Talent Chooses You has been referred to as the “the roadmap for the next hiring revolution” and “the new bible for the employer branding practitioner and the novice alike.” 

Let’s pretend you are selling tacos. Or doughnuts. Or toothbrushes. It really doesn’t matter. These things are cheap items, maybe costing a dollar each. So you set up a stand or cart and hawk your wares. Anyone who walks up with a dollar in their pocket is a viable customer, and your job is to convince them that your item is worth the dollar to them. Perhaps it will give them more than a dollar’s feeling of satisfaction to eat that taco. Or it will crave that sweet tooth in a way they’d be willing to spend two dollars. Or that brushing will keep them from needing costly dental work down the road. Either way, your item has value, and they’d be a fool to reject it. The conversation is about value conversion.

Which is fine. This is typical commerce: I have a good or service to sell, and I will sell it to whoever can pay for it. You have a dollar. I have a taco. Let’s make some magic happen! Your goal in this space is to replicate this transaction as many times as possible. Having sold the taco, you look to sell another. You are rewarded for selling lots of tacos. Becoming the best taco salesperson is a game of quantity and nothing more. 

In this process, do you ask your buyer if they have a college degree? Did you confirm that they have a reliable mode of transportation? As you are both in the same place, you don’t wonder if they live close enough to you. But are they certified to eat a doughnut? Do they have at least five years’ doughnut-eating experience? Can they provide names and contact information for three people who can confirm they know their way around a doughnut? How many different varieties of doughnut can they discuss with confidence? Hmm…I see a gap of three months in which you were not eating doughnuts. Can you explain that gap?

Have you ever heard of someone saying they only had one doughnut and were going to sell it to the “best” customer? The one who was a cultural fit to the mission of your doughnut?

Of course not. That would be insane. Again, you have a doughnut and they have a dollar. To quote comedian Mitch Hedberg, why do we even need a receipt? This transaction is completed. It doesn’t matter if they don’t have a work visa, a degree, or can pass a drug test.

Dollar. Doughnut. Done.

But when we’re hiring, we aren’t selling doughnuts or tacos. We’re looking for a specific person to do a specific job. We wonder what school they went to, what other jobs they’ve had, and what the outcomes of their work were. We immediately reject them if they don’t have enough experience. We reject them because they don’t “fit.” We reject them because they were arrested and tried for fraud. We reject them because someone was just a little bit better. 

Hiring isn’t a game of quantity, because we’re generally filling one role and we want the best possible person to take that job. We want one person, so we seek the best person.

“We live in a world driven by quantity, and blindly applying marketing and sales techniques designed for quantity to a model designed for quality is a disaster waiting to happen.” 

This seems prima facie obvious, but it is the difference that underlies all hiring and differentiates it from almost any other kind of profession. It is foundational to everything and what differentiates employer branding from every other kind of marketing and branding in the world. The rest of the world is looking to bill more hours, sell more time, build more widgets, train more people, take more cases, fix more pipes, and take on more clients. We live in a world driven by quantity, and blindly applying marketing and sales techniques designed for quantity to a model designed for quality is a disaster waiting to happen. 

If you’re selling tacos and you sell a million tacos, you’re getting a raise. You’re getting a bonus. They’ll put your picture on a wall above the words “Salesperson of the Year.” 

But if you’re “selling” jobs and you get a million people to apply, you’re getting fired. 

Applying great, clever, or even genius-level marketing thinking won’t solve recruiting and hiring, because they are so different. Tennis, golf, and billiards are all played with round balls, but you can’t switch one ball for another and pretend it’s the same game. 

This difference isn’t academic. It is an industry built on a very different foundation to almost everything else we know and do. But embracing this difference is the beginning to solving your hiring problems.

Talent Chooses You has been referred to as “the roadmap for the next hiring revolution” and “the new bible for the employer branding practitioner and the novice alike.” Unlike any other employer brand business book, it is designed from the ground up to be a call to arms to and for talent acquisition to see a better way to hire. One that doesn’t put candidates and recruiters on opposite sides of a fight. And unlike other books, it literally was designed to not make any money, so James is now selling it at cost (he isn’t making a cent on sales) to ensure it gets in the hands of the people who are looking to start their own talent strategy revolution wherever they are. Get your copy now.

It’s possible that the stories are true and that a radioactive recruiter bit born-marketer James Ellis years ago. All we know is that James Ellis has become a well-known podcaster, writer, speaker and consultant in the growing employer brand industry. He’s done everything from putting a public Fortune 1000 brand on his back to building a 19-person employer brand activation team within the biggest recruitment marketing agency in the world. What drives someone to write, podcast, speak and work so obsessively towards revolutionising the recruiting and talent industry? Coffee. Yes, he would like another, thank you.

(Listen to thetalentcast.com podcast here!)

The post Doughnuts, tacos and employer branding: Why hiring is a game of quality, not quantity appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.

What’s the purpose of your job?

Hang on — that wasn’t meant to be accusatory. Organisations often lose sight of what recruiting is really about, so I wanted to offer a reminder. The purpose of your job is to hire people. Your job isn’t to grind through interviews, process candidates or collect applications — it’s to help your organisation find the talent it needs to grow and succeed.

Depending on the position and industry, the average job posting can garner anywhere from 50-200 applications. Seen another way, having to disappoint 49-199 people for every one person hired has, for some, become the cost of doing business.

But hiring is becoming more challenging. The power has swung from the employer to the job seeker as the labor market tightens and salary data becomes more transparent. Perhaps it’s time to admit that the process of collecting so many resumes per role has become a drag on hiring — and a risk you can’t afford.

Fortunately, these three solutions can help you gather more of the right candidates, instead of simply gathering more. This will make your job easier while building a positive employer brand.

Recruiting’s “99% Problem”

Imagine your organisation is hiring a nurse. You collect 100 applications and hire one person. This means 99 people didn’t get the job. For some, it may be tempting to write these 99% of applicants off as underqualified.

But recruiters bear some responsibility for all those rejected applications. Ask yourself: Are your job postings well written and descriptive, or are they stuffy and full of legalese? Are you sending them only to targeted candidates, or are you distributing them as widely as possible? Are you casting a wide net because you really aren’t 100% sure what your hiring manager is looking for?

And don’t forget about the candidates who gave up their time and energy to participate in phone screens and interviews. What are you providing in return? Do you educate them on how other organisations do things or give useful feedback? Or does your recruiting software simply auto-generate a form letter to tell them they didn’t get the job?

Remember: These are real people, and you paid real money to attract and endear them to your employer brand. They’re also resources you can leverage to attract other qualified candidates.

Job seekers talk about their recruiting and interview experiences in online reviews, forums and social media. If you treat the 99 candidates who didn’t get the job as well as the one candidate who did, they’ll share their experience and you’ll build a positive employer brand. But this works both ways: leave a negative impression, and you’ll have to do a lot more work (and possibly pay a premium) to convince quality talent to consider your open role.

This is the 99% problem: when recruiters hurt their employer brand among 99% of applicants for the sake of one hire. Luckily, there are three ways to turn the tide.

1. Keep track of candidates you didn’t hire

Recruiters spin plates all day long. Odds are, you won’t remember an interesting candidate from three weeks ago any better than one from three years ago.

This is why you need to invest in tools to help track interesting candidates: those who are sold on the brand and simply waiting for the right role to open up. It doesn’t have to be insanely expensive or complicated. Just keep a note of the person’s contact details, optimal role and skills/experience. This will help you remember them for new roles and personalize future interactions.

And let them know you’re still interested. Figure out what feedback you can give and reasonable solutions you can offer to turn a rejected candidate into a fan (though always adhering to privacy regulations, of course).

2. Create fewer applications per requisition

Instead of trying to collect the maximum number of resumes, embrace the power of better writing and honesty to attract more of the right candidates — and fewer of those who aren’t a fit.

Start by looking at a job posting. Is it clear, or is it full of HR jargon? Does it actually explain the job? Does it talk about the future of the person who fills the role? Does it show how this role helps drive the success of the organisation? If not, make the necessary changes.

Next, add a section to every posting that lists the tougher aspects of the role. No job is 100% sugar plums and roses, so be honest about the downsides. That alone will help cut down on unqualified applicants without scaring off anyone who understands the reality of the position.

3. Pipeline per organisation, not per role

No job opening is an island; they exist within larger ecosystems. However, recruiters are trained to see each one as independent.

People don’t just apply for a job — they also apply to an organisation, a brand or an idea. Adopting a more holistic mindset lets you tell more compelling stories about why people work at your organisation. This will lead to a higher ratio of applicants who are passionate about the brand versus those simply hitting the “apply” button, which allows you to have better conversations with prospects.

Think of it this way: Would you rather have a perfectly qualified candidate who has no real attachment to your brand or mission or a slightly less qualified one who would love to find a way to help out? Who’s going to last longer in the role? Who’s going to put in the extra effort when it matters? Who’s going to find new ways to help your organisation grow?

It’s time to reject the idea that making 99 people unhappy is the price we have to pay just to hire one person. By shifting your tactics and mindset to hiring for quality over quantity, you can build a positive employer brand while making more effective hires. The job market has changed. It’s time for recruiting to change, too.

James Ellis is host of the popular podcast the Talent Cast and Employer Brand Consultant.You can also find him on Twitter: @TheWarForTalent

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Indeed.

It’s possible that the stories are true and that a radioactive recruiter bit born-marketer James Ellis years ago. All we know is that James Ellis has become a well-known podcaster, writer, speaker and consultant in the growing employer brand industry. He’s done everything from putting a public Fortune 1000 brand on his back to building a 19-person employer brand activation team within the biggest recruitment marketing agency in the world. What drives someone to write, podcast, speak and work so obsessively towards revolutionising the recruiting and talent industry? Coffee. Yes, he would like another, thank you.

(Listen to thetalentcast.com podcast here!)

The post What happens to candidates you don’t hire? Turn engaged candidates into advocates appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.

Way back a long time ago (I mean “industrial revolution,” not “before Facebook”), there were no brands.

When you bought a barrel from Robert Cooper, you knew Robert made that barrel. When you bought horseshoes from John Smith, you knew John hammered them into shape himself. When you bought flour from Tom Miller, you knew Tom oversaw the grinding and weighing.

And when something went wrong, you went back to Robert or John or Tom and you figured out a solution. You didn’t need to stamp “horseshoes by John” into the horseshoe because you bought it from John and you were the only owner.

But when the industrial revolution came, and these people realised they could make more and sell more at a lower price by building factories that made barrels and nails and bread, you couldn’t complain to Robert or Tom or John because it wasn’t their fault. They never put their hands on the goods.

The next step was opening up transport, so your nails might have been made a hundred miles away rather than around the corner, so how did you know which nails to by? The only means is reputation, and in order to support and solidify and anchor the position, the brand was created.

There’s an irony in how the consumer brand was created because of a lack of connection between buyer and seller as people, where the employer brand is designed to better explain why people should connect.

But in your world (I’d hazard to guess) consumer brand and employer brand might as well exist in two separate dimensions, barely acknowledging each other’s existence.

We look over the fence to the consumer brand (or, as we usually call it, “those jerks in Marketing”) and see money, access to decision makers, and impact. They look over the fence to employer brand (or, as they call it, “those snoozers in Recruiting” or “…shudder… HR”) and see slowpokes and dilettantes, people who play at marketing but without the need for business metrics or much accountability.

Sound familiar?

These star-crossed Capulets and Montagues seem doomed to glare at each other across the bullpen. But there are ways to integrate the two families (without having to go full Romeo and Juliet).

The first is to understand the elements of the brand architecture that are connected to the consumer brand. That is, the leadership and the purpose of the company (its raison d’etre, if you will let me use my limited French). What the company makes and why it makes it drives who they make it for, how to position that offering to the audience and how to get the word out. It’s what keeps IKEA out of the luxury car business.

That same leadership is the wellspring for your employer brand. Without it, you don’t hire the people who develop your culture. Without a clear culture, what are you offering a candidate beyond a paycheck?

The goal in showing a diagram like this to those jerks in Marketing is to make it clear that you in employer branding have the same objective and can both do amazing work aligned to the mission without getting in each other’s way. The mission can be the music that allows two strangers to dance together without fear of losing toes.

The second way these two rival factions can work together is to remember that people aren’t the most important asset in your business, they are your business.

In the last two years, I’ve noticed a marked uptick in the number of companies who talk about their corporate and consumer brands through their people. 

That is to say, when the consumer brand has its back against the wall, the new favourite go-to move is to stop focusing on the price, product or placement, and bring out the people. That means connecting to the employer brand, because while your goals have been focused on attracting applications and creating hires, all of that story-telling, all those videos, all those employee profiles will be the raw material to help consumer marketing out of a jam.

You don’t have to wait until scandal rocks HQ. Start by pinging marketing and asking how you can help them (rule of reciprocity: give first, ask second) by identifying and supplying great internal voices for their own marketing. It could be as simple as using employees for your catalogue or website (and connect those people to their employer-brand owned elements). Or maybe you can tell a deeper story around “this is what we do and here are the people who do it.” Any marketer worth their salt will understand the power of having more human faces in their marketing.

This toe-hold, leveraging both the architecture and the use of people, will be the first steps towards reconciling the two warring tribes. Beyond this, look for ways to integrate people into every story you are trying to tell. Showing off internal people to the outside world via consumer marketing becomes a gateway for people to consider working there. Having people be ambassadors and talk about the mission and values to the world only reinforces marketing’s work.

Together, you can make magical things happen.

It’s possible that the stories are true and that a radioactive recruiter bit born-marketer James Ellis years ago. All we know is that James Ellis has become a well-known podcaster, writer, speaker and consultant in the growing employer brand industry. He’s done everything from putting a public Fortune 1000 brand on his back to building a 19-person employer brand activation team within the biggest recruitment marketing agency in the world. What drives someone to write, podcast, speak and work so obsessively towards revolutionising the recruiting and talent industry? Coffee. Yes, he would like another, thank you.

(Listen to thetalentcast.com podcast here!)

The post The Great Divide? Integrating your consumer and employer brands appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.

If you ignore the mountain of garbage science and science fiction within Jurassic Park, you can still take away a simple idea: that the tiniest DNA contains the instructions to build massive creatures. Maybe not dinosaurs per se (DNA breaks down pretty hard after a few thousand years), but certainly whales, emus, and you and me.

It doesn’t matter how many itty bitty little pieces you break us into, we are still ourselves, and the DNA ensures that when you cut your finger, a toe doesn’t grow in its stead.

The same can be said for your organisation’s DNA. If you are all about innovation, if your people live to think outside the box and try new things, if they are happiest when they are surrounded by the most cutting-edge tech or ideas, if they stay late not to make a bonus but because they sense that they are on the cusp of a breakthrough, that drive to innovate is something that saturates everyone in the company.

This is why branding professionals always caution others that the logo and tagline aren’t the brand. Is the Nike brand the same when you can only see half a swoosh? Nope, it becomes something different. You can’t look at just a little piece of the logo or tagline and see the whole brand. In fact, it’s likely that you won’t be able to learn anything from it at all.

Here, we have Starbucks (like pretty much every other place humans exist), but we also have tiny little independent coffee shops. At Starbucks, they may be offering me a quick pick-me-up, but the culture dictates precision, efficiency and consistency. I know that if I get a flat white in London, it will be effectively the same as the one in Sydney and the same as the one in Brisbane. You may not think they have the best coffee, the best service, or the best food, you know exactly what you are getting when you walk in. Do you expect a giggle? A surprising flavour? A little something extra? No. This is Starbucks.

But that independent shop also offers coffee. It also offers pumps of flavours to make my latte taste more like a candy cane than coffee. It also offers me a selection of muffins and sandwiches.  Same place? Hardly. The independent place has all their specials listed as jokes from the TV show Arrested Development. They sell little candies that make political jokes. They have a chalkboard out front that makes a cheeky joke about how much I probably need coffee.

They aren’t the same, but that’s obvious. But let’s flip the script. What if instead, I started with the menu boards. At one place, you have professionally designed listings of coffee drinks (and here in the States, it comes with calorie counts and other nutritional data points). The font is professional. The colours muted but aligned with the rest of the space. There might even be a screen on which animated gifs of precise shots being poured and foam designs being drawn may show up. From just this single data point, I can infer that this place is part of some bigger chain, that they make a lot of shots exactly the same way every time.

At the independent coffee shop, the menu made of references to a semi-cult TV series shows personality and tells me I should expect more “fun” than “professionalism.” It might tell me that this place is owned by the person who wrote this (because most “employees” are too scared to go out that far on a limb), which suggests that I might even meet the owner as she pulls that shot. It suggests passion for coffee and life. Is this coffee better than the other place? Maybe not, but based on the tiniest data point, I can infer much of the rest of the shop and company.

Your prospect’s understanding of your EVP isn’t because you tell it to them, it’s what they infer based on lots of seemingly tiny touch points. It is a bird’s nest they build in their mind, collecting bits of whatnot to establish the form of the nest.

As an employer brand professional, your job is to establish and maintain the bird’s nest. But you can’t just tell the bird: no, you’re doing it wrong! Build it wider! If you want to change the nest you change the environment, replacing the coffee stirrers and plastic bag detritus with twigs and grass. The bird, taking what is lying around, will inevitably create a different kind of nest.

So if you want to change people’s sense of your EVP, you need to change the touchpoints. In the same way that you could tell a lot about the coffee shop by their menus, chalkboards and napkins, your prospect will be making conclusions about your employer brand based on all their touch points with the brand.

For example, if your brand is predicated on the promise of better candidate service, look at every element of outreach communication. Is every element driving the idea that you will take care of the candidate? Does it communicate the process and what happens next? Does it help the candidate understand what to expect? Or do you ghost them for weeks at a time and come back surprised that they aren’t interested any longer?

Look at your career site. A company that is claiming to care about its workers had better not have stock art on their career site. It should have stories about how the company goes above and beyond to ensure each person can focus on doing great work when they are there and not worrying about child care, health care, parental care, etc.

A company claiming to truly care about the employee must be clear with exactly how far they will go to provide support. On-site gym? Unlimited paid time off? Maternity and paternity benefits? Spell those out in detail (detail provides certainty and credibility). What about your social channels? Are they filled with job openings or stories about how an employee was supported by leadership, their team, or their boss?

What about your consumer touchpoints? If you sell something that your candidates interact with, will they be getting aligning or dissonant messaging? What about your application process? Does it look like everyone else’s or are you simplifying steps, communicating why you need certain bits of information, how carefully you will protect that data? Yes, even the help text of your application process is another bit of stuff in their mental birds’ nests. Will they be adding another twig or an old cigarette butt?

There’s really no level too granular when it comes to supporting that brand promise and there’s a reason for that: Stating a brand promise is cheap. Proving and reinforcing that brand promise all the way down to the DNA level is how the promise becomes real, because it isn’t easy. (Spoiler: the easier something is to do, the less impactful it becomes because if it is easy, everyone else is already doing it).

So if you think you’ve got your EVP nailed down tight, look around. Look at every single touchpoint a prospect sees in the journey, from passive to active to candidate experience. Look at every item and ask, “is this supporting the brand promise or undercutting it?” No element is too small, from the “thanks for applying” automated message to the signature on the recruiter’s email to the hiring manager’s willingness to turn their phone off during the interview. It all matters.

James Ellis

It’s possible that the stories are true and that a radioactive recruiter bit born-marketer James Ellis years ago. All we know is that James Ellis has become a well-known podcaster, writer, speaker and consultant in the growing employer brand industry. He’s done everything from putting a public Fortune 1000 brand on his back to building a 19-person employer brand activation team within the biggest recruitment marketing agency in the world. What drives someone to write, podcast, speak and work so obsessively towards revolutionising the recruiting and talent industry? Coffee. Yes, he would like another, thank you.

Website: employerbrand.consulting and jamesellis.us

Twitter: TheWarForTalent

LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/saltlab

The post What’s your employer brand DNA? The secret to bringing your EVP to life appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.