📰 The Law of Options 🪢 EBH
Anyone who tells you there's one way to do something is selling you something.
Why should you (or your boss) take a one-hour course on strategy?
Strategy is how you make the resources you already have work better for you.
If you’re like many companies, expectations for how many people you’ll hire next year are going up while your budget stays flat (or worse). How will you accomplish your objectives? With a better strategy.
In one hour, you’ll learn this critical to make you more valuable (at this company or your next one). The live session is Wednesday at the discounted price of $25. Don’t miss it.
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The Law of Strategy
The Law of Focus
The Law of Perception
The Law of Ownership
The Law of Impact
The Law of Desire
The Law of Quality
The Law of Fit
The Law of Clarity
The Law of Subjectivity
The Law of Localization
The Law of Activation
The Law of Options
For a very (very) long time, Glassdoor told companies that it held a magic (and proprietary) formula about whether you had a “great” company to work for or not. It was a formula that resulted in a single number between 0 and 5, which we were told was how we rated as an employer.
I’ve been pitched a dozen different products in the last six or seven years who have tried to tell me, “This is how you solve your employer brand problem.” Sometimes they were spamming/broadcasting tools, sometimes they were chatbots, sometimes they were reputation management tools, and sometimes they were video tools.
Look at the different skills “employer branders” bring to the table. Some are writers, some are videographers, some are narrative storytellers, some are visual designers, some are social media experts, some are ad builders, some are project managers, some are political creatures, and some are strategists.
What should all this tell you? That there are almost infinite paths toward making your employer brand create change.
Whatever your situation, whatever your goal, there is no one way to make your brand more useful.
You have lots and lots of options.
Do you want to get more people to know about you?
Buy some ads. Tell better stories. Get more of your staff to share content. Write a job posting so interesting, people share it organically. Build a clever video and edit it to look like a hotshot YouTube content creator made it. Better yet, make a parody of what a hotshot YouTube content creator would made and post it on YouTube. Then share it with them. Create an industry event and invite industry publications to cover it. Write an article revealing something about your industry most people don’t know and pitch it to a reporter.
Do you want to change the way people who know you see you?
Find specific stories of how individuals have changed while working there and tell those stories (on social, in a video, on a blog post, in an outreach email). Define your mission to be less “woo woo” and more “achievable goal everyone has a hand in achieving” and build a campaign to share it more widely. Record an impromptu camera-phone video with the CEO about where the industry is heading and what makes your company suited for that future (don’t worry, you’re going to have to run it by comms and legal). Screengrab a Slack thread by leadership talking about how people should take care of themselves (see previous note about comms and legal). Work with fulfillment to put a note from the product lead (and signed by the product team, QA, and anyone who touched the product) into every deliverable thanking them for purchasing.
Do you want more people to want to work there?
Run a live virtual event where your product team talks about what they are building and the technology they use to build it. Write a series of social posts and get everyone on a team to commit to sharing, commenting, and engaging with the post to ensure the content became more credible over time. Make your hiring manager a social media rock star. Go spend $20 bucks and get all the cool-kid video effects and apply them like a drunken influencer. Create a video about an intern who was hired full-time that looks like a professional crew shot it. Sponsor anyone at your company who wants to run a local 5k and make sure they all have matching shirts. Go to an industry conference and live-tweet/thread the entire event (with an opinion).
Do you want to help people self-select out?
Tell a story about someone who on paper was a perfect hire and how the decision was made to not go forward and why. Give it a happy ending wherein the rejected person landed at a company better suited to them and you landed a better-fitting hire. Make the job posting shorter but more specific about what the job is intended to accomplish (rather than a list of skills). Instead of a “goofy” question when someone fills out the application, ask them, “If you could work at any company (and we didn’t exist) where would you work and why?”
When it comes to making your brand more effective, there are always options.
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What did you miss when Rachel and I built a September LI calendar?
Want to check out the archive of classes? They’re all here. Enjoy!
***This Newsletter Contains No ChatGPT***
-James Ellis [LinkedIn] [Website]
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