Employer Brand Headlines: The "Town Called Malice" Edition (#66)
In this edition:
Are you being clear?
Are you having fun?
What are the unwruitten rules?
What prediction are you making?
The Big Idea
How clear are you being with your employer brand (EVP, brand position, brand promise, etc)?
I bet you spend a lot of time (and/or money) to distill your brand into a few simple and easy to understand statements, I bet you slap that language anywhere you can.
But I didn’t ask if you were easy to read. I asked if you were being clear.
Sure, you’re a great place to work, but in what way? To whom? How would someone see that? How is that different from the company just up the road who says the same thing?
EB is often accused to being “employer blanding” and this is why: we list a bunch of positive things about our company, but aren’t being clear how we’re different.
Because clarity isn’t just about who you are, its about who your company isn’t.
If you’re a bank, you need to show how you’re not like other banks. If you’re a startup, you have to show how you’re not like other startups. Otherwise, how or why would anyone talented choose you?
By focusing on who you are, you are almost certainly saying many of the same things your competition is saying. And when you aren’t clear about the opportunity and what you offer, candidates are forced to flip a coin about who you are and whether they should bother applying or not.
On to the Headlines
I really appreciate Charlotte Marshall popping the bubble around the seemingly-universally-agreed-upon-yet-never-discussed idea that companies need to be “fun.” More than that, that there’s only one emotional trigger at work and it is called “happiness.” She touches on the idea that a strong employer brand isn’t just a claim you put on a poster, but needs to answer questions about the experience of working somewhere. Not, “do you offer free food” or “what’s the holiday party like,” but questions that start with the phrase “what happens when…?”
In fact, I think this HBR article is the other side of that coin when it says you should write down the unwritten rules of the company. Aside from pulling assumptions out from behind the curtain given them some sunlight, the exercise is a great way to reveal how you company really reacts to stimulus. I’d take it another step further and say that the unwritten rules of the company are more the culture of your company than what HR says it is, thus making it ripe fodder for employer branding architecture and narrative.
Ooof. When you ask the question, “Does TA Understand Passive Talent Engagement?” you know what the answer is going to be, and that answer isn’t going to be positive. But what I was amused by was that after examining the wreckage of the question, the solution the author came away with was that more time and energy should be spend on marketing. Now, if you’re a marketer, you know that marketing can be broken into two kinds: direct and brand. Direct marketing is what you get when you Google “kid’s STEM activities,” the direct response to a need. Any marketing with a clear CTA is direct marketing, which hardly seems in keeping with the original question. So what the author is actually prescribing is that employer branding should be in charge of passive talent engagement. QED, right?
I point this out not because you need to know it, but employer branders always need to have a full quiver of ways to explain what employer brand is (and isn’t), so here’s a solid article from South America on demystifying employer branding.
Are you putting data at the heart of your EVP? Here’s a nice long article (from three people I rather respect and like) that tries to connect some dots between EVP and data. With the exception of thinking about your EVP as a catalog of your company’s traits and features instead of as an idea that aligns to and supports someone’s worldview, it suggests that we all still have a long way to go to really open our doors wider to all the different kinds of talent out there.
As a guy who seems to always be launching this new project or that new idea, I really do try and carve out a little time every few days to just… think. Sometimes its to write a sit-down book (not some musician biography or noir pulp book I use to escape, but a book I need to be seated in a chair to absorb). Sometimes it’s to dump a bunch of thinking on my white board. And while this year has made it hard to get a safe change of scenery (I used to love airports and plains for just this sort of thing, but my favorite was camping out in a hotel lobby for two hours), it is still imperative that we all break away from our calendar and email and make space to just think, to let the mind be… idle? Well, maybe if you’ve achieved total enlightenment, that’s something you can do, but every without the saffron robes, maybe you can just make sure you give your brain some space.
Quick Hits
Maury Hanigan continues her series on the nuts and bolts of how to make video really work for you.
EB Tip Of The Week
Choosing a job is making a prediction about the future: Choosing a stable company because it is stable is a bet that the world is about to become unstable. Deciding to work at an up-and-coming company is a prediction that the space needs to be disrupted. Joining a startup is a bet that this idea will be needed by many people very soon.
If you think about your brand messaging as about informing someone of your worldview, your vision of the future, is that vision clear? What is the bet someone is making about the future that makes you the best place to work?
Nail that and work backwards and you’ll make a far more compelling case to apply.
And Inside Your Fortune Cookie It Says...
“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”
— Paulo Coelho in The Alchemist
Thanks, everyone!
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Cheers and thanks!
-James Ellis (LinkedIn | Twitter | Podcast | Articles)
I tried to write the best book ever written on employer branding. I don’t know if I completely succeeded, but for 99 cents, you can decide for yourself.
By James Ellis, Employer Brand Nerd
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