Oct 11, 2021

⚡ Employer Brand Headlines: The "Fortress Around Your Heart" Edition (#114)

By James Ellis, Employer Brand Nerd • Issue #114 • View online

My mission: move the conversation around employer brand forward.

Employer Brand Headlines, brought to you by James Ellis

In this issue

The perfect brand?
What do candidates want?
Are you hiring people or personas?

The big idea

Having once made my living (more than once, in fact), “selling EVPs,” what I am about to say may seem… strange.

Despite all the time and effort put into an employer value proposition (and frankly, the same is true of any shape of same, whether you call it a brand promise or brand position or whatever), regardless of how much research and language polishing you do, there’s no right answer. There is no perfect brand.

This isn’t a “how can someone come in and know us enough to explain our brand to us?” argument (because, as your brand needs to reach external audiences first, you can’t read your own label from inside the jar). Nor is this an “it just takes the right approach/framework/model” argument (because the map isn’t the territory). This is something different:

Your company is always bringing in and losing people, both leadership and staff
Your business position is always shifting
Your competitors grow and shrink in market prominence
Your competitors are constantly launching new products and claiming new positioning
As you grow or shrink, your own position changes (you can’t pretend to be the leader when you’re the underdog and vice versa)
The socio-economic climate changes (things like George Floyd’s death are the seeds of thousands of new DEI departments all around the US)
The individuals themselves change (unless you’d like to argue that you are the same now as your 24-year-old self, in which case you are either a pretty lousy adult or should seek therapy)

Sure, many of these changes happen slowly, but collectively, they are real shifts happening 24/7 in directions we can’t predict or even see as they happen.

So I guess the question should be: how can the EVP you developed last year (or… shudder… in 2017) still be true??

We often get a little twee without our branding work (I know I do). We think about the costs and efforts it took to build that brand position. We see the scars and effort we put into that brand, and shudder at the idea that maybe we’ll have to do it all over again.

I’m not just talking about the hours and effort in research and focus groups it took to build it, I’m talking about the heartbreak when you had that meeting with someone you couldn’t say “no” to, who forced you to make a compromise you didn’t believe in, just to get buy in from a critical part of the business… Wait, now that you mention it, maybe it was never a perfect brand. Maybe it was a collection of compromises and imperfect perceptions, maybe it really was something we banged into a shape we knew we could deliver and push out the door.

And yet, we build infrastructure around that “perfect brand,” structure that is designed to resist change. We know that you use the word “investment” instead of “budget.” Or there are only two appropriate secondary colors you can leverage. Or that something the founder wrote years ago cannot be changed.

Is that all still true? Or do we decide it is true so we can focus our energies on what we think is possible? While it feels like we limit our scope to keep us sane, it might be that such limitations are what is holding us back.

Having launched the brand last year, you have effectively trained dozens or hundreds or thousands of people on the value and effectiveness of a strong employer brand. During your last go-round, you were blazing your own trail. But this time, when you return to the paths you made before, you might find more receptive audiences and that the fights are easier to win.

Your EVP isn’t right because your company keeps changing, but change is what allows for the opportunity to always be making a better brand.

Headlines!

Talent Shortages & Credential Inflation

If you read Blair Enns, you know that when a work contract is made, pricing is either “inputs-based” (hourly cost/materials plus margin, where the client bears the risk as you pay as you go), “output-based” (what the maker thinks it will cost to build, plus margin, where the risk is on the maker), or “value-based” (what is the value to the buyer? where the risk is spread across all). That’s really influenced by thinking about talent. If a company hires “A talent,” they pay a premium for the talent having accrued the experience/skill to do the job knowing they can walk in and do the role. If they hire B or C talent (or ‘new’ talent) they are sharing the risk that the talent won’t be able to do the job.

fotnews.futureoftalent.org • Share

Employees Today Want Jobs That Offer a Future and Good Pay

No surprise: Maslow’s Hierarchy is real. Before people can concern themselves with personal satisfaction and emotional support, they start by looking for a job that pays fairly that they can count on.

www.hrbartender.com • Share

New research – Young Talent Prioritises Job Security in the Face of Uncertainty

This coming generation of talent will be more stability-focused for YEARS.

universumglobal.com • Share

Want to Make Your Company an Employer of Choice for Executive Talent? Do These 4 Things.

Sorry, why are these strategies just for “executive talent” again?

www.recruiter.com • Share

How Twitter Applied the “Jobs to Be Done” Approach to Strategy

The practice of employer brand can sometimes feel like building a million-piece puzzle without a photo to guide you. Any given day you can spend your energy in dozens of directions. So how do you pick? Perhaps you start with the “jobs to be done” approach.

hbr.org • Share

How Employees Can Become Better Organizational Citizens

Let’s say you claim your culture is collaborative. Did that just happen? Did you just mandate it? Talking about how you feed that aspect of the culture creates proof of your ‘culture’ claims.

knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu • Share

This Holiday Season: People Will Always Shop As People First

Are you hiring people or personas? We’re in a world of radical personalization, so why are you trying to hiring with such broad nets?

www.thebrandberries.com • Share

Employer Value Proposition: The new reason to get up for work in the morning

Old school HR seems comfortable ignoring EB. Next Gen HR is starting to realize that the EB has a lot to offer how they think about people strategy.

chro.co.za • Share

How to Create a More Equitable Experience for Remote, Hybrid, and On-Site Employees

The spinner hasn’t really landed on how we work in the future, has it? All remote? Hybrid? Back to the way it was? If your business is changing, that change creates gaps in the employee experience, meaning you need to help re-map the experience for hybrid and remote so you can more properly tell your employer brand story.

academy.nobl.io • Share

The Art of Listening for What’s Not Being Said: Top 10 Tips

Good tips to get beyond the “obvious answer” when you’re trying to understand the company’s DNA/Culture/Work Experience.

www.yourthoughtpartner.com • Share