Gut check 🩻 EBH

You don't decide the way you think you do. And neither do candidates.

If you’ve ever shopped for a house, you might know the sensation of walking into a stranger’s home and thinking, “ahhh… this is the one.”

That’s not accurate. You didn’t think that this was the right house. You felt it subconsciously and your brand interpreted that data and turned it into a thought.

Realtors know this. That’s why they recommend that you bake some cookies during your open house, to communicate the emotion of home. This listing might need a little more work than you planned. The layout might be a little more closed than you were thinking you were looking for. It might not have its square footage arranged in the way you’d want. But if there’s an emotional trigger, if subconsciously we feel that the place is right, our rational brain will build a story of how that feeling must be accurate.

Intuition is incredibly powerful. And studies show that we use it a LOT more than we think we do. We all want to believe we’re rational animals, but underneath it all, we’re animals in the jungle, reacting to patterns, stimuli, and our gut.

So here we are, without our ecosystem of platforms and channels, trying to reach and convince the rational brain that ours is a good choice of employer. And we wonder why this is so hard. It’s because all of our messaging seems targeted to the wrong part of the brain. We’re not talking with the boss. We’re talking with a gatekeeper.

Intuitive decisions are intensely complex. They seem to be based on looking at a lot of data across a spectrum of sources, absorbing it passively and actively, and seeing meaning within relationships to create a… sense of an answer.

There is a lot of research on how people make immediate judgments on people they’ve never met and how often those snap judgments are accurate. There’s a deep dive into how a professional horse better is able to regularly and accurately judge which horses are more likely to run well, beating odds makers over and over again.

Think about how we react when we see a Jackson Pollack painting. Or Picasso’s Guernica. Or a Rothko. These are messes of paint that have very tenuous relationships with “reality.” And yet when we see them, we feel something. When Rothko paints a slightly sloppy red square, what makes us feel? The shape? The shape within the frame? The shade of red? That one brush stroke in the corner?

What we’re learning is that individual data points aren’t what drive intuitive decisions. We see patterns in the whole. Our eyes take in WAY more information than our brains rationally process, but that information is informing us nonetheless.

People don’t fall in love with a company because of a line in a job posting. Or a hero photo on the career site. Or that video of a hiring manager. Or that specific benefit. Or the way a career site is laid out.

Prospects see more than those data points, like seeing how the information is laid out. Is DEI statement at the top or the bottom? Do the claims and promises in the DEI statement reflect the leadership team? Does the site feel like it’s trying to help me understand or broadcasting its own hype? Do benefits seem lazily defined or is there detail to create shape? What information is missing? How can a company that talks about how much it care for its employees on the career site seem to take so little consideration in actually describing the job? What does the news say? Review sites? Friends? Do people who work there post much on LinkedIn? Does it look forced and scripted?

People will not think you are a great place to work because you say you’re a great place to work. They think you’re a great place to work if you have all the telltale signs of a place where people like working.

As George Clinton once intoned, you can’t fake the funk.

So stop thinking in terms of data points and think more in terms of how people absorb information, the relationships between claims, the messages seen between the lines.

Don’t draw a blueprint. Paint a Rothko.

Go for the gut.

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My new book, Employer Branding for Small Business is inching closer to completion. (Why do projects like these feel like they are racing at full gallop for 80% of the process but crawl for the last 10%?)

I’m going to be starting my first giveaways in a week, so go join the waiting list for your chance to win.

***This Newsletter Contains No ChatGPT***

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