The Talent Cast

We all know our first job is (or expected to be) one of attraction. And we all know that if we build a strong brand, it will impact retention. But how many of us are intentionally involving ourselves in the thorny retention issues of the company?

In this episode, we talk about how you can get involved and how you can play a role in one of the most complex and important issues of any company.

We all "know" that the employer brander's mantra is to create an authentic brand. What does that even mean? Is that even achievable? Is that even really a thing?

Sadly, we've all brainwashed each other and ourselves into aspiring to something that crumbles with any scrutiny. 

But don't fret. Behind that fuzzy-bunny facade is something far more useful. 

While your employer brand is really owned by everyone in your company, your recruiters do a great deal of heavy lifting to communicate, frame and amplify your branding message. So why do so many push back on your work? Don't they know that you're trying to help them???

In this episode, we get nitty gritty on building great relationships with recruiters to be the best possible advocates for you and your employer branding.

The mistake in employer branding is to treat the brand as monolithic, as a single tagline repeated until you are blue in the face.

In reality, a strong brand is modular, allowing you to pick and choose how to present it to various audiences while still maintaining a core (and very much aligned) sense of the company.

But you can't do that on the fly. You need to build your brand to be modular from the ground up.

Show notes:
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In the beginning, many of us saw (and our bosses saw) employer branding as "stuff that needed to get done and solved." But as we solved issues, we started asking, "is this the right problem to solve?" and "how can we solve this issue so it never happens again?" 

But even this isn't enough. Having mastered tactics and strategy, there's still another mind you need to embrace in order to maximize your employer brand impact at work.

Show notes:
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Most employer brand professionals and practitioners or driven (and often pushed) to solve immediate problems, the kind that have immediate impacts, the kind others can see. But solving those kind of "urgent, but not always important" problems is now you you'll succeed in this role. Success comes from seeing the fast, urgent and immediate problems, but also looking to resolve the slow, important, and unobvious ones, too.

Show notes:
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In this long conversation with the one and only Elena Valentine, we get into what employer branding means, branding fan fiction, telling better stories and all sorts of other goodies. Don't miss this one!

Show notes:
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To quote the one and only David Byrne (of Talking Heads, duh):

"Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don't do what I want them to"

Go to any career site and you'll see facts. Oodles and oodles of facts that mostly tell us nothing. And yet we keep stuffing facts into our work, despite the fact that they don't differentiate our brands or do much to support our narrative.

If you want to attract candidates, promise them the moon. But if you want them to engage and even stick around, you are going to have to learn how to set, manage (and occasionally exceed) candidate expectations.

Employer branding is very much about excelling at the expectations game.

Romeo and Juliet is the same story as West Side Story. Star Wars is a samurai fable. Mad Men is the same story as Breaking Bad.

As you think about developing and managing your employer brand, you might wonder how your brand is supposed to stand out and be unique and authentic in a world where there are millions of brands, all vying for the same territory as you. Is it really possible?

In this episode we think about story structure as a metaphor for how you can build your own brand.