The incomplete thought. 🔬 EBH#163: We'll Be Together
You create more engagement when you let others fill in the missing parts
The mission: Create a million employer brand thinkers (like you!)
Employer Brand Headlines is written by James Ellis. »» Yes, you should say hello! ««
First…
We all know that all our companies have employer brands. The question is whether we are taking advantage of those brands to make an impact. One clear and obvious way is to get recruiters trained on how to use the brand.
That’s why I developed Employer Brand for Recruiters, a complete video course to teach recruiters how to level up what they do simply by understanding and using their employer brand properly.
I’m now offering group rates for companies who want to get a bunch of recruiters to take the course together. Interested? Ping me at employerbrandnerd@gmail.com.
The Big Idea
Let’s pretend you’re an 8-10 year old child.
Let’s further pretend that you really enjoyed watching some variation of Star Wars on the big screen (even if it was just a really large TV in your parents’ living room). It doesn’t matter if your version is Luke versus Vader, Anakin versus Jango Fett, or Rey versus Adam Driver (sorry, he always reads as “Adam Driver” to me in the movies), you’re in your bedroom, playing with some action figures and thinking about their adventures.
Let me ask you a question: Are you reenacting the movie?
Probably not. You’re playing out adventures that never happened on screen. Maybe in your mind Chewbacca and Mace Windu are searching for Boba Fett in the jungle. Maybe R2D2 is flying though space without a ship. Maybe Princess Leia is seeking revenge for Alderaan and has become a Kill Bill-like murder machine.
The reason these amazing adventures happen in your mind is because there’s space to allow it to happen. For most fans, the movies create a universe populated with aliens, mythology and history we only see through a tiny pinhole. Nine movies means 18+ hours of compelling action and storytelling, but not the complete ancestry of Bossk (the lizard bounty hunter that has 15 seconds of screentime), or the time Obi Wan meets Yoda for the first time. There’s lots of room for you to project your own imagination into it, allowing you to fall into it and play out your own versions of the story.
Star Wars is a complete story, but it has lots of incomplete thoughts.
And it is those incomplete thoughts that create long-term fans.
Like a song whose lyrics are hard to understand or a poem who’s meaning isn’t perfect clear, the incomplete thoughts create friction in our minds: what does it mean? That friction asks us to ask ourselves more questions, making us part of the story. Our minds leap to try and fill those gaps, thus making us part of the story.
Mark Rothko painted abstract rectangles of color. Standing before one, you might start wondering, “What do the rectangles mean? What do people see when they look at them? What do I see? Does the absence of clear meaning or intention force you to consider it via your emotions? Is this sparking an emotion in you? How can two rectangles create emotion?” A Rothko is a machine that creates a rabbit hole of questions leading to emotional change. That’s why they cost $50MM+.
This isn’t an excuse to keep your claims vague, to continue to pitch the same pablum like “We’re a great place to work” or “We’re innovative” or “We care about our people” without any evidence to back it up. Rather than engaging, those messages are saying vaguely positive things to fill space. They aren’t creating friction, encouraging readers to ask their own questions, to spark emotions. They are safe. They are harmless. They aren’t the poetry that causes someone to swoon.
Instructions, manuals and laws need to be perfectly clear. Your offer letter and your objective values should be crystal clear.
The reason someone stops what they are doing and visualizes a life-changing future with you is because you made them ask and answer questions in their own mind. You offered them an incomplete though to finish.
Headlines
There’s a lot of conversation stemming from the news that Tik Tok is a more widely used search engine than Google for a wide (younger) audience. We’ve gone so long with Google as the dominant means of searching (ignoring Amazon search for products and LI/FB search for people), that seeing a sea change in behavior throws people into a tizzy. This is the thinking that drives crazy ideas like “Tik Tok resumes.”
Addiction to a platform (regardless of which it is) is a game of short-term wins as you learn to optimize your actions to achieve outcomes, but long-term losses as you over-invest in a platform you don’t control. Ask anyone who remembers Facebook pulling the rug out from under company page owners 15 years ago when, after encouraging company page owners to grow their audience on FB, decided company page owns would have to pay for the privilege of actually reaching them (check and see if your organic reach is more than 3% and you’ll see what I mean).
Not to say you shouldn’t consider a Tik Tok strategy. Rather, consider why you want it, what it will achieve, and how it will support your larger talent strategy.
“For years, these people have been insisting that the circle of shareholder obligations can be squared by a sufficiently passionate belief in purpose. Can any of these companies seriously claim to be purpose-driven from this day forward? … it says something profound, and profoundly obvious, about purpose. There is no such thing as business purpose. There is no such thing as brand purpose. There is only human purpose.”
Also:
Quick Programming Note
I’m teaming up with Clinch for an 8-part webinar series, where I talk to employer brand and talent acquisition pros about what’s new in tech hiring. The next one is with a true “sourcer’s sourcer,” Shally Steckerl. We’ll talk about the world of tech recruiting from a sourcer’s point of view. Register here!
Also, I’m previewing my upcoming video course on doing your own competitive brand audits over at EB Stars (October 5th and 6th). Take a look at the full agenda here and then register here.
Inside the fortune cookie
“Any information which is common, after several repetitions, you cease to hear.” - Brian Eno
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Cheers and thanks!
-James Ellis (LinkedIn)
Where the subject line came from:
Sting - We’ll Be Together
If you know this song, you know it’s a pretty simple song. Wikipedia says Sting wrote it in a few minutes for a beer commercial. No, you didn’t read that wrong. And it kinda shows. Simple chord structure, simple intention, simple lyrics. Heck, he even cribs from another of his own songs for lyrics at the end.
For me, this thing thrives because of its production. Layers of sounds, layers of vocals, the synth bass, the three drummers, a pop producer just for this one song, Eric Clapton on guitar? C’mon! Annie Lennox as one of FIVE backup singers?!?! Now you’re just cheating. It’s like he knew he wrote a simple song and through sheer ego/bravado said, “I will force this song to be good through sheer willpower (and cash)!”
The video features Sting in his long-haired period playing two roles. What the what?! All on an album which, while fantastic, is also his least coherent. But I kinda adore Sting (before the lute album, to be certain), and this insanity is pure 1980’s. Enjoy.
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:
