Employer Brand Headlines: The "Smooth Operator" Edition (#56)
In this edition:
Watch your tone
Brand quality or brand value?
2020 from LinkedIn’s POV
Shout out loud for introverts!
Let’s talk to Holland McCue of Delta
On to the Headlines
I don’t think I’ve mentioned brand tone much in this newsletter, but that’s because there isn’t much written about it more than anything. Your tone expresses a great deal about your employer brand, so getting that tone right matters. Except it seems like most employer brand tones are either “stiffly professional” or “your wry friend,” as if there’s a singe spectrum between formal and informal. Where’s the introspective tone? Where’s the cheerleader? Or the bureaucrat? Where’s the professorial tone or the underdog? If our brands are complex, why are the tones so simple?
I wonder if “simplified” (or simplistic) brand tone is a function of being so closely connected to recruiting. maybe 3% of all job posts have a tone that isn’t “this is what HR said we could write” and that seems to permeate so many candidate and employee communication experiences. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can actually make your “boring” messages more effective.
There’s a lot of assumptions around the intersection of brand value and brand quality. That is, if a company does a great job supporting its people, the quality of the brand establishes the value of the brand. But it isn’t always so cut-and-dried. Take SpaceX, a company known for its horrible work-life balance and overly-aggressive management, two thinks engineers say they hate. And yet, SpaceX is the top company engineers want to work for. How can you leverage the disconnect between quality and value?
Sally Bolig (hi Sally!) took recent LinkedIn data and did a better job of pulling out the insights than LinkedIn did. Of note: Companies are posting more in 2020 than before, posts about Covid seem to be plateauing as a messaging focus, and more companies are using LI to post about hiring. (This is good stuff if you want to convince marketing to let you have a seat at the LI table). Also note how quickly we all went from “don’t talk about race and politics on your corporate site” to “well, we have to say something about BLM…” in a matter of a few weeks.
We’ve been telling candidates to develop their personal brand to make it easier for recruiters to understand who they are and what they bring to the table. The problem is, personal brands seem to be the domain of the loudmouth (hi, how are you!). What about introverts? And if we flip the concept around, does your employer brand only cater to the boisterous, obvious extroverts? How can you make sure you’re not repelling introverts in order to stand out in the crowd?
Related: Fascinate by Sally Hogshead is a great book on how to align a brand (personal or employer) around a single compelling idea.
Employer branding is a game of fast and slow: jumping on the latest channel or talking point, but also in making sure the long-term strategy is yielding results. Of course, we always talk about the fast stuff (it’s a weekly newsletter, after all), but here is a case for remembering to be slow.
For all the work you do in establishing and instilling/imbuing your brand throughout all the various touch points of the candidate’s brand experience (bigger than the “candidate experience”), there’s one place where it tends to fall apart: the interview. The interview is like talking 6 months of potential brand interactions and compressing them into an intense 1-3 hour live session (virtual or not). Worse than that, they are always happening and they are always out of your control. Let’s be clear a bad 30 minute interview is the difference between a positive or negative experience, between a 1 star and 5 star review, and between a yes and a no. So here’s a list of the 50 biggest issues with interviews. Ignore the fact that it is a 8-year-old article: it will let you blueprint ways in which to influence better brand experience into this crucial experience.
Hubspot has a list of 14 different blog formats. This is great when you’re out of ideas and need to think of what kind of content you could build.
Quick Hits
Stating values isn’t the same as living your those values.
Don’t let the pandemic break your company culture.
10 requirements for driving brand growth.
EB Tip Of The Week
At least twice a year, you should go get a random job posting (from a job board, where job posts do their work) and ask: is this telling the story I want it to tell? Would I apply for this job? Does it reflect what’s unique and special about our company? So make that day today.
On The Talent Cast
You think you’ve had a rough 2020? What if you were responsible for the employer brand for a major US airline?! That’s exactly the kind of 2020 Holland McCue‘s had. Delta has been one of my favorite employer brand examples for a few years now, and in this episode, Holland and I dig into what makes it work so well, even when everything around you looks scary.
Thanks, everyone!
The mission of this whole thing is to help you get better at employer branding, so if you have questions or want me to consider other articles, just let me know (reply to this email and it comes straight to me).
Cheers!
-James Ellis (LinkedIn | Twitter | Podcast | Articles)
Makes a perfect Labor Day gift!
By James Ellis, Employer Brand Nerd
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