Why The Law of Ownership Works 🏆🏅 EBH

Changing your perspective gives you options

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Check out Monday’s edition to see the explanation of this law.

Why this works

According to the Law of Perception, the brand we seek to influence lives in other people’s heads, and is ultimately a construct of accumulated experiences, touchpoints and interactions with the company. 

Thus, all elements of the company are nudging the employer brand in various directions. What the recruiter says in the outreach email and how much customer service seems to care about their customer’s problems have equal weight and impact on the brand. 

Instead of thinking about a company as a series of semi-related functions, see it as a large organism, where attributes from one part impact the attributes from others. Imagine a giraffe or a deer with one leg shorter than the rest. That short shapes how well the animal can run, regardless of how strong the other three are.

When you are looking at an employer brand, you’re looking at the sum of an entire organization, even if the responsibility of the employer brand falls to talent acquisition, comms or marketing. What someone on the other side of the company does can have just a big an influence on what the public sees and feels about the company as thousands of dollars in ad budget and the planning of a dozen people. 

Where this falls apart

The obvious challenge with this law is that no matter how often you explain that every part of the company is shaping the brand, companies prefer to know exactly who can be blamed for problems. They are going to make one person or team responsible for the brand so that they have a single “throat to choke” so to speak.

No matter how diligent or organized, no matter how prescient, you will not be able to know everything a company is doing. The law means that part of your time managing the brand is going to go toward building space and slack in the system, giving yourself room to adjust and react to messes you can’t anticipate. 

This need to build in space and gaps will seem like a drag on your productivity, but as you are regularly interrupted by crises well beyond your scope and expected to react to them, that space will keep you from having to throw your more strategic projects by the wayside.

Examples

There are ample examples of companies making big claims about their employer brand, their cultures and their values to candidates, but not living those examples within the rest of the company.

We can start with companies who fly pride flags all over their careers page in June to show how inclusive they are, but then donate to politicians actively seeking to limit the rights of people in the LGBTQ+ community. When the company is talking out of both sides of its mouth, who is a candidate supposed to believe? The marketer or the executive cutting the check?

Of course, we have the companies who talk about how much they care about valuing women in the workspace but only offer the legal minimum of family leave. It doesn’t matter how many women are in the hero image on the career site if allowances aren’t made for the women and their families. 

Or the companies who talk about their dedication to innovative approaches, but ask you to retype your resume into the ATS after you’ve uploaded it. Sure, the company didn’t code the ATS, but they made the choice to be okay with outdated technology for candidates because… well because those people aren’t important to the company yet.

These examples are almost always negative: the company plays up how much it lives by its values as a marketing tactic, but then chooses to throw those values out the moment it becomes complex, painful, expensive, or politically expedient. So I won’t name names, but I suspect I won’t have to. We all know companies paint over the cracks (and worse) of the foundation with a coat of glossy paint.

That might work in consumer marketing, but in employer branding, the cracks always come through.

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***This Newsletter Contains No ChatGPT***

-James Ellis [LinkedIn] [Website]

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