The Prediction

🔮 I just got my crystal ball back from the shop!

Employer brand bingo: When your company wins, you’re actually losing.

It’s not that employer branding is dumb/dull/fluffy/meaningless. It’s that bad and weak employer brands aren’t saying anything worth reading, remembering, or acting on.

If you’re ready to talk about what a truly differentiated and strong brand can help your company accomplish, check out Employer Brand Labs.

[Sponsored]

10-15 years ago, we we still living in a world where employer branding simply meant, “giving candidates a reason.”

It wasn’t a very high bar. If you’re younger than 40, it’s the only world you’ve ever lived in. You might not remember a world before employer branding, where companies posted that they had a job and that they fully expected people to all but bow and scrape to be considered for it.

It was a world where having a job on offer was the sole source of power in the candidate/company relationship, so the idea of a company having to give a “reason” was almost earth-shaking.

That was the world I entered when I started in employer branding (though that wasn’t the term I used at the time). I watched from the inside as massive company after massive company would sit in the agency’s boardrooms to be told that posting the job on job boards simply wasn’t enough.

This began to shift 8-10 years ago. That’s when we started talking more about candidate experience, social recruiting, Glassdoor scores, awards, and content marketing. Employer brand moved from “provide a reason” to “become an employer of choice.”

We went from giving people a reason to consider our company (however paltry, thin, and UNcredible that reason may have been) to trying to look good.

Since then, we have been awash in slicker and glossier career sites, ginned-up advocacy, testimonial videos of people saying how great the company was, microsites, quote cards, CEOs telling us how great the company is and how much they care. It’s a period where everyone touts their Culture and Purpose (without defining them, of course). Recruitment marketing agencies went from selling seats on LinkedIn and negotiating ad prices to building websites and talking about candidate perception.

And we’re shifting again.

More and more TA leaders are looking at the arms race of “looking good” for what it is: a way to spend a lot of money and not really compete with bigger companies who can afford to out-spend them.

Employer branding has become synonymous with porcine lip stick: costly, complex, and who’s only obvious outcome is to make the company ever more dependent on agency creative and account management.

So here’s my (two) predictions for 2025:

One: Employer Branding is becoming a bad word. Leaders often see it as fluff, rose-colored glasses, lip stick-smearing, and all of it expensive. You would do well at work to stop using the term except amongst friends.

Two: The idea of employer branding will be all about differentiated value: How are you not like them? How do you facilitate choice? How to do you build monopolies of what you offer and find ways to actually compete less instead of more?

Success for your work will come when you let go of 2019 thinking (higher review scores, more people “talking” about us on social media, making a perfect career site that never seems to get updated, etc) and focus on what the company needs: great talent who “gets” what you offer and wants it. That means thinking less about looking good and more about making it crystal clear how your company is different.

Focus on this idea and you’ll find your work performs better, and you’ll be in a better position to show leadership your value.

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It’s time for me to stop being coy…

This is the last email from The Change Agent. Why? Because something way way way better is on it’s way.

Bryan Adams (of Ph.Creative and Happy Dance fame) and I are teaming up to help you get your seat at the table. How? By talking less and delivering more.

Imagine that every week Bryan and I sent you something immediately useful. Maybe it’s a script to help you talk with your CFO about budget. Maybe it’s a guide to building your personal brand. Maybe it’s a series of examples for demonstrably better outreach emails. Maybe it’s a checklist for making sense of tool-buying. But every week, it lands in your inbox. And every week you are better armed and better prepared to do more than just survive, but to show the company and leadership how important talent acquisition (and you!) is to the company.

It’s about helping TA show off its value to business, like people-focused MBA. Hence, PeopleMBA.com.

Since you’re already subscribed here, you’ll be subscribed there. Look for more info in the next week and we get set to launch Jan 14th!

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🎁 How to turn a competitor’s strength into a weakness (April Dunford for the win! Also, you would be very well served by reading her books, just sayin’) »

🎁 When you’re doing your recruitment marketing planning, keep the following phrase in mind: The Mainstream is Fringe, and the Fringe is now Mainstream »

🎁 The coolest job in tech is at a bank? This smells like the final eulogy for “FAANG is where everyone wants to work!” »

🎁 Inside the four-day workweek experiment »

🎁 The 18 Laws of Employer Branding now free on YouTube »

🎁 The year the memes took over reality – and marketing followed »

🎁 The year creators took over »

🎁 The state of design in four parts (you think EBers argue a lot…) »

🎁 This isn’t directly applicable to TA/EB, but I love it when people have that moment when they realize “the way we’ve done it isn’t working!” and try to rethink something basic, like trying to make shopping fun again »

🏛️ All 2,600+ (five years worth!) articles from this newsletter are in a searchable archive. Go get ‘em!

“The only rules worth following are the ones you write yourself.”
- Jasmine Bina

As I bring the curtain down, I have one more thing to bring up.

I’m writing another book. And this time, I’m doing it right.

That means letting people like you see the work in process, asking for help on where the work should go. I want to build something truly meaningful for you and our industry. Something that changes minds. Something that makes people say, “oh shit!” every ten pages.

Would you like to be a part of this process? If you’re the sort of person who reads this far, you’re the person who’s advice I want.

Here’s the outline of the book. I would love it if you added your commentary to it. What’s missing? What problems do you have that you would expect this book to help with? What would a book have to have to make you say, “oh shit!” out loud when you read it.

Unlike my previous book, I fully expect this project to take 6+ months, so your feedback will keep me on the right path.

Thank you!

-J

***This Newsletter Contains No ChatGPT***

-James Ellis [LinkedIn] [Website]