Why the Law of Fit Works 🪢🪢 EBH

Find the overlap between company, role and person

Can I help you with something? Is there an employer brand question or challenge you’re facing that you think my experience can help with? Whether its how to develop a brand, how to sell it internally, or how to activate it, I’d love to find a way to help.

Let’s talk about it!

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[Here’s the first half of this article from Monday]

Why this works

Good hiring isn’t about getting more applications (Law of Quality), but about finding the overlap between company, role and person. You can’t think of quality hires as commodites, something that can be swapped interchangeably like a screw or a light bulb with equal results, it becomes clear that we may have over-indexed on “finding the right person” while all but ignoring the thinking needed to define the role and the company.

Ahhh.. but you may be thinking to yourself: What do you mean? We have job descriptions and postings to define the role, and we have the career site and marketing to define the company.

But do they, though? What percentage of job postings are stolen from other job postings or even other companies? How can you be describing the role using language designed for other roles at other places? And the answer is: you aren’t. 

So we aren’t describing the job. Okay. Are we describing the company? 

Not really. Very very very few companies have a meaningfully distinct brand. What’s the difference between AstraZeneca and AbbVie? If you look at their career sites… not much. What about the difference between PwC and KPMG? Again, you’d need a microscope and years of experience in the industry to find daylight between them.

Over-indexing on the candidate is a natural extension of the company having all the power in a hiring relationship. Before 2015, the company that had the job on offer had way more power in the relationship than the candidate. It didn’t matter what the difference between KPMG and PwC was because it’s not like the candidate was getting offers from each and trying to weigh their options. 

This is why employer branding is necessary to fill the gap and provide the perspective that makes this real.

You might do a great job listing bullets to accurately describe the job (and let’s be clear: employer branding has a lot to offer in the job posting creation process), but the employer branding describes the company, providing the context for all those bullets. While job posts are meant to deliver some kind of value to the candidate even when stripped of all formatting and shared at a third location (e.g. job board), the employer brand shapes the perception.

The textually identical job posting from Twitter is NOT the same as the job posting from Moderna. The brand matters.

Without the brand, you’re just a restaurant with a sign that says “WE HAVE FOOD!” and wondering why no one is ordering anything.

Where this falls apart

Yes, there are plenty of places where commoditized talent isn’t just the norm, but is in fact, preferable. Look at McDonald’s. Every burger, from hoof to burp, is run through a rigorous process, from ensuring cows have proper medication, to testing grind size and fat content, to equipping restaurants with that apply the exact right amount of mustard or mayo on a burger, to a centralized point of sale system. All of which ensures that while it is very hard to mess a burger up, there’s not much chance for a single person to add their stamp on things, to make the burger better.

In places like these (and please excuse the use of a “burger flipper” as my example here), talent is truly commoditized and the employer brand has less of an impact. 

Examples

Two years ago, it came out that junior Goldman Sachs analysis were working 100-hour work weeks. At the time, it seemed like a PR nightmare, that no one would ever want to work at this place that normally has hundreds, if not thousands, of applications per opening.

And at almost any other company, that would likely be true.

Why wasn’t it true at Goldman Sachs? Why did a well-shared story like that not decimate their recruiting? Because every single person who applied knew full well that that was what was expected of them. 

Goldman Sachs is not a place for feet-on-the-desk daydreaming or taking a it’s-my-birthday-so-I-came-in-late break. It is a place where you push yourself like you’ve never pushed yourself before. You don’t join GS because of their mission or discussions of work/life balance. You join because you know that if you work your butt off, there is a pile of gold at the end of this rainbow. 

You don’t join GS to learn. Or to meet people. Or to feel supported. Or because it has some clear social good.

You work there because the value transaction with the company is crystal clear: you give us the whole of your twenties and much of your thirties and in return we’ll make you rich.

It’s not just about what the company wants. About 8 years ago, GS launched an app to help people prepare to apply. Not interview, to apply. They created checklists and processes that ensured that anyone who applied knew full well what they were getting into. The definition of the expectations of the role and the working culture was spelled out in ways that your usual “a paragraph of boilerplate from legal and 17 bullets that look generic” job posting can’t begin to match.

They did everything possible to ensure the company and the role were clear. It was up to the candidate to decide if that’s the kind of thing they wanted.

They were doing their part to create a fit.

(And if it matters, anecdotally, I have heard that GS has had no problems attracting people who want to work there despite the article.)

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***This Newsletter Contains No ChatGPT***

-James Ellis [LinkedIn] [Website]

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