Misaligned. 🔬 (EBH#166: Everything Is Broken)
A brand at war with itself cannot stand.
The mission: Create a million employer brand thinkers (like you!)
Employer Brand Headlines is written by James Ellis. »» Yes, you should say hello! ««
First…
Do you feel like you’re all alone at work? Your boss doesn’t quite understand what you do, recruiters treating you like you don’t quite belong, marketers not making you a real part of the team?
I get that. Having owned employer brands in-house at three companies, I totally get that.
What you need is someone in your corner. A coach. Someone who can help you focus on the important stuff, navigate the politics and agendas, and just be someone in your corner.
Interested? Ping me at employerbrandnerd@gmail.com and we’ll figure out something that works for you.
The Big Idea
Does this sound familiar?
Executives and leadership want candidates to think of your company as a place of status, where simply working there should impress other people. When asked why a candidate would think that, they point to their own names and resumes on the leadership page on your website as their primary evidence.
The hiring manager wants candidates to think of your company as a place where they will be part of a great team, where people aren’t there for glory, but do amazing work as a team. This is despite the fact that people on their team are super competitive (which is obvious now that someone on a review site called the team “cutthroat”).
The HRBP wants candidates to see the company as a place where people can be innovative, because they read that’s what talent wants. They fill the job description with innovative-sounding terms based more on the articles they read than reality on the ground.
The recruiter wants candidates to think of the company as a place where talent can be fairly autonomous, can make their own decisions and be responsible for their own success. These kinds of claims are half-heartedly supported by hiring managers who, when asked about autonomy in the role, reply, “yeah, pretty much, I guess.”
This is an employer brand effectively at war with itself. A chair where each leg disagrees as to what they are trying to convey offering the structural integrity of a blanket fort.
Candidates can be tricky. Depending on the survey or article, it is easy to surmise that they all want status, high compensation, innovation, autonomy, a “good culture” (whatever that might mean today), a supportive team, social good and a meaningful mission. (And make no mistake: they want all those things until push comes to shove and have to make a choice.)
But making a claim for any one of those ideas when it isn’t validated by evidence offers no value. Making lots of claims that have no basis in reality is the surest path to attracting only the most desperate candidates, someone who doesn’t want this job, but is willing to accept any job.
One of the hardest, but most useful, parts of employer branding is creating internal alignment. Every part of the company supports the brand, so when they don’t agree, it all falls apart. Usually in a messy and public way.
Strategy Idea
The Tiny Difference. It’s a lot of fun to try and think how we can present our brand as radically different, the big ideas and ways we are reinventing the very notion of work and how work is done. The problem is, like laundry detergents, car insurance providers and mass-market coffee, there really isn’t much difference between options. So companies default to generic differences which are really just list of pleasantries (great culture, great people, great place, we promise!) to stick on a career site and call it a day.
Instead, find a tiny difference and magnify it. You’re a pharma company who cares about innovation and making lives better? Congrats, that’s every pharma company. But after that you offer a clear career progression? Or more line of sight to patients? A culture built on collaboration? Well, these are minor differences compared to their investments in innovation (measured in billions of dollars, often), but as no one else is talking about it, it creates an element of differentiation. It’s just enough to matter. All you have to do it establish your baseline around innovation and mission, then start leaning hard into that tiny difference.
Headlines
I hope everyone gets a chance to read Competing in the New Talent Market from Harvard Business Review.
It’s not that it is chock-filled with amazing ideas on the world of hiring. Far from it. HBR is something of a lagging indicator when it comes to the next wave of business. By the time HBR gets an idea and writes it up, it’s something that lots of companies are already pursuing. They don’t write about what could be, they only point to things already being done.
But what makes this article important is that your boss is reading it right now. And their boss is reading it right now. Their peers are reading it right now. It is the thing littering chairs in airline lounges and arrayed prettily in waiting rooms.
The things we talk about are becoming less futuristic and more real every day, and this is further proof. Throwing out a job-centered talent acquisition model, focusing on outcomes rather than pedigrees, creating impact through culture fit/add, none of these things are new.
Because they are the now.
This is like JFK giving his inauguration speech hatless: he didn’t kill the hat industry, but he was the lead speaker at men’s hat’s funeral. Not wearing a hat in such a public and important forum was the indication that the hat was old fashioned rather than the height of fashion. This article is throwing the first clod of dirt on the old way of hiring’s casket.
So the next time you encounter a leader who is unwilling embrace new thinking on hiring, who seems to be clinging to the past (but is in a position to block your work), share this article. Talk publicly about it. And if they don’t begin to change, they are telling everyone around them that they are happy to ignore the change around them, eroding their power and supporting your influence.
Also:
Programming Note
If you missed any of my interviews with tech recruiting experts like Jessica Rose and Shally Steckerl, they are living over on Clinch’s resource page. More to come!
Inside the fortune cookie
“Today, communication itself is the problem. We have become the world’s first over-communicated society. Each year, we send more and receive less.” - Al Ries and Jack Trout
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.
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:
Bob Dylan - Everything Is Broken
Everyone has a take on Bob Dylan. From hating his sometimes helium frog-like singing, to being just hippie-dippie protest subjects, its easy to hate on him. And no doubt, the idea of running through his catalog sounds like more work than anything. But every once in a while, he drops something great. Sometimes it’s something for a soundtrack (Things Have Changed) or something when he’s playing with other bands (see: Grateful Dead, Tom Petty, or The Band. But with this, it was on an album that felt like a last gasp of greatness after a string of shrug-worth releases.
This isn’t even the most popular track on the album. But from the very first quiet strums of the train-like guitar, it grabs you. This isn’t some cynic’s lament, but instead something you could drop into a cocktail party playlist without anyone raising an eyebrow. And it sounds great, thanks to has-been-whisperer Daniel Lanois). Enojy.
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:
