Follow the Leader 🏃🏃🏃🏃🏃🏃

Wait!! I was being sarcastic!!!!

Uh oh. The last excuse for not investing in your employer brand is GONE.

Quick. If you could clearly increase candidate quality, make all your recruiters and recruitment ads more effective, and lower your reliance on agencies, all for $1,500 a month, wouldn’t you?

If you think about employer branding (how you make those outcomes real) as a service or subscription, the power of employer branding is within reach of any company. Check out Employer Brand as a Service to learn more.

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I know I say the word “differentiation” like it once saved my dog from an oncoming bus. I get it.

But in all honesty, it matters. A LOT. Perhaps more than anything else within employer branding.

At its most basic, the purpose of employer branding is to make the people we want to hire want to work here. That’s a function of creating desire, but desire is very very specific.

👟 You don’t desire “shoes,” you desire the Nike Air DT Max 96 Black Varsity Maize (currently selling for twice their retail price).

🎟️ You don’t want concert tickets, you want tickets at the Miami stop of Taylor Swift’s tour, specifically the A2 section (currently going for north of $8,000 each) because the A1 section doesn’t give you a great view of Taylor diving into the stage.

🍪 You don’t desire a cookie, you want your mom’s chocolate chip cookies where she adds in almond extract and some crushed up Twix bars fresh out of the oven (priceless).

Being specific forces us to be different. Those Nike Air cannot be confused for any other Nikes, let alone any other brands. They have a very specific look and feel not designed to appeal to anyone with feet, but for people who really click with that specific aesthetic.

So what does your brand offer? (And yes, your brand is offering something. What did you think ‘Employer Value Proposition’ meant, exactly?) Does it offer “opportunity?” Or does it offer “access to leaders in three of the biggest brands in the world?”

Does it offer “development?” Or does it offer “a mentoring program, $1,000 in professional development stipend, and a free Kindle with unlimited books?”

Does it offer “caring about our people?” Or does it offer “a four-day workweek and a stipend for each child an employee has?”

Differentiation is created through specificity.

The entire talent acquisition industry is beset by people, tools, process, systems, and communities who think there is only one way to recruit and that any deviation is to be stomped out.

But if I were to ask your CEO, they would say that their company isn’t like any other company. In fact, they’d be flat-out insulted at the idea. (This is a useful datapoint when someone in HR or Comms or wherever starts forcing you to look and sound like every other company by removing anything that stands out.

Employer brand is the tool that allows you (demands of you, begs you!) to show the ways in which you aren’t yet another company offering yet another job.

So don’t ignore your chance to tell that unique story!!!!!

Why? Because candidates want to make an informed choice. You want them to want your company like they want those shoes or those specific cookies. Because when they desire you, they show up, they hang around, and they add so much more value to your company.

Last week I asked if you wanted me to break this newsletter into two parts, and the answer was a resounding “no!” One person even wrote in to say, “don’t do what everyone else does!” and that struck home. So you’re stuck with this format for a while 😇

🍿 We know that a strong employer brand has any number of positive impacts on a company. But what’s the cost of an ineffective employer brand? »

🧮 Changing thing by yourself is a nearly Sisyphean task (think: boulder and hill). Sure, it would be way easier if you had a lot of people to help. But for now, focus on finding one partner in crime to keep you going »

🍿 A brand without a go-to-market strategy is just a nice idea »

🧮 Here are a bunch of ideas to make your interviews more effective. Here’s my addition: Stop building interview processes to filter people out. Build them to validate that they can do the job (and then shut up and hire them) »

🍿 AI can do a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean you should use it for everything. To maximize the value, think like a strategist »

🧮 Bullshit Jargon Alert: “Brand Vibes.” It sure sounds like another way to integrate employer branding into the corporate brand (without acknowledging employer branders) to me »

🍿 Change is really really hard work. So set up some small habits that help keep your battery charged »

🧮 Unpleasant truth: the brand that serves convenience is often the brand that wins, even over brands with stronger messaging and stronger value offerings. This seems worth bringing up as we represent brands who’s “customer experience” is widely considered something between, “a fresh hell” and “the agony of drinking double-shots of woe.” »

📡 Last week’s breakdown of Buffer (with Tracey Parsons of Flockity) was a real surprise. What started as a great example of “employer blanding” revealed something far far more interesting (and a lot of ideas worth stealing!) »

🧠🔌 AI Idea of the Week: 10 recruiters, strategists and branders talk about AI in employer branding »

🧠🔌 Producing better content with AI (podcast) »

🏛️ All 2,300+ articles from this newsletter are in a searchable archive. Go get ‘em!

Change how you think about your talent acquisition problems

Let me bottom line this whole conversation:

• Yes, you can succeed without strategy, but it requires way way way more effort.

• Strategy isn’t abstract, it’s about understanding what you offer that your customers want that they can only get from you (see?!?! differentiation!!!!!).

• When you have a strategy, it’s like tilting the table in your direction. Things seem to just work better.

Yes, it’s a nice long conversation. But it’s worth it. And don’t miss the next episode (dropping tomorrow) with Jasmine Bina, who talks about how identity shapes people’s perception of employer brands. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or over at The Definition of Insanity show.

All my resources (and they are legion) are now being stashed in one spot: EmployerBrand.ing. It includes the brand new “ChatGPT Prompts for Employer Branders” ebook and the first episode of The Definition of Insanity.

-James Ellis [LinkedIn] [Website]

***This Newsletter Contains No ChatGPT***

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