The Law of Strategy ♛♘ EBH
How do you compete against much bigger and better-staffed companies?
For a very long time, when it came to warfare, the largest army won. It was simple math: each soldier was about as effective as any other, so having more meant you would win.
Every once in a while, someone would defy the odds. Rather than array their people in the “typical” way, they would try something different. Maybe they would put their weakest people in the front instead of the strongest. Maybe they would employ trickery to make it seem like they had more people than they did. Maybe it was a feint to the right and a strong attack to the left.
Sometimes it was as simple as choosing the battleground, like when the 300 Spartans faced off against thousands by forcing the far larger army through a mountain pass, negating the army’s strength and making the battle more of a one-on-one affair.
This is strategy: Making decisions about how to use your resources to achieve maximum impact. Whether it’s against an opponent across the battlefield or the dozens of companies against whom you compete for talent, you can (and should) make choices about how, who, when, and where you fight.
But classic recruiting feels much more like medieval warfare, where one army (mostly farmers and serfs) holding swords and pikes fought against another army (again, mostly of farmers and serfs) with similar tools. Line ‘em up, let ‘em rip. We look at recruiters similarly: few are “trained” in recruiting and have the same databases and outreach tools as every other recruiter in every other company. We line ‘em up and let ‘em rip.
It seems strange to think that we’ve optimized around this idea, that recruiting teams get better when they get bigger, or get “the latest tools.” And so TA leaders fight their fight in terms of headcount and budget.
Employer branding, at its core, is strategy: Who do we want to hire? Why do we want them? What do we offer? Why would they want that? What will they get out of working here? Who is looking for the stuff we offer? Where are they now and what do they get now? How are we different from other companies? Where do they look for information about jobs? How do we talk to people outside the funnel versus thus within it? What policies and news can we leverage to tell our story in a more credible way?
This isn’t letting ‘em rip. This is thinking about the creation of an advantage without more resources. This is about maximizing existing resources, sometimes by making the individual recruiter more effective, sometimes by seeing the bigger picture and creating resources from outside TA, and sometimes by defining and building a position that just makes the company more attractive.
Employer branding works best when it starts with that strategy and builds tactics and plans that execute the strategy. Sure, employer branding is building LinkedIn posts (tactic) and writing better job postings (tactic) and implementing a better referral program (tactics) and implementing your first CRM (tactic) and training hiring managers to use the brand talking points to attract great talent (tactic) etc. But those tactics without a strategy are noise, like your favorite book with chapters in random order. The words and sentences are the same, but the book is confusing rather than enthralling.
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If you’re building your social content calendar for July, do you post on the 4th of July? It’s on a Tuesday, so is Monday safe? If companies are doing defacto four-day weekends because it’s on the 4th, how do you adjust your publishing schedule on a platform like LinkedIn? Are there other holidays and national [blank] days you can take advantage of? Why should you anticipate that your audience is thinking about people with disabilities late in the month? How should you repurpose content to maximize impact in a month with a major holiday and when lots of people are starting to take vacations?
Creating a real content calendar for LinkedIn isn’t just “set it and forget it.” It requires deep thinking and strategy relative to the realities on the ground.
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If you’re interested in learning how to increase your offer acceptance rates, fill your pipeline and maybe fire your RPO agency, reach out! EmployerBrandLabs.com
***This Newsletter Contains No ChatGPT***
-James Ellis [LinkedIn] [Website]
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I love how you noted the tactics in the list. This will hopefully further remind people the difference between strategy and tactics.