Jabberwocky.🔬 (EBH#178: Breakout)

Saying words and conveying meaning aren't the same thing. The same is true for having something worth saying.

Jan 02, 2023

Mission: Create a million employer brand thinkers (like you!)

First…

Tomorrow (!), I am putting on a free webinar where I walk you through how to measure your own employer brand activation. Far from some academic exercise, this process will show you exactly what’s working on your own channels and what isn’t. This information will change how you see your content and, more importantly, improve your very next post. Register here!

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The Big Idea

Why do we write?

Obviously, we write to convey some bit of information. We write notes to say we’re out of hand soap. We write to label the leftovers. We write cards to say thank you. We write blog posts and books to teach others what we know. We write emails to make sure our team and leader understand the next step in the process. We write job postings to explain what the job is and (hopefully) why someone would be interested in it.

But beyond the documentation and delivery of information, writing has another purpose: to help our brains process information.

Have you ever had it happen where you needed to explain something to someone, maybe in an email or a Slack message, and found yourself at a loss? The idea and justification makes perfect sense in your brain, but as soon as you try to write it down, it isn’t nearly as clear. This thing you think you know and understand suddenly feels as solid as smoke simply because you are trying to writing it down.

"A modern professed thinker must, however, sooner or later in the process of thought, make the conscious effort of expression, with all its risks." - Graham Wallas (1921)

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means." - Joan Didion

The act writing things down has a magic quality as it forces us to see what’s in our mind. And in seeing it, we realize there are gaps, places where we gloss things over, and even places where we suddenly realize internal contradictions.

When I wrote Talent Chooses You, I had these moments a LOT. I still have them when I try to write a job posting, where my brain understands why this is an interesting job and why its attractive, but when its written down, it is yet another say-nothing list of bullets.

I bring this up because this week on LinkedIn, I had a lot of conversations about ChatGPT. My idea (half baked when I posted it, because I hadn’t spent any time writing it out) was that ChatGPT (the AI that can “write copy for you”) was a deeply problematic technology because it allowed us to skip the writing. If you only think of writing as the delivery of information, this wouldn’t be an issue. But skipping writing means we’re skipping on thinking.

In 1871, Lewis Carroll published the poem Jabberwocky as a part of Through the Looking Glass. The poem is filled with nonsense words, phrases and sounds Carroll made up that defy any lexicon to signify to the main character reading the poem that she was in a dreamworld, intentionally building word-shapes that had enough context to deliver information. Almost half the words in the poem are made up and without historical usage, and yet somehow when read, its meaning comes out.

ChatGPT is the inverse Jabberwocky. It is writing that is clear, that abides by all the rules of English. But it isn’t saying anything. It can’t. It’s job is to collect words that exist, mash them up until it LOOKS like writing. The computer has exactly NO sense of the words’ meaning. When it writes “the cat is black” it doesn’t know what a cat is. It doesn’t know what black looks like. Frankly, it doesn’t even understand the concept of “being.” All it knows is that it would be incorrect to say that “the black is cat” because it has never seen that phrase in use before.

Why should you or I care? Because thinking is what we do. No one hires you to post pictures and quotes on LinkedIn or jobs on job boards. They pay you to think, “how do I make this better?” They pay you to think, “What’s the best way to engage this candidate?” They pay you to think, “of all the things I could tell a candidate about this company/job, what would be the best message and channel?” They pay you to think, “why would this audience care about what we offer?”

I fear the separation of writing and thinking because writing is a part of thinking. You don’t REALLY know what you think until you write it down. When you let a computer write it for you, are you thinking? Do you even know what you’re thinking?

Now, in the course of my conversations, I have been all but accused of being a luddite, and told that I only dislike ChatGPT because I’m a consultant. I’m legitimately not sure which is more insulting. But I feel the need to be clear. I do not dislike ChatGPT for any reason other than it leads to thinking less. It lets us skip past the tough parts and jump straight to the pretty job post or social post. It lets us avoid questions of “was that useful? Could it have been better? Was that my intention?”

The job of employer branding is defining the way in which working there is different. It is the job of creating meaning in other people. You can’t do that by letting a computer steal other people’s words and glue them together.

When we ask the machine to write for us, we're skipping the part where we think. No mind, no writing. Writing as pattern recognition means there is no thought. So why would you want to write something without thought?

More to the point, why would we want to abdicate our own thinking?

Want to understand how well your employer brand is being activated? Request your free report here.

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Headlines

Another short list this week:

“Change breaks the brittle.” – Jan Houtema

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.

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Breakout - Swing Out Sister

Look, this might be the most polished pop song ever recorded. From the hyper-treated gated drums, to the overly-rounded corners on the synth bass, to the breathy back-up vocals to glimmering brass and layers (upon layers) of keyboard parts that just seem to take up space rather than move the song forward, this song is the finest example of corporate pop I’ve ever heard. Contrived and calculated, it’s like a motivational poster in audio form.

There’s something in music called the “trucker’s gear shift” where the song shifts its key up without changing anything else. The act of shifting the key up increases the emotional tenor. It’s a cheap trick which, once you hear it, you can’t miss it. It’s a trick this song employs three times! (Check out the video as it shifts at 1:55 and 3:02 and then in the fade out at 3:32, those cheeky monkeys!)

I can’t really make any claim that this is some great piece of art other than the fact that it just… works. It is a bit of fluff, but I kinda have to respect the craft of making such perfectly

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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