand purpose to create a stronger brand foundation as everything seems to change every second around it. If your company is thinking about purpose (or you’re starting to spark those conversations), it might help to understand how purpose works and how businesses can leverage purpose strategically (also, companies don’t have purpose, people have purpose, and you’re in the people business, remember?).
This was a pretty solid list of resources around understanding, audits, and showcasing your brand. Aside some usual suspects, there are a few new ideas here.
If you don’t have time to read Robert Greene’s book on the 48 laws of power, here are the seven kinds of power one can have in the workplace. Know where you as the EB pro have power, and when you need to lean on a different kind of power from somewhere else.
Friend of the newsletter Alex Her pulled together some good examples of how companies are pivoting their employer brand communications now that it seems the “new normal” is here to stay.
EB Tip Of The Week
Have you defined your brand’s vernacular? If you have 10-20 words/terms that you intentionally use in all comms (and share so that recruiters, comms, HR and leadership repeat), you can create a stronger alignment around your ideas without forcing people to parrot talking points (which never sounds real). Start small with a few words that really say “your company!” and say what other terms your words should replace. You know it’s working when you start seeing those terms on your Glassdoor reviews…
On The Talent Cast
The world changed this year. Not just conceptually, but every single consumer experience we have today is very different from last year. So doesn’t it stand to reason that every single candidate experience would be different, too? And yet, it feels like brands are nibbling around the edges, trying to push towards change without having to really change much. Personally, I think we need to get beyond thinking in increments.
Other housekeeping
HRTX Virtual. And it’s free! It’s a heck of a line-up, so get your learning on! (oh! And I’m presenting on content creation!)
If you missed the big webinar on data0driven D&I with Torin Ellis and Gabriel Hitt, it was recorded. Go watch it here.
Thanks, everyone!
I hope you really enjoy the new look and feel. If you have any comments, just reply to this email or ping me online. Thanks so much for sharing and being a part of this goofy little newsletter.
Cheers!
-James Ellis (LinkedIn | Twitter | Podcast | Articles)
Makes a perfect Labor Day gift!
By James Ellis, Employer Brand Nerd
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