The Talent Cast

We all strive to build brand messages that stand out, that stick in people's minds long after they have been seen. So, how do you make that happen?

Your instinct might be to ratchet up the creativity, to focus on making something unusual or with exceptional amounts of polish.

But I'd suggest that better brand messages start with positioning, and in fact, can beat out more "creative" messages. Let's explore!

Show Notes: 

• Yes, the books are starting to roll out!!!

Most recruiting functions work (and treat candidates) as if there's always more fish in the sea. They act as if there are an unlimited supply of candidates, so their job is to just find more.

But what about in circumstances where there is a fixed number of potential candidates? Aerospace engineers with security clearance, clinical researchers with MDs, veterinarians, etc?

In this episode, we break down how employer brand strategy changes when you have a finite talent pool.

Show Notes:

• Sign up for my free newsletter on employer brand headlines
• Want to ask me anything? I have open office hours. Grab your free spot.

In the last two months, we've seen changes to almost every aspect of our lives, both professionally and personally. So it might stand to reason that our employer brands should change, too.

But is that true?

Perhaps the answer to that question may determine how successful our employer brands and EVPs ultimately are.

Show Notes:

• Sign up for my free newsletter on employer brand headlines
• Want to ask me anything? I have open office hours. Grab your free spot.

By now, you've been thinking about how your employer brand needs to react in light of...[looks around]... well, everything. Whether you inherited your brand or defined it yourself, things have changes and your brand needs to reflect it.

But if you just slap a new brand on, how useful will that be? You need to re-think things. Which means you need to understand how your employer brand was formed in the first place. 

In this episode, we break down the four things that create your brand. If you understand them, you can figure out how to influence them. If you don't understand them, you might as well try to change the tides.

What is culture? And why is it I can still ask that question? You'd think after countless books, articles, podcasts, lectures and TED talks, we'd all know what we mean by culture. And yet, that doesn't seem to be the case.

If you define your culture by your perks, this month has been quite the wake up call, hasn't it? If you think you can dictate culture, or that it remains static in the face of changing staff, leadership and... well, everything, you're going to be in trouble.

In this episode, we get serious about how to think about and leverage culture in our employer brands.

Show Notes:

• Sign up for my free newsletter on employer brand headlines
• Hung Lee's 24-hour Recruiting Brainfood Marathon

It feels to me that we often talk about the connection between diversity and employer brand as if its obvious, but is it really?

In this conversation with my friend Madison Butler, VP of People at Sourced Craft Cocktails, we try to explore about the connection between the two ideas.

Show notes:

• Madison Butler's LinkedIn

It really is a rare day when someone says, "go ahead and build our employer brand. We'll stand still for a few weeks or months while you figure it out..." More often, we are building a brand on top of existing ideas, collateral and content, trying to disparate ideas together that were never designed to go together.

So in this episode, we examine the process of developing a strategy, brand and even EVP after you've already built a bunch of "stuff."

Show notes:

• Webinar with Elena Valentine: How Do You Build an Employer Brand When No One Is In The Same Room?

This episode is a kind of natural second chapter to last week's Employer Brand In The Time of COVID. In that episode, we talked about how you need to start thinking about how to manage your brand when physical proximity can't be an assumption.

In this episode, we go beyond that. Not to what happens beyond the crisis, but how do you think beyond the standard limitations of how we see employer branding as a function, as a player within the business. If you think your employer brand is just there to attract talent, that's all it can do. But if you see it as a great deal more, your impact can go far beyond recruiting.

Show notes:
Sign up for my free newsletter on employer brand headlines
Want to ask me anything? I have open office hours. Grab your free spot.

Well, it seems like we're all working remotely all of a sudden, huh? 

While there are plenty of resources on how to manage employees and manage yourself in a remote-office situation, no one has asked how we're going to manage our employer brand remotely.

Why does it matter? Because the context of work has dramatically changed. No more posters. no more water-cooler talk, no more information communications channels with which to socialize the brand.

Thus, we take a deep dive into how you can manage your own employer brand when no one shares much physical space anymore.

Show notes:
Sign up for my free newsletter on employer brand headlines
Want to ask me anything? I have open office hours. Grab your free spot.

If you take the definition of employer branding literally, you might be inclined to make employer brands for all the various teams, offices and roles within your company. I mean, that's how you're going to explain "what it's like to work here" with any kind of granularity and specificity.

But what if you let go of the guide rail of "specificity" and focused on creating emotions in the prospects to attract them? And then, what if instead of telling specific stories, you talked about what it feels like to work there instead?

Show notes:
Sign up for my free newsletter on employer brand headlines
Want to ask me anything? I have open office hours. Grab your free spot.
This episode was sparked by a comment on this post asking what the next topics should be. Feel free to add your own ideas!