Filtering. 🔬 (EBH#168: Brainiac's Daughter)
Yeah, I'm still talking about strategy. Yeah, it's still really important to your recruiting and branding
Mission: Create a million employer brand thinkers (like you!)
Employer Brand Headlines is written by James Ellis. »» Yes, you should say hello! ««
First…
I’m recording my next video-on-demand class: How to audit your employer brand (and your competitors). It will walk you step by step how to build a structured competitive audit that will show you (and your boss) where your brand has the best opportunities for success, even in a crowded market.
I’m shooting for a November launch, so if you’d like to get the early bird discount code, let me know.
The Big Idea
Building on last week’s essay/rant about how rare it is to actually see any strategy in a company’s talent strategy, the thing I realized I forgot was why strategy is so dang important.
Historically, before “strategy,” wars and battles were fought by applying strength to strength. Your army and my army show up, and the stronger (usually jut bigger) force wins. This means the only way to win was to be bigger, a brute-force approach to problem solving.
And it’s easy to think of strategy as “big ideas that we talk about in board meetings” or “things maybe seen in magazines.” But that would be to your own detriment.
Rather than it being some conceptual mumbo jumbo, strategy needs to be an every day thing. You should have a strategy on how to approach a given prospect. You should have a strategy on how to extend your reach. You should have a strategy to influence your head of marketing. You should have a strategy for loading the dish washer.
In practice, strategy is how you separate distraction from opportunity, an interesting idea from an idea that furthers our goal.
Employer branding still isn’t a codified role, at least compared to most jobs. I mean, nurses aren’t really able to take a day off, play around with germ sterilization techniques and try them out the next day. But we get to watch a couple of videos on how to make better videos and try them out on our testimonials the next day. You can spend your time writing job postings and social copy, meeting with hiring managers on job promotion ideas, building LinedIn banners, polishing a new iteration of the brand deck, implementing a new task-tracking tool, trying out automated/AI-based copy tools, demoting CRM software, etc etc etc.
The question isn’t, “what am I allowed to do?” The question is, “where can I put my efforts to make the biggest impact?”
That’s where a strategy comes into play. If you have a strategy around being known for being a place where people collaborate better, what will it take to make that strategy work? Telling stories of collaboration? Making “how meeting happen here” videos? Publishing your playbook on how people are expected to work together? Putting out a list of books and sources that influenced your thinking on collaboration? Some of those things seem kinda “out there” and aren’t “your usual talking points.” Why aren’t you making talking head videos about how the company started? Or articles on leadership’s vision for the future? Why aren’t you championing mentions of conferences you attend?
If your strategy is built around collaboration, the first set of ideas seem fantastic. In fact, they each build on one another, developing your credibility that you really do care about collaboration. The second set of ideas aren’t bad, but they aren’t furthering your strategy. Implementing them might get you a tiny blip of notice, but (if your strategy is properly planned out) it won’t be from the right people. Publishing those things muddies the water and undercuts the thing that makes you interesting and unique.
Using strategy as a filter like this isn’t new. Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter see strategy as what you choose to not do. But most companies are just stacking up tactics on top of one another such that looks less like a strategy than a Jenga tower late in the game. And the result will be the same when something invariably jostles the table.
Strategy Idea
1/10thX or 10X. Strategy development’s biggest hurdle is seeing with fresh eyes. We’re all surrounded by the day-to-day challenges and politics, that we don’t build a strategy from a clean sheet of paper, but on the rubble of past victories and failures. One game to play with yourself is to ask, “How would I do this with 10 times the resources? How would I do this with one tenth the resources?” Don’t be limited by thinking of resources in terms of money. What if you had to achieve some goal in one tenth the time? Or with ten times the staff? Radically changing your constraints will change how you see the problem or the opportunity.
New Project: Employer Brand Minute
Can I explain a single employer brand concept, strategy or habit in just a minute or two every day for a few months? Let’s find out! This week, I covered topics like localizing the brand, using EB to make each recruiting tactic better, a brand as a filter, and this one, about how you need to build the habit to ship something every single day. (Remember to subscribe!)
Headlines
I hope I’ve made my view that we need to speak more directly to specific audiences crystal clear. You wouldn’t try to attract german-speaking applicants by posting a job in English, or engage someone who is visually-impaired with a photo, so why do you think a job posting written by a male hiring manager, male recruiter and male HRBP is going to attract a lot of female candidates?
And we do need to be more intentional about speaking to women. I’m not talking about “removing masculine language” from job postings, I mean speaking to women as women, around things that women are concerned about. This means talking about your commitment to pay equity, to giving women opportunity to reach the C-suite, to making space for ever-present emotional labor, connecting policies to promises, etc.
Women are better negotiators, more inclusive, better leaders, better sales people, and better investors1. Businesses who want to succeed need to stop saying how important women are and actually do the work to make it happen.
Women Roar (2002, but the data is only getting worse)
Unrelated: This always makes me nuts. This article is mis-titled 12 things that get employees excited (besides a raise). It should instead read, “Instead of actually asking any employees, we we let these CEOs and founders tell us what they think employees want.” Why is it that employees are rarely consulted in these kinds of conversations? Companies are ostensibly trying to make employees happy, but never ask what they really want.
Also:
‘Just Give Us the Basics’: Recruiters Reveal Their Expectations of Employer Branding
Dazzling creative campaigns – Because comms magic really can exist
“These days, we’d be pressed hard to find symbols that mean the same thing to everybody. The geography of influence, taste, and communities shifted to micro. The big, sweeping planes of culture that asked for big, sweeping products and personalities are replaced with many micro cultures, each with their own niche products and personalities. Our concepts of “cool” and “iconic” are forged in the intimacy of our own taste communities.”
- Ana Andjelic
Whenever you’re ready, I have a few ways I can help you:
EVP Mastermind: 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 consulting: 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:
Search all 1,600+ links historically referenced in the article archive.
Download 105 free (or almost free) ways to activate your employer brand.
Read Talent Chooses You for free from this open source Google Doc.
Here’s the 2022 version of The Employer Brand Manifesto.
220+ episodes of The Talent Cast podcast.
Where the subject line came from:
The Dukes of Stratosphere - Brainiac’s Daughter
Having not proven their love of all things Beatles, Hollies and Kinks-related, XTC put out two circa-1967 psychedelic albums under the name “Dukes of Stratosphear.” Now, Vanishing Girl is probably their best known song from this period, and for good reason. It’s wonderful, and YouTubers have done amazing jobs isolating bass tracks and vocal tracks so you can really see how intricate and well-crafting these songs are. Heck, the Rickenbacker intro to Vanishing Girl is a whole mood, as the kids say.
But Brainiac’s Daughter is my choice, because while it is still so clearly a 1967-influenced track, this is no Strawberry Alarm Clock cover band. There are little musical gifts galore all throughout, given with what feels like the same joy the band had when they made them. Enjoy.
If you are enjoying the music, congratulations, 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:
