Employer Brand Headlines: The "Rooms on Fire" Edition (#80)
Our mission: Help you understand your employer brand better and make it work for you.
In this issue
Where should employer brand live?
What really creates change?
Value tagging your brand
Who drives your culture?
The big idea
What’s the most common question or topic when employer branders get together? It’s certainly the same question I get asked most. It’s a great question because the answer isn’t the answer. The answer is really a reflection of the questioner and their own frustrations.
If you haven’t guessed, that question is, “Where should employer brand live?”
The question arises because employer brand, when first done, is often an extension or add-on to some other business function like recruiting or comms. But as employer brand matures, as it realizes its own impact and scope, it becomes bigger than any one team.
So the answer is that it doesn’t live anywhere.
But when I say that, I sound like a crazy hermit who’s been contemplating his own naval for a little too long. So here’s the real world answer:
It doesn’t matter where employer brand lives.
Rather, there’s no right place for it to live. The pros and cons for any single answer end up equaling out, so it’s about picking your particular brand of poison.
Consider your employer brand function as having a home, be it recruiting, HR, comms, marketing, wherever. Your home will dictate your priorities and your initial audience. Live in TA? Your first job is to serve recruiters and recruiters’ needs. In order to do that well, you need to connect to every other part of the business. Effectively 50% of your brain is in TA, and 50% of your brain is spread across a dozen different departments, teams, offices in some capacity. So when you live in TA and talk to TA, you are an insider, one of “them.” But when you talk to marketing, you are talking to them as an outsider, someone who isn’t part of their world, because you don’t show up to their meetings and team gatherings. You only give them 5% of your brain, making you a dilettante.
Flip it around and put yourself in marketing, giving them 50% of your brain, living in their meetings and inside jokes, knowing their pain. Suddenly, you’re an outsider at the TA table. You’re the special guest who shows up, delivers something, and then is asked to leave.
In a way, that might make your decision easy. If you have a marketing brain, go be part of the marketing team. They can be your home base as you spend a lot of time trying to crack the TA team.
But I have a different point of view. The question shouldn’t be “where will I feel safest?” The question should be, “Which home will give me automatic credibility where I might not have much?”
If you have a marketing brain, if you already speak marketing well enough to get around (even if you don’t have the native accent), if you know their pains from other teams, then go to TA. It’s like buying near-immediate TA credibility. And with your previous marketing knowledge, you’ll connect and integrate (relatively) quickly in marketing teams.
This isn’t limited to marketing and TA. If you have a TA brain, go to Comms. You’ll get your butt kicked, but you’ll end up leveling up very quickly.
The goal isn’t to figure out where things are easiest. The goal is to establish a kind of “dual-citizenship” with more than one functional area. By working in an employer brand team that’s based where you are “weakest,” you can build bridges to more teams faster, which gives you more influence and impact.
Headlines!
How do you create change in an organization? Is it by building compelling decks and strong emails? Is it by fiat? Well, if we look back just a little, we can see that we are going through the biggest change to happen in our professional lives, perhaps ever. We’re re-thinking the concept of work, working from home/digital nomadism, work-life balance, the role of businesses in our well-being (physical and mental), what employers are obligated to give employees, what citizens should expect from their governments, and so much more. Where did that come from? I ran across this (very unscientific) poll on reddit that really underlines that the things we think create change don’t. Sure, it’s tongue-in-cheek, but still telling in terms of what really makes change haappen at work.
There’s a lot of talk (much like this article here from the NYT) about how to re-draw the lines between work and not-work. One of the ideas is that work is a choice. For the most part, what we do for a living isn’t strictly who we are as people. We choose where to work. We choose who we work for. I like the idea of connecting work to intrinsic motivations beyond the raw size of one’s paycheck. And while in EB, we occasionally talk about those intrinsic motivations, the rest of the world usually never does. It’s an interesting opening of the conversation to a wider audience. At the same time it will let you remind people how important connecting those motivations are to day-to-day leads to productivity benefits.
So the etch-a-sketch of work has been flipped and is being shaken as we speak. What’s the world going to look like next? Well, I don’t have answers so much as I have a suggestion: you can play the role of describing the new world of work, or you can play a role in building it. Your call.
I talk a lot about how EB is different from other marketing, so this might serve as a clear case. I’m launching a YouTube channel and an internal stakeholder asked, “why don’t we have more subscribers?” Because that’s not the metric I want to focus on. Job seekers might only be interested in this information for 6 weeks or 6 months, but probably not much more than that. Subscribers, which is a way to think about long-time lead value, don’t help me. That said, I still want people to watch my videos. So here’s how to get more video plays on YouTube.
You have to love that HBR is finally realizing that when you define “corporate culture” as ‘the way we do things around here,’ you have to take into consideration the “we” in that idea. HBR, who still talk about grass-roots company culture as a sign of the apocalypse, finally realized that culture isn’t what someone tells you it is, it’s what everyone agrees to (consciously or not).
Even when someone is staring right at your brand, if they aren’t looking for it, they won’t see it. They might be a lifelong customer and touch your products every day, but have they ever thought about working there? Those are two VERY different ideas, aren’t they? So the trick is to establish, quickly and powerfully, what your value to them is first.
I liked this article on the three things to consider when designing a logo (or other visual brand elements). Please note that none of the things to consider include how much you “like” it, how much it “pops,” or what color it should be.
Hey, you! Yeah you! Your leadership is reading articles like these on resetting their corporate narrative. You need to be in the room, because you own the people side of that narrative. And without people, I don’t know what kind of story they think they are telling.
Quick hits
Here’s What Joe Biden’s First Day in Office Tells us About the Evolving Role of Employer Brand
What Is Your Talent Narrative?
Research: How Companies Committed to Diverse Hiring Still Fail
Tip of the week
If the quote below is to be believed (and I agree), discipline will get you farther than tricks and hacks. So look at your calendar. Where are you spending time on stuff that doesn’t matter? Kill it. Now bake in 2-3 small times over the week and repeat them on your calendar. Select small projects that if you do regularly for 15 minutes a week, will yield massive benefit in 6-12 months. Turn these little wish-list projects into habits and you’ll be a stronger brander.
Inside the fortune cookie
“The biggest generator of long term results is learning to do things when you don’t feel like doing them. Discipline is more reliable than motivation.” - Shane Parrish
One last thing
We just hit 1,400 subscribers. I can only hope this newsletter has helped all of you just a little as you wrestle with your own brand questions.
And I’m going to take Clubhouse seriously for a while. On Tuesday, I’ll answer any employer brand question you have. Got an obstacle you can’t see around or just want a professional opinion? Jump in on Tuesday 8:30 am Central.
Next month, Holland McCue and I will talk about employer brand beyond the “obvious” tools on Clubhouse. Got an idea to talk about? Hit me up!
Thanks, everyone!
Whew! That was a long one! Thanks for enjoying and sharing this newsletter.
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:
Stevie Nicks - Rooms On Fire (Official Music Video)
By James Ellis, Employer Brand Nerd
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