What are you selling? 🔬 EBH

Because it determines your potential audience

There’s a lot of great research coming out of LinkedIn’s B2B Institute on how at any given time, only 5% of your total potential audience is actively “in-market.” That is, only 5% of the people who might ever want what you have to sell have raised their hand to say they are ready to download white papers, watch sales videos, listen to demos, collect information about various options, etc.

That means that 95% of the people who might buy what you sell aren’t interested at the moment. Send them white papers, share sales videos, and invite them to demos and they will not engage.

Without arguing over the exact 95/5% figure, recruiting works the same way. At any given time, 95% of the nurses, salespeople, designers, developers, or recruiters we could potentially hire aren’t looking for jobs. They aren’t on job boards. They aren’t watching your “day in the life” videos, and they aren’t looking at your career site or review pages. They aren’t “in-market.”

Focusing on people in-market makes a lot of sense. They have raised their hand to show that they are interested in your recruiting materials. They are actively looking for roles, and may be comparing companies and opportunities against one another.

Most importantly, once someone is in-market, not only are they easily reachable (they are the ones reading your jobs and looking at your career site), the job is to convert them from browser to buyer. This is a relatively easy process to measure.

Here’s the challenge. While there may be hundreds of people in-market who might be worth talking to, there are millions of incredibly talent folks who aren’t in-market and who you won’t reach using recruiting tools.

And as the labor market tightens, reaching people who aren’t in-market is critical for hiring.

But there’s another aspect at play here that is rarely talked about.

Let’s say you see a story about a company where every employee is encouraged to have their own side hustle (I’m thinking of a very specific company, but don’t tell Alex Her, okay? Thanks.). Perhaps you see a video about how someone is a marketer by day, but makes and ships 3d-printed coffee accessories on the side. This is encouraged because the company is all about helping their customers build businesses, and rather than being a slogan or marketing campaign, encouraging people to build businesses is just in their DNA.

Cool, right? It’s a great employer brand approach.

Even if you have no interest in building a side hustle, the story itself is really interesting. You’re going to remember that story, which might influence you to open that job posting when you’re looking for a new job.

More interestingly, is the idea that the story itself may have made you consider your own professional situation. It may have made you question, even for a moment, if you’d want a job where side hustles were encouraged. Perhaps it would spark a question in your mind like, “I wonder what else companies are offering their employees that I hadn’t considered before?”

This is the magic of employer brand content. It isn’t that it speaks to the 95% so that it influences them when they decide to put themselves in-market. It is how great brand content forces the issue, moving them into being in-market.

This is the power of employer brand thinking: it actively creates new talent audiences who would not normally consider looking for a new job.

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Employer Branding for Small Business is also a video course (and it comes with the full text of the book). It is available April 2nd! (Ping me if you want bulk rate pricing for your TA team.)

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This is THE employment brand playbook for small businesses. It’s a basic HOW TO and framework for every team looking to create, recreate or focus their employment brand. From examples to instruction, the book shares actual action plans with timelines for its readers to use as roadmap to success. I love seeing a book written for even the smallest and busiest of teams. Employment brand is critical for all organizations and all teams deserve support building this framework. James’ latest book is the book that provides that support.
- Rachel Cupples, Talent Strategist and Recruiter at Textio

Employer Branding for Small Business is available April 4: https://a.co/d/cK9WDZB

***This Newsletter Contains No ChatGPT***

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