The Talent Cast

If you make your living as an employer brand professional, what is your job? Is it to write better job posts? Raise your Glassdoor score a little? Suggest better outreach messaging? Manage a CRM? Make hashtags? Obviously, you'll likely a lot of those jobs, but those jobs are in service of a single idea, one we often lose sight of as things get busy (and they are always busy). So here's your reminder of how you should see your job, and what you are being paid to really do. Find...

How do you attract attention to your brand? Interestingly, its a lot like how you're going to build internal buy-in. You're going to make the familiar strange (and the strange familiar). Show notes: Communicating the New by Kim Erwin (great book!) Find me: Recruitcon - Nashville HireConf - NYC Employer Brand Headlines (weekly digest of the EB world so you always look smart)

Every company and every brand has that thing they don't talk about. That thing that everyone knows but bends over backwards to avoid referencing. They have an elephant in the room. And if you're in charge of your employer brand, you can choose to ignore the elephant, but your candidates (who can see it clear as day) will think you're being disingenuous. Or, you could take into account that elephant and find a way to work it into your messaging. Because if you aren't managing your elephant,...

The race to "easiest possible application" has not been a race worth winning. Our ATS's are clogged with applicants we wouldn't hire in a million years simply because we've made it so easy. So what's past "peak easy application?" A world in which we actively and intentionally make it harder for people to apply, to leverage the process itself and insert messages that filter great candidates from the rest. It's time to expect candidates to put some skin in the game. Find me: Recruitcon -...

Influencing ratings, encouraging talking points, framing values and establishing a shared north star for every one in our company may sound like our job, but it isn't. Our job as employer brand professionals is far deeper, far more difficult and interesting. Our job is to create meaning in the minds of our candidates and employees. Did no one tell you? Oops. Find me: Recruitcon - Nashville HireConf - NYC Employer Brand Headlines (weekly digest of the EB world so you always look smart)

You know your employer brand is important. I know your employer brand is important. And there are probably a few other people in your company who would agree. But a lot of people see investment in employer brand as a vanity project, as a fluffy-bunny nice-to-have project and not the crucial element in hiring success we know it is. You might be inclined to try and fly under the radar to get your work done, but a better strategy might be to show everyone how crucial employer brand really is....

It's not a magic trick. A strong employer brand doesn't just attract a better class of talent, it actually helps shape perceptions of everyone in the business. Done well, you can help people inside and outside your company see the business as more valuable than before. Find me: Recruitcon - Nashville HireConf - NYC Employer Brand Headlines (weekly digest of the EB world so you always look smart)

Hold up! It's not an arcane or crazy question or abstract zen koan. It's a legit question: what exactly is a job. Turns out that how we see it, how we answer that question has huge repercussions on how we find and develop talent in our organization. Find me: Recruitcon - Nashville HireConf - NYC Employer Brand Headlines (weekly digest of the EB world so you always look smart)

Building consistency is easy: take what you already did and do it again. Take what someone learned and use it without learning. Follow the leader and paint by numbers someone else laid. And if that's all branding was, robots would take all our jobs. But it isn't. In fact, great brands are about consistency, but about understanding the core elements within the brand experience and think of ways to re-apply them to other arts of the business. They don't try to copy, they create patterns. Which...

Thinking about employer branding can get complicated in a hurry. There are so many ways to describe, measure and understand your brand, it makes it hard to compare one brand to another. When I audited brands, one tool I developed was the "reach and clarity" model, a way to see how you stack up against another brand simply and see where you should be applying your energy. Want to hear it? I thought you might. Find me: MRA Minneapolis Recruitcon - Nashville HireConf - NYC Yes! you can have...

There seem to be two schools of thought on employer branding: reveal the brand and be authentic as possible, or manufacture what you think your audience wants to hear. These two positions seem mutually exclusive, but employer branding success happens when you find that middle path. What path is that? You'll just have to listen in to find out (though the title kinda gives it away). Find me: RecFest - London MRA Minneapolis Recruitcon - Nashville HireConf - NYC Yes! you can have my...

There are ways to spend a lot of money on your employer brand (and a lot of reasons to do so), but how on earth do you pay for it? In this episode, we walk through one scenario to show you how even you can pay for an impactful employer brand. Find me: RecFest - London MRA Minneapolis Recruitcon - Nashville HireConf - NYC Yes! you can have my ebook!

You can't find better solutions until you ask better questions. But too often we couch, hedge and soften our questions because deep down, we don't REALLY want to know the answers. Rather than build questions to make ourselves look and feel better, if we build the most painful questions possible, we rip the blinders from our eyes and discover see the world for what it really is. Only then can we make real impact. Find me: Transform - Boston RecFest - London MRA Minneapolis Recruitcon -...

Ever been to an amazing career site? Me neither. Regardless of the platform, this thing you rely on to help candidates fall in love with your brand is a lot closer to stale bread than pastry. So we examine the question of how to build a great career site. Places I'm speaking: Transform - Boston RecFest - London SRSC - Philly MRA Minneapolis Recruitcon - Nashville

When we talk about brands, we usually talk about brand leaders, the people in the market with the leverage and power to do amazing things because they are the market leaders. No one talks about the power of the Zune brand, they only talk about iPhones. And that's great if you're one of those handful of leaders. But what about everyone else? It turns out, if you aren't a leader, you're one of two brands: a follower or a challenger: those willing to stay safely out of the lead, and those...

If you're sure bots are evil... this conversation will not sway you. But since so many discussion about AI and bots are vendor-driven, I wanted to talk about the concept of bots with someone who actually uses them everyday. So I pinged Chris Murdock, co-founder and Chief Sourcing Officer (yes, that's really his title), and we had another meandering chat about bots today and bots tomorrow. Show Notes: Chris Murdock: Twitter, IQTalent Partners Yes, I can speak to your team! Yes! you can...

When it's time to reveal your employer brand to leadership, what's your plan? Were you just going to take a page from that episode of Mad Men and make a big creative reveal? Wow, that would be a mistake. Here is my surprisingly nuts-and-bolts approach to presenting your new employer brand to leadership to increase your odds of buy-in, acceptance, and even use it as a means to clearing out obstacles in front of you. Show Notes: Yes, I can speak to your team! Yes! you can have my...

A great brand position, brand promise or even strategy that sits in a deck without being used is 100% worthless. So while thinking strategically is a great start, you need to activate the brand in order to see your employer brand's value. While we've talked about specific channels and media before, we've never thought through activation as a concept. In this episode, we'll reveal the secret to activating your employer brand across any channel in any company. Enjoy! Show Notes: Yes, I can...

While I'm a big believer and proponent of opening the doors to let everyone find frustration and satisfaction at work, as a middle-ages white guy, I always feel out of my depth. Luckily, I know a guy who lives and breathes diversity. We have yet another rambling conversation on what its going to take to change minds and the world. I'm a huge fan of Torin Ellis, but I'm also his friend, so I'm tickled purple to bring him onto the podcast. And for real: if you get the chance to hear him speak,...

Haven't we been doing this recruiting thing for a LONG time already? Does it feel like we're not really getting any better at it, that we're all throwing up our hands and giving up that things can be better. And if we look at recruiters and sourcers and HRBPs and hiring managers as independent actors instead of an integrated system, that might be true. But pilots and surgeons face similar problems with far higher stakes and have found ways to achieving much better outcomes. What can they...