Even more free.🔬 (EBH#180: No Reply At All)
If you show you can do great work without budget, and you'll never need to worry about budget ever again.
Mission: Democratize Employer Branding (it is for EVERY company!)
First…
The January 10th employer brand workshop cohort is underway and people are already asking about the next one. So I am booking the next four sessions to better serve different geographies and how people work. (All Times Chicago/Central):
Wednesdays at 10am starting February 15, 2023
Wednesdays at 3:30pm starting February 15, 2023
Tuesdays at 8am starting March 7, 2023
Tuesdays at 1pm starting March 7, 2023
All sessions are limited to ten people.
If you’re a recruiter, HRBP, TA leader, marketer or employer brander, it only takes six weeks, a little work and $1,500 to build your own impactful employer brand. Click here to learn more.
The Big Idea
As we talked about last week, doing great employer branding work using the free ideas and resources at your disposal is the surest way to make an impact and get access to the real money. That’s why all the newsletters in January will do a deep device into free stuff you can do RIGHT NOW.
This week, we get visual (in a very very specific and tactical way).
What is your big employer brand claim? Maybe it’s a tagline, maybe it’s a tight phrase that helps you differentiate from other companies. Let’s start with that.
In Canva or Figma (free!) start with two blank images. The first one is 1200x627. The other is 1200x1200.
These will become graphic templates designed for LinkedIn content (while LI states it likes a wide image, it will accept square ones, so play around with them… it’s free to experiment!).
Build your employer brand tag or frame into this graphic. Making sure you’re meeting your brand standards, push the boundaries a little. Assume that no one actually wants to see this image, so make it clear and attractive so that it can establish the frame through which someone will see your company as an employer.
Hint: if you are using Canva, look at the templates already available. Don’t use anything exactly off the shelf, but these designs are really useful starting points to figure out how big text should be, how to make sure your words are not obscured by design elements, etc. If you grab a template, remember that everything is editable and changeable, so steal what’s useful to you.
Leave some space on the image for your localization message. This is text under the brand claim in a smaller font. If you’re building an image for a job, this is where you put a message about how data scientists are saving lives or this is the place where nurses are able to develop their skills. This is how you take the bigger, more general overarching message and connect it to a specific situation, be it a job, an event, or even a blog post.
Once you have the design right and you’ve let a few other people offer notes (unless you are a professional designer, there’s nothing as useful as multiple sets of eyes on your work - just make sure they are people whose eyes and perspective you trust. (super secret hint: if you are at a company lucky enough to have dedicated design resources, make a friend on the team and send the template their way for notes. They will ensure that you are hitting the brand guidelines properly and usually offer little tweaks that make your work look way better. They’ll love that you’re asking for help and not asking them to do it!)) it is time to build. Make a few copies of your design within the tool.
Got a favorite recruiter? Ask them what three requisitions are giving them heartburn. When they tell you, make graphics in both sizes for each one. Take a few minutes and think, “what can I say that will make someone stop what they are doing and want to learn more about this role?” Take that thinking into your localization text or design. So now you have six images (three roles, two sizes of images a piece). Go into the ATS and embed the wide image into the job itself. It can be at the top or half way down. When your job gets pushed to job boards, the image will get stripped out, but since most job boards send you back to your career site, the image will be there.
Write an email to the recruiter. For each job, write a short LinkedIn post (none of this “join us!” crap, something that says something about the opportunity or company. After all, that’s what you’re here for) and pick three good hashtags for each, and attach the images. Ask them to send the appropriate hiring manager requesting that they use the text (which you’ve made copy-and-paste ready including the job URL) and an image to talk about the job.
Two days later, ping the recruiter and ask how the request went. Look on the HM’s LI profiles and see if they posted them (and if they did it correctly). Note how many people liked and commented on the posts. Note if the number is notably higher than the rest of their posts. You are trying to collect data that shows how useful this stuff is.
Every day for a few weeks, look in your ATS and see what new jobs were posted (make a 30- minute calendar invite to remind you). Make two images for the job and write up a LinkedIn post. Share with the recruiter (who is listed in the ATS with the job).
After a few weeks, a large number of roles will have new graphics. Recruiters (and their hiring managers) will start to expect these images and posts because of how useful they are in generating attention to the jobs.
(Later, you can make versions of your template that have visual variations. Maybe a different background, maybe put dark text on a light background instead of the other way around. This makes sure that images from the template have some variety.)
One image templates in two sizes, and suddenly you’re making a name for yourself (and employer brand) for free.
Next week, we’ll get into the free side of LinkedIn strategy.
Headlines
It feels like the entire marketing/creative/content/branding world crawled to a dead stop a few weeks ago when Open.AI’s ChatGPT got released. It’s kind alike if aliens landed and they all looked ALF. I suspect once we all acclimate to the brave new world, we’ll see a better stream of articles in a the future.
Recession-Proof Your 2023 Employer Brand & Culture Strategy: Trends & Predictions
Choose to Change: Why Organizations Must Design for the Future, Now
Last week, I was a podcast guest on Marcus Edwardes’ Recruiting Trailblazers. We sparred a bit about the power of EB from a recruiter’s POV.
The team at RecruitmentMarketing.com collected all of The Talent Cast’s second season in one spot, if you want to pretend its a long audiobook. (and yes, I’m finally having serious conversations about season three!)
“The faster things move and the more unpredictable the future gets,
the more helpful it is to make decisions based on principles
rather than on attempts to predict specific outcomes.”
- François Chollet
Whenever you’re ready, here’s how I can help you:
EVP Masterclass: Develop your own Employer Brand/EVP alongside other recruiting leaders in my next guided cohort.
Employer Brand for Recruiters: Video on demand to teach recruiters how using their employer brand properly makes them more effective. Group rates available.
Coaching and support: Email me and we’ll set up time to talk 1:1 about how I can help you or your company take advantage of your employer brand.
Cheers and thanks!
-James Ellis (LinkedIn)
Resources:
Download 105 free (or almost free) ways to activate your employer brand.
Read Talent Chooses You for free from this open source Google Doc.
Search all 1,700+ links historically referenced in the article archive.
Here’s the 2022 version of The Employer Brand Manifesto.
220+ episodes of The Talent Cast podcast.
Where the subject line came from:
Genesis - No Reply At All
I’ll admit it. I have recently fallen down some weird prog rock rabbit hole, which in this case entails listening to large swaths of (Peter Gabriel era) Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, a double-disc concept album (a phrase that should scare even the heartiest of music fans) who’s story is completely impenetrable, but who’s music is kinda amazing. Since it came out in 1974, it doesn’t qualify for this list.
But Peter eventually left to make art rock that people wants to buy and Genesis realized that if they took their best three songs and kept them under four minutes, they could be a pop group with insanely good musicianship and still crank out 10 minute instrumental jams. Add in born-ham Phil Collins, who would step out from the drum kit to ham it up on music videos (and, notoriously, on a very bad episode of Miami Vice with Kyra Sedgewick and Emo Phillips!!), and you have the best prog pop best ever to hit MTV.
Enjoy!
If you are enjoying the music, congratulations, you have great taste in music and/or you’re old! Just for you, I made a Spotify playlist of all the subject line 80’s songs I’ve referenced over the last year and a half. You don’t even need hairspray to enjoy it:
***This newsletter contains no ChatGPT***
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