Linkfest 🏮💡 EBH

Like Lobsterfest, but you won't need a bib. Unless you want one. You do you.

I’m thrilled to see how many people who took one of our previous LinkedIn classes on content strategy and advocacy are coming back for more! If you want a stronger, easier, and more effective content plan for September (and have $25 in your learning and development account), then I know what you’re doing August 16th!

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Let’s get to the links!

STRATEGY AND BRAND
🏮 Your brand strategy can’t be backward-facing. It has to see the future. In fact, it has to predict the future. Because if you want that future, you’re going to “buy” the brand. Another classic from Jasmine Bina.

DIFFERENTIATION
💡 What can you learn by looking at 30+ biotech career sites? For one thing, everyone’s copying from each other.

MAKING THINGS ‘BETTER’
🏮 Rory Sutherland has made the point that most of what passes for “disruption” these days is looking at a situation and defining it such that tech can more readily solve it (how you define a problem determines how you solve it). The example is of a doorman at a hotel. If you think the job of a doorman is to open and close doors, then an automatic door is way cheaper. But the automatic door isn’t going to make people feel fancy and exclusive entering that $500/night hotel. The door opener can’t provide directions or hail a cab. It can’t keep an eye on people loitering by the entrance. Tech is great at distilling things to a very specific essence and then proving a solution for it, ignoring all the other ancillary solutions.

Why bring this up? Well, it sure feels like TA tech has succumbed to the doorman issue. In an effort to make applying and candidate experience “smooth,” we’ve eliminated all the human touch points. Sure, it’s “faster” and “cheaper” (sorta), but we’ve defined the problem as “how do we make this easier for ourselves?” rather than, “how do we make this better for the candidate?” The end result? 42% of people will reject an offer (not ignore a recruiter, but reject an offer) because of the candidate experience.

GET PUBLIC
💡 From Recruiting Brainfood, see what a truly open organization looks like.

VALUE-FIRST
🏮 HR has been pigeonholed as a cost center, the team who exists to limit risk. In the future, that won’t be enough. HR will need to learn to create value. (Sound familiar, recruiting and employer branding?)

HOW DO PEOPLE FIND YOU?
💡 The age of search engines is ending. People are more likely to discover and learn about you via social media than Google. Are you ready for what’s coming?

FLEXING
🏮 Setting aside the news that Zoom is calling its people back into the office (in related news, Nike is asking people to sit more and Apple thinks people stare at screens too much 🙄), there still seems to be debate as to whether WFH is over. It isn’t. Every company isn’t going to go 100% WFH, but flex time is pretty much the reality at everyone company at which that’s feasible. More to the point, companies have (finally) figured out that the best way to hire is to offer remote and flex options. Here’s the data.

RECRUITING REVOLUTION
💡 “It’s a game of juggling cats.” The things I say on podcasts surprise even me.

🎪 There are 2,000 articles in the link archive!

“As no two people see the world the same way, all trips from here to there are imaginary; all truth is a tale I am telling myself.” - Brion Gysin

“The camera sees everything at once. We don’t.” - David Hockney

“When do I see a photograph, when a reflection?” - Philip K Dick

I love it when a team books a class together!

Yesterday, a team of six booked my "Build a Strategy from Scratch” webinar. Imagine how much stronger your TA team would be if your team took this class together, traded notes, brainstormed on what you learned and made it real?

$25 to develop a future-proof skill. Check it out!

***This Newsletter Contains No ChatGPT***

-James Ellis [LinkedIn] [Website]

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