taking too long
And hhat Rick Rubin, Steve Albini and Brian Eno teach us about employer branding
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What if they could see the ROI of investing in your employer brand?
Because all of that is possible. All it takes is answering nine TA questions to find out what kind of financial impact a strong employer brand can have on your company.
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To anyone who’s ever done the heavy lifting of building an employer brand, this scenario may feel all too familiar:
Company: We’d like an employer brand! We need to hire a lot of people to staff up our new [office, location, function, acquisition] and we think an employer brand will greatly benefit our ability to do so.
EB person/consultant/agency: Great! We’ll follow our standard process of internal and external data collection with a bunch of 1:1 interviews with leaders and execs to understand why you think your company is great, followed by a few focus groups to pressure test the brand before the final delivery.
Company: That’s what we’re paying you for! We’ll connect you with someone internal who can schedule all the meetings.
EB’er: Fantastic!
Time passes, in which meetings are cancelled and take a month to re-book, focus groups happen but some of the people in those focus groups leave, two execs who you’ve already interviewed leave and everyone thinks its inappropriate to interview the two new leaders because they don’t know much about the company yet, but someone thinks it’s useful to get their feedback once they’ve been in the role for one or two months, and someone in one of the focus group makes a stink that the brand doesn’t perfectly encapsulate their specific experience and you need to go back and tweak (again). Oh, and one of the execs would like a shot at letting someone they know review the draft and offer notes before the project is allowed to be completed.
EB’er: Okay! After six months of countless meetings, interviews, reschedules and drafts, we’re ready to present the employer brand!
Company: Yeah well, one, the exec who hired you doesn’t work here any more and two, we’re not hiring anymore. So just give us the brand deck and we’ll call you when we decide this is useful to implement.
EB’er: 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
This is NOT an unusual story.
Very often, the company that begins an employer brand project is often NOT the company who actually receives the finished product.
Why do employer brand projects take so long? A few reasons, many involving executive egos and doing enough visible labor to justify a price tag, but a big one is that buyers of employer brand/EVPs think they are buying something… “big.”
Big as in, “This will define our recruiting message for the next five years.”
Big as in, “Once we apply this to our career site, we can ignore it for years.”
Big as in, “We can check this box and forget about TA for a LONG time.”
Doesn’t sound good, does it?
Trying to design an employer brand that takes every little part of the company into consideration (you know, the parts that are always changing, evolving, losing and hiring new people) and deliver a static idea that can be used over and over for years is asking a LOT.
Maybe that’s why so many employer brands are so bland and meaningless.
Building something big and static is like taking a photo of the ocean: It only really looked like that for the split second the photo was taken, and has since been changing every second thereafter.
The way most companies thing about developing an employer brand is akin to trying to put together a nice vacation and planning what you’ll do and eat ahead of time. Weather won’t mess up your trip? Mechanical issues won’t get in the way? Opportunities to have more fun won’t make themselves apparent?
As Mike Tyson said, “Everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
What if instead, you planned to get there and see what looked good? Taking advantage of surprising opportunities, not getting so locked into a plan based on imperfect information that we miss what we’re trying to achieve,
This is a more agile approach. Build a brand direction that makes what the company offers more clear and interesting right now, and adjusting and tweaking in parallel with how the company is changing.
Don’t over-engineer it because you think you have to deliver something “right” that will stay static for years. Something in stone that cracks at the first seismic shift instead of something where changes within the company can be felt in subtle ways by the candidates.
So when you think about the employer brand that will make an impact, why not build something that makes it clear who the company is right now instead of one day in the future?
🛠️ We’re all worried about marketing to prospects to make them candidates. Meanwhile, consumer marketing is spending more and more of its time talking to people AFTER the sale. Is there something to be learned here? »
🥿 The small things matter »
👔 Podcasts to support your company’s employer brand? »
🛠️ Personalize the candidate experience? Yes? Dear [first_name]? No. Understanding the intersection of what your company offers (that you can’t get other places) and trying it to what they want? Absolutely. »
🥿 There will always be friction in the recruiting process, so it can’t be truly eliminated. BUT! That doesn’t mean people FEEL the friction in the same way »
👔 Yes, culture is your behaviors. And one of the best ways to measure it is to look at your meetings »
🛠️ Reimagine success at work »
🥿 The work is never just “the work” »
👔 How to tell your all your customers and prospects that you absolutely don’t understand why they buy from you in just 68 seconds »
🛠️ Don’t let your creative spark go out »
🥿 Chaos Packaging: Is it a gimmick? Yes! Does it force you to think beyond the received wisdom and inherent expectations to see brand new possibilities »
👔 No, it’s true. Everyone hates Workday »
🏛️ All 2,400+ (five years worth!) articles from this newsletter are in a searchable archive. Go get ‘em!
Employer branding is a weird job. Here you are, possibly responsible for how thousands and millions of people view the company based on any number of touch points (real or imagined). You need to nudge people’s perceptions without being ham-fisted (what’s that line about how everyone likes to buy but no one likes being sold to?) so that connect to a core idea.
Best/worst of all, you have very limited budget or reach with which to make that happen.
Like I said, it’s a weird job.
And I see a lot of parallels between employer brand work (stewarding how people see your company without really directly interacting with them) and being a music producer.
Music producers are those people who sitting behind the engineer (who is the person who is twiddling the dials and sliders) who’s job is it to make the music the best it can be.
Some producers are former musicians (See: Brian Eno, Mark Ronson and Jack Antonoff) and some can’t play music at all (See: Rick Rubin). Some like to be the ones pushing the sliders and some are more like consultants. Some move in with the band and end up playing on the record, and some show up once or twice a week to comment on what they hear.
There are a million ways to be a music producer just like there are a million ways to build an employer brand.
This idea is top of mind because this week Steve Albini passed away. If you don’t know who he was, I totally get it. He was a musician/engineer/producer (he preferred to say he “recorded” bands rather than “produce” them) who mostly made indie albums in a deeply raw way. He’s the reason Nirvana’s In Utero doesn’t sound like Nevermind, which was a bit more polished thanks to Butch Vig’s more “traditional” approach to production.
Links:
How Steve Albini changed rock music, in 12 essential songs »
The Problem with Music »
Read the remarkable proposal letter Steve Albini sent to Nirvana »
Steve’s philosophy was that the music business was a scam and his job was to find ways to just make the most honest music he could. That meant being better than his better-funded and better-networked peers. He knew the subtleties of this mic or that board, and made decisions designed to get the most out of any recording, especially because he wasn’t there to drop his own guitar solo into the song like some might. He was always slightly removed from the work itself.
Compare that to Brian Eno, who despite being a deeply mediocre keyboard player, has produced the best stuff to come out of David Bowie, U2, Talking Heads, and Devo. His approach is completely different. He thinks in systems.
The three rules for complex systems:
a rule of generation
a rule of reduction
a rule of maintenance (or a tendency to persist). - Brian Eno
He seems to see his job as the guy who says, “what if you switched instruments?” or “What’s something core we could remove and see what happens?” He’s changing the inputs and seeing what happens. Again, he isn’t telling the bassist what to do, he throwing a well-considered wrench into the workings to get a band to a place it couldn’t on its own. Like an employer brander who isn’t trying to make a company what it isn’t, he’s trying to make something great out of what exists.
And there is Rick Rubin who, aside from bring hip hop to white/suburban audiences (well, let’s be fair, Run DMC and LL Cool J had something to do with it, too), he produced some of the best stuff Tom Petty, Johnny Cash, The Avett Brothers and Red Hot Chili Peppers ever did (and Jay-Z’s 99 Problems). But he doesn’t play music. (For reference he played crappy guitar solos on the first Beastie Boys album.) He’s the guy who listens to a track and asks, “is this what you want it to be? What would better sound like?”
Beware the assumption that the way you work is the best way simply because it’s the way you’ve done it before. - Rick Rubin.
He produced by setting higher expectations and giving you space to find a way to meet them. His talent is that he has a great ear and knows when something is “worth putting out” and when it still needs work.
Isn’t part of employer branding standing with one foot in the company and one foot out of it to see the company as candidates do?
And remember, these people aren’t there to play the music, they are there to make the music the best it can be, just like what we do.
And don’t forget, most music producers aren’t famous names. They get buried in the credits next to the person who “masters” the final product. Sound familiar?
So tomorrow, don’t walk into work as the employer brand manager or specialist. As a test, think of yourself as the brand’s producer.
What are you going to do to get the most out of that brand?
Want proof a strong employer brand only takes three weeks?
Because I’ve got three process case studies that prove it.
A 300-person manufacturing company
A 400-person construction company
An 800-person video game company (new!)
Just reply to this email and we’ll set up time to talk through them, and show you exactly how close your company is to having a strong employer brand that will impact your company’s bottom line.
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***This Newsletter STILL Contains No ChatGPT or AI***