Standing in the Way of Control*
Is your employer brand punk enough?
“It was amazing! I kept getting pings on Teams from people saying “He’s so great! This is amazing!” Etc. The overall explanation of how we need to differentiate and then digging into their questions and real world examples got the creative juices flowing. You kept it engaging and fun and I got a lot of great feedback about that too.”
Keynotes, AMAs, team meetings, featured guest on stage, on Zoom, it doesn’t matter. I love getting people excited about employer branding and it can make hiring, marketing and comms better.
Let’s talk about how you can bring me in next year: jamesellis.us
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In the last 30 years or so, “punk” as a term has come to mean a lot of things. It means a certain level of rawness, it means DIY, it means a lack of expertise, or even a loud or garish quality.
And there’s a lot of truth in those ideas.
But like blind men touching an elephant, they are facets of the larger idea.
I was listening to a new podcast called “Destroy! The Influence of Punk” featuring an interview with artist and album sleeve designer Peter Seville (He’s a legit genius. See: Joy Division and New Order covers). It was a great conversation, listening to a legitimate artist talk about their process and thinking in the middle of the punk movement. And something struck me.
The way Peter talks about it, punk isn’t just an ethos or a way of doing things. It is the willingness to take control. In the 1970’s it was taking control away from a overbearing British government and a sense of hopelessness. It was saying to the modern music establishment (think: disco, ELO and the highly-produced and highly-polished commercialized music of the time), “this doesn’t sound like us. this sounds like we’re being sold to. And we’re not having it.”
And so, they took control of their own popular culture. They started bands. They made magazines. They made their own clothes. They started record labels. They launched music venues and clubs.
They took control.
There have been many many many examples of this punk ethos since then, from 1980’s indie music (see: REM, Talking Heads, Husker Du), 1990’s grunge (Nirvana was punk, folks) and movies (El Mariachi, Blair Witch Project) and into the digital era (anyone can make their own website, anyone can start a label, anyone can publish a book). But it’s all about rejecting the existing systems of power and taking control.
And I’d suggest that employer branding fits right into this approach.
Here’s a scenario:
Company A spends $200k on an EVP (not a record, I assure you). The CEO who signed off on the budget promotes it regularly because it centers on how much the company cares about its customers.
Then a minimum-wage front-line worker takes a video of himself standing in the shredded lettuce. Or talking smack about the “stupid customers.” Or how they are expected to upsell customers on expensive things they don’t need. Or they make fake accounts to meet their quotas. And, as is often the case, the video goes viral.
So what’s your employer brand?
The $200k EVP that leadership says it is?
Or the video made on a phone by the lowest person on the corporate ladder?
Is it the claim made by management? Or is it the actions taken by employees?
And when the aspirations and claims of management come into conflict with the actions of the rank and file staff (AS THEY SO OFTEN DO), who wins?
What many people think of as an employer brand is actually the attempts of leadership to influence how their company is seen.
And seen through that lens, a six-figure price tag seems sensible.
But it is a doomed endeavor. Your brand is is far more directly controlled by the people in the jobs, middle management, and former employees, who are trying to tell a more authentic story about the company.
And that’s real employer brand: Understanding the reality, not to paste on layers of grease paint and garish lipstick on the pig, but to find what makes the company interesting, unusual, different from someone’ other options.
Employer brand is punk: rejecting what is given and looking at the work, the culture and the management with clear eyes.
Employer brand is punk: it isn’t about how much you spend, but how much feels real.
Employer brand is punk: giving more power in telling a company’s story to those who don’t see the inside of the executive washrooms.
Why? Because they already have that control.
*In case you are unfamiliar with the headlines’s source material:
So! It’s been a bit, hasn’t it? I know. I’ve been busy. And I think you’re going to like what’s next because of how it will help YOU.
What’s the NUMBER ONE CHALLENGE TA Leaders like you face? What’s the thing they complain about more than anything else?
Getting their seat at the table.
What if there was a… thing where you could get good advice on how to get your seat at the table and a download (a script, a template, a guide, a model, etc) to actually help you make it happen?
In a few weeks, that’s exactly what I’m building (with a partner who will be named later). I’ve seen the drafts and I am intensely excited for you to see it when it’s ready. I really think it will make you obviously more effective at work.
It’s a project that is effectively the next step in what The Change Agent was all about And as a subscriber, I’ll be adding you automatically to this new project, so you won’t miss anything.
Stay tuned!!!!
🎁 Hat tip to Hung Lee for sharing this unflinching article about the 16 recruitment inefficiencies draining your TA budget »
🎁 The Only Prediction That Matters to Me as a Brand Strategist in 2025 (Jasmine Bina continues to uncover the meaningful culture shifts we live but done’t see) »
🎁 The work “enshitification” is hands-down my favorite word going into 2025. And this article on the “Resisting the Enshittification of Work” is part of the reason »
🎁 What if instead of “personas” we started to think in terms of “subcultures”? »
🎁The future belongs to job hoppers (damn right it does) »
🎁 It’s just me talking on Top Source Talent. It’s video, so you’ll have to just avert your eyes from my face or something »
🎁 This isn’r really EB/RM/TA focused, but it is fascinating none the less: There are businesses (a lot of them, it seems) who realize how painful breaks can be and carter to the recently dumped »
🏛️ All 2,500+ (five years worth!) articles from this newsletter are in a searchable archive. Go get ‘em!
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