Why The Law of Quality Works 💍💎💍 EBH

Shine bright like a diamond

One-half of your LinkedIn success comes from saying something interesting, something useful. But where does the other half of success come from? From how you leverage internal resources to amplify your message. That’s the subject of next week’s $25 webinar, where Rachel Kennedy show you how to get more out of your most important social media channel.

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[Read the first part in Monday’s newsletter]

Why this works

This is basic math. If I have a hundred donuts to sell, the faster I can sell those donuts, the sooner I can get to making more, meaning the sooner I can sell out of my donuts, the more money I will likely make over the course of a year because I am spending more time making donuts than marketing and selling them. As a good little capitalist, I want to sell the maximum number of donuts and maximize my return, so selling more and faster is the win.

But recruiting doesn’t operate by those rules. For every requisition you have, chances are, only one person can fill it. Let’s say you’re hiring a new director of sales. Are you going to hire the first person who applies? Or the first person who meets to core requirements? 

Of course not. You wait a week or four and sort the people who applied. There a huge value to the business in getting great people “in seat” as soon as possible, but that’s not how recruiting works. 

It’s not recruiting’s fault. Every recruiter has dozens of stories of showing the hiring manager the perfect candidate a few days after the job gets posted, only to hear the hiring manager say, “Yes, that’s great, but let’s see who else applies.”

Everyone in the process is attempting to maximize the quality of the candidate.

Where this falls apart

Non-employer branders hate this law. They reject the optics of focusing on quantity instead of quality as if their work was somehow inferior. But it isn’t. Their job is to increase sales by finding more people who will buy. 

Here’s proof: Marketers don’t talk about how they got the best lead. They talk about getting the most leads from a campaign. They don’t talk about how this work will get the best view, but how it will get the most views. 

Their only argument is that they care about quality in the shape of a “marketing (or sales) qualified lead” and that’s true. There is a threshold of quality leads must make to be seen as useful, but then they want as many of them it can find. It is still a game of quantity for them.

Flip it around: are recruiters and employer branders rewarded for finding one amazing candidate or ten? Talent is a relative thing: if you brought in ten perfect hires, the hiring manager would hire “the best one” and generally consider the rest “rejects.” Collecting ten perfect candidates instead of one or two provides almost no extra value.

Examples

You can see great examples of employer branding ignoring this law everywhere. They are always the brands without much of a point of view, the brands that epitomize “employer blanding” by trying to speak to everyone, trying to make the universe see them positively.

As we’ll see in the next law, employer brand isn’t served by being generically attractive. It needs to be attractive to someone specific, and broad pronouncements about how this is where you can do great work without defining what the work is, who the person is who will do great work or why this place isn’t like other places with similar statements.

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If you are enjoying this newsletter, make sure to check out the Resources page on Employer Brand Labs. Why? Well, it’s got lots of free stuff for you to check out!

***This Newsletter Contains No ChatGPT***

-James Ellis [LinkedIn] [Website]

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