⚡ Employer Brand Headlines: The "Why Can't I Be You?" Edition (#107)
My mission: move the conversation around employer brand forward.
Employer Brand Headlines, brought to you by James Ellis
In this issue
The real problem with job postings
Why your job is so hard
People, not candidates
What strategy?
The big idea
I love job postings.
(shut up. you knew I was that kind of nerd when you opened this email)
I read a lot and I help write a lot. I know the machine that pushes recruiters and sourcers and HRBPs to cobble together job postings from other jobs, other teams, and (don’t act shocked) other companies.
I know of companies that pre-write job postings for hundreds of pre-defined roles. Think of it: this is a company that’s never HEARD OF YOU who is writing the bulk of your job postings, describing your jobs for you blind!
I get it. We all need job postings NOW and NO ONE actually wants to write them. The hiring manager looks to the HRBP who looks to the recruiter who is too busy and hates writing anyway and suddenly, the fact that most job postings suck makes perfect sense.
But all these pressures to create “good enough” (ha!) job postings at scale and speed has lead to a simple problem: Job postings all sound the same.
Don’t believe me? The exact phrase “must have excellent written and verbal communication skills” comes up in Google more than half a million times. (Let’s not talk about how the exact phrase “must have excellent written and oral communication skills” shows up another 298,000 times.)
This is a bullshit phrase if ever I heard one. Will this job require you to write a novel? Or haiku? Probably neither. It probably means “write an email that other people can understand and act on.” But we never see stuff like that. See see the bullshit phrase.
I bet if I asked, you’d come up with your own bullshit job description phrase you see over and over, thus proving my point.
But it gets worse. All job postings sound the same, but all jobs are different.
Put another way:
All jobs (as described) are the same
All jobs (in reality) are unique
The gap between these two ideas isn’t just enormous, it constitutes a kind of lie to our candidates. If our jobs are unique but our descriptions are not, we’re not actually describing the job, are we?
In other industries, that’s called “fruad.”
Worse than that, in a place where our candidates hold all the power, we can’t engage them with platitudes and generic bullets. They know those are lies and are beginning to hold us accountable.
Isn’t it standard practice for smart candidates to say, “putting the job posting aside, what is this job… really?” The posting was enough to get a candidate to do research and ask questions, but since you’ve started the relationship with a stack of black and white lies… how far can you really get?
To me, bad job postings are a great example of how we need to help our TA teams rethink everything they’ve learned because it isn’t working anymore.
Headlines!
5 Truths About Why A Career in Employer Branding is SO HARD
An absolute must-read. It pulls no punches and says the things we usually only talk to each other about after the third drink.
Candidates are dead. Long live people.
“More than ever we have to understand people, their motives, their desires, where they are on their personal journey, if we want to successfully match them to the right business.”
How to Write Job Ads for a Candidate-Short Market
It is an art to make amazing job ads (paging Katrina Kibben), but it is REALLY REALLY easy to make okay ones. (So are 80% of them atrocious?!)
blog.firefishsoftware.com • Share
Let Your Top Performers Move Around the Company
Between “I can’t find people,” “everyone’s quitting,” ‘everyone wants to work from home,“ and "what’s this about a 4-day work week?” we have to just admit that the world of work is changing at every level. That might mean a renewed focus on your existing people and building a meaningful brand around how you help them grow (you don’t even need a sexy tagline to make that pitch sing)….
How to Work With Your Competitors to Fill More Jobs
(continued from the previous piece)… it might also mean that its time to start revisiting those “everyone knows” about how you think about your talent competitors.
blog.firefishsoftware.com • Share
If you’re not going to turn that great piece of content into three other things, you might as well just throw it away. There are starving people looking for content in other companies, you know!
www.marketingprofs.com • Share
Many Strategies Fail Because They’re Not Actually Strategies
They’re goals. (This is an old article, but with our obsession with metrics and KPIs, I wonder how many of us have forgotten our strategy, assuming we ever had one.)
Strategic Considerations For Extending Brands
Your employer brand is an extension of your corporate brand. So many looking at how other brands extend themselves would be useful to you?
www.brandingstrategyinsider.com • Share
Employers not getting it right in recruiting diverse talent
‘It’s one thing to speak generally and build awareness about you as an employer, it’s another thing to build awareness of you for the specific things that your candidates are interested in’
These Pasta Are Having a Really Good Hair Day
It doesn’t cost you any money to see what you are pitching in a whole new light…
Nike celebrates its retail employees as athletes in UK ads
Nike, who has built an entire company on the backs of the most famous athletes, is turning its camera inward…
Quick hits
Inside the fortune cookie
The secret to success is doing the stuff other people won’t do & doing it for a really long time. - John Jantsch
Thanks, everyone!
Reminder: The more people at your org who read my books, the better your job will get! employerbrandbook.com (They’re free!!!)
There are now more than 900 links in the link archive. Enjoy!
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:
The Cure "Why Can't I Be You?"
By James Ellis, Employer Brand Nerd
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