The Talent Cast

I hope you enjoyed the podcast-as-audiobook update of Talent Chooses You. As a special bonus to celebrate/announce the launch of EmployerBrandLabs, I challenged myself to "retell" the book in just 15 minutes. And I think I succeeded. Enjoy!

I started this book as a way to champion the idea of employer branding. But along the way, I wanted to temper it with reality, the honest challenges and frustrations and employer brand professional faces. Building an employer brand, in whatever capacity you choose to do it, is intensely hard work. What we do is ART. Embrace it.

The broadest vision is that employer brand is how we will fix a broken recruiting system. It is the lever we use to reinvent how we see, connect with and engage the people who will make our businesses grow. It provides the WHY to candidates, which attracts the right people to jobs where they will be more satisfied and productive. This shift in perspective leads to better collaboration with all parts of the business to build better systems that give prospective candidates more than they expected, ultimately helping us find the right talent faster. We Grow Businesses. We Approach Talent Differently. We Collaborate. We Focus. We Revolutionize.

Employer brand professionals are a strange lot, in that we are often people without a country. If we're based inside the recruiting team, we aren't recruiters. If we live in marketing, we're a very different breed of marketer. The market itself is still emerging to define what it is we do. So this is our rallying cry, a flag all employer brand professionals can point to and say, “yeah, this is why we're amazing (and different by design)” that can be understood by recruiters, HR, business leaders, and marketers/comms (our big four partners internally). This is the manifesto that declares, “we're not your swag mavens, your job post writers or tool buyers. We are the orchestra conductors seeing the big picture, understanding and communicating the brand to the world so that the business grows."

“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.”  -Chuck Close, Artist Most starting writers fear the blank page. Most beginning artists stare blankly at the empty canvas. The only way to move forward is to move. So when the going gets rough (or more likely, when the going gets strange), here are some good ideas to just help you get moving, even when you don't know what to do.

It would be a mistake to pretend that following along with all this instruction leads to automatic growth in your recruiting and business, and I'm not going to say that. There are about a half a million ways this all falls apart in big ways and small. If you do part of this wrong, you could become a laughing stock within the branding community, or maybe the whole project slowly loses momentum to the point where people quietly point to it as a failure behind your back and never let you on any other projects because this one went nowhere.  Change is hard. If it was easy, you would have done it already.

When it comes to employer branding, you can pretty much say and show anything at all. Any piece of content will highlight your brand somehow, so how do you choose what to build?

The power of a story has been written about many times before, but there is a core and undeniable truth: people believe stories. More than that, stories have a depth and complexity that claims simply cannot. You can read and project so many things into a story creating new depths, connecting you to the characters and developing emotional bonds like nothing else. So when you are looking to learn about a company, do you want claims, or do you want to hear the stories.  That's why content, in any form you choose, is so crucial to building your brand.

Think of this as a manifesto to stop building empty content, to stop praising things that don't matter because they are easy to praise. What if you started telling stories of people who had bounced from job to job who were smart and talented to just never felt at home. They never really fit. They were too curious about the wrong things, too focused on results in cultures that were process driven? You aren't saying “Here is proof that you will be happy here” You are instead saying, “this is the kind of person who found happiness and success here when other places didn't work. Your mileage may vary, but what would professional satisfaction look and feel like to you?”

The funnel makes it really clear that there is amazing talent to be found in places far beyond the job board and the hiring event. Prospects are all around you. The trouble is that trying to communicate with them via a job postings will only work on the limited few who are looking for a job, know your brand and willing to listen to what you have to say (gosh, when I write it all out like that, it's a wonder anyone ever applied from a job board). You're going to have a lot better response, both in terms of rate and level of 

If you understand what motivates some people, you can look within your company and see which of these motivations you are rewarding. Are you rewarding people who innovate and drive change, or treat them like rabble rousers and try to silence them? Are you promoting the people who cultivate your “together” culture, or focus on the ones who do the best individual work? When you say you are trying to save the world, are you recognizing the people who work towards that goal or the people focused on developing their own career ladder?

What's the difference between an EVP and an employer brand?  It's not a riddle, but for something so fundamental to our understanding of helping attract and retain talent, it seems like EVP, employer brand, brand position, and brand promise are almost never well-defined. I've been guilty of using them interchangeably, or just mirroring the terminology used by my customer in order to get to the work of crafting and communicating the brand.   Every experienced and smart employer brand practitioners don't (or can't) properly explain the difference. They just use phrases like “the way I like to think about it is…” and go off on some flowery bit of poetry.  So let's nail things down right here once and for all. What is the difference between an employer brand and an EVP?

Let me start here: is there a job you would consider taking even if it meant a 5% salary cut? Is there a great-paying job you'd reject because the company mission didn't align to your worldview? I'm willing to bet you said yes to both those questions, destroying the idea that the only thing people weigh when considering a new company or offer is salary. The fact that you would take a job that doesn't pay the most means that there are other underlying reasons that are not as directly connected to salary (for most people, anyway). You might choose a job because it gives your better work/life balance. You might choose it because it has a substantially better commute. You might choose it because it rewards your intrinsic desire to build something new. You might choose it because it will give you less interference as you pave a path forward. You might choose it because the brand's status in the industry feeds your ego.  We are all motivated by different things.

We've spent a lot of talking about what makes up the brand, but when it's time to make choices that will influence and change the brand, where do you start? The process of building the materials to attract and validate someone to your hiring process requires answering questions like these dozens of times a day, the answers to which will determine the success of your recruiting initiatives. So, you know, no pressure or anything. The answer to the question of “what video do I make” begins by understanding the complete architecture of your employer brand. Once you see that, the answers become far more obvious. And come quickly. Invest in this process and you'll be equipped to make decisions easier for years.

If you looked at all those sources of employer brand touch points and thought to yourself: How can anyone actually manage the employer brand when nothing is in their control? All these touch points that feed the perception come from every level and department of the company. But these touch points, regardless of what channel delivers them, come from a single core source. Every product decision, every customer support interaction, every news story, every recruiter interaction stems from or is a reflection of your company culture.

You may not think you have an employer brand, but you absolutely do. The fact that you haven't invested in clarifying or amplifying it doesn't mean it isn't there and making a deep impact one way or the other on how hard you have to recruit people.

When you do it right, employer branding shows the right prospects how they will be more satisfied working for you. They might see one of those other "obvious" companies and assume that's the best company. But as there's a good chance it's not the best for them, this is your chance to compete. And win.

Stories rule the world and our imaginations, but more importantly, they are the driver of our choices. When you look at a nice watch and think about buying it, somewhere your brain wonders, “am I the kind of person who spends that much money on a watch?” This isn't crazy. This is the power Apple leverages when it launches a new product, to know that people who love Apple products are the kind of people who would buy the new thing. They don't want to be seen as missing out, or falling behind. They are willing to pay the premium (money, standing in line, etc) to tell themselves the story about how they are on the cutting edge, that they are the kinds of people who “think different” [sic]. Read the book (free and open source): http://employerbrandbook.com Sign up for Employer Brand Headlines (also free!): https://employerbrandheadlines.substack.com/

The kind of evolution that comes from embracing employer brand thinking is a shift that starts as a transactional-driven recruiting model (putting butts in seats) and becomes a relationship-driven model. And while “relationship-driven” seems like a pleasant enough term, we need to see what it would mean for recruiters in how they approach their work and how it will impact hiring managers and the rest of the business. Read the book (it's open source and free): http://employerbrandbook.com Sign up for Employer Brand headlines (also free!): https://employerbrandheadlines.substack.com/

Employer branding isn't just something that businesses and recruiters should see value in, it is something that your candidates, especially those with higher levels of talent, want you to invest in. In fact, they are desperate for it. Read Talent Chooses You (it's free and open-source): http://employerbrandbook.com Sign up for Employer Brand Headlines (also free!): https://employerbrandheadlines.substack.com/

Companies who value a higher grade of talent, but don't want to spend more money begging them to apply and don't have to have to pay too high a premium for their skills will see that a more clearly understood and communicated “why” will help them reach their goals. 

Employer brand (and employer brand thinking) is the lever that will change the recruiting and talent world. In an industry obsessed with best practice tactics, the coolest tool to plug in, and a focus on filling roles without a care to long-term quality, thinking systemically is heresy, plain and simple.

Once you re-think what you mean by a "job" in terms of what you're hiring, you'll see that there are lots of ways to engage forgotten audiences. You into an audiobook, revising and annotating from the text originally written three years ago. The entire project is brought to you by RecruitmentMarketing.com, and will take 6 months to complete. Subscribe to the biggest employer brand newsletter for free. It lands in your inbox every Monday morning and keep you sharp: https://employerbrandheadlines.substack.com/

We live in a time when our roles change on a very regular basis. We're expected to learn new skills, expand our ability to make an impact and rethink our role every year, every quarter and some time every week. How you described what a “data scientist” or “marketer” or “office manager” did on a daily basis two years ago would get them fired today for lacking the ability to create value. This season of The Talent Cast is sponsored by RecruitmentMarketing.com. Open source text of Talent Chooses You can be found at employerbrandbook.com.

Focusing on the traditional recruitment funnel will allow you to optimize a sinking ship. The way you make a real impact on speed of hire, quality of hire, and really your entire talent strategy is to look above and below the funnel. This season to The Talent Cast is sponsored by RecruitmentMarketing.com. To read the open source text of Talent Chooses You, go to employerbrandbook.com

We've spent the last 10 years embedding the "recruitment funnel" into how we see all our recruiting challenges, and it's time to admit that it is holding us back. This season of The Talent Cast is sponsored by RecruitmentMarketing.com. The open source text of Talent Chooses you can be found at employerbrandbook.com.

“Why” is the question of our age. It determines how we see ourselves, what we do and how we do it. We live in a world with abundant resources, choices, and options, a world filled with technology that your parents all but think is magic, and any fact, song, show or movie, article, book or idea at our beck and call within seconds. If you can do anything, what you choose to do isn't based on basic constraints, but on why you want to do something. 

In this episode, we breakdown one of. the most important and least-discussed elements of employer branding and how it differs from every other kind of marketing: the focus on better, not more.

Welcome to Season Two of The Talent Cast! The big news is that this season, I'm turning Talent Chooses You into an audiobook, revising and annotating from the text originally written three years ago. The entire project is brought to you by RecruitmentMarketing.com, and will take 6 months to complete. In the first episode, we intro the book the jump into talking about how your people aren't employees you can boss around anymore. They are a lot more like paid volunteers.

Surprise episode! The Talent Cast is about to launch Season Two as the audiobook for Talent Chooses You. As an hors d'oeuvre (or maybe an aperitif?) for subscribers who have been waiting more than a year for new episodes, here is a "big idea" for you consider. The audiobook, sponsored by RecruitmentMarketing.com, will start airing January 19th, 2022. As always, you can subscribe to the world's largest employer brand newsletter by going to employerbrand.news and subscribing for free!

There's analytics. There's metrics. And then there's the magic and insight than Andrew creates every day. Prepare to have your mind blown (in a good way). You can connect with Andrew on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewgadomski/ Show Notes! Employer Brand Headlines is the #1 employer brand newsletter. It's free. Go sign up: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/employerbrandnews Talent Chooses You and The Employer Brand Handbook Vol 1 are now free and open source! http://employerbrandbook.com

I love talking about employer branding with people who aren't IN employer brand exclusively. That's why chatting with Jill was such a hoot. She has perspective and experience to burn, and it shows in this amazing chat. You can connect with Jill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jilldudones/ Show Notes! Employer Brand Headlines is the #1 employer brand newsletter. It's free. Go sign up: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/employerbrandnews Talent Chooses You and The Employer Brand Handbook Vol 1 are now free and open source! http://employerbrandbook.com

Fun fact: We recorded the first version of this interview more than a year ago, but it didn't record properly (there were tears). So Lindsay, being magnanimous and generous as always, let me take a second shot at it. Which is great, because she's seen some stuff and always brings such a great perspective to branding and recruitment marketing. You can find Lindsay on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindsay-parks/ Show Notes! Employer Brand Headlines is the #1 employer brand newsletter. It's free. Go sign up: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/employerbrandnews Talent Chooses You and The Employer Brand Handbook Vol 1 are now free and open source! http://employerbrandbook.com

Katrina Kibben is the reigning champion of all things job postings. There's no need to call a vote. There will be no recount. If you had any doubt, you have only to listen to this interview where they pinpoint any number of instances of "recruiting insanity" that most of us take as gospel. Katrina can be found on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/katrinakibben/, or through their company Three Ears Media https://www.threeearsmedia.com/. Show notes! Employer Brand Headlines is the #1 employer brand newsletter. It's free. Go sign up: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/employerbrandnews Talent Chooses You and The Employer Brand Handbook Vol 1 are now free and open source! http://employerbrandbook.com

Looking for a job? Yeah, I hear you. It is the WORST! But you can take a bunch of lessons from employer branding to create a resume that isn't just "good," but helps you stand out and get the job you want. Show notes: Talent Chooses You: Hire Better with Employer Branding is available on Amazon right now! Get yours on Kindle or paperback. My free newsletter on employer brand headlines hit 1,250 subscribers, so I decided to revamp it on a better platform. Same great content, easier to read!

The future of employer branding (or maybe the maturation of it) lays in how well it is integrated into the corporate brand. The more your brand looks like a single idea seen through multiple lenses, the more each aspect can support the others. And there are few better examples of that than at Delta, where Holland McCue has pushed to create a seamless sense of brand, even when things are deeply chaotic and the future is uncertain. Here's my interview with Holland. Show notes: Talent Chooses You: Hire Better with Employer Branding is available on Amazon right now! Get yours on Kindle or paperback. My free newsletter on employer brand headlines hit 1,250 subscribers, so I decided to revamp it on a better platform. Same great content, easier to read!

This week we have a lovely long conversation with Charu Malhotra. Charu's worked on a number of employer brands that you've probably hear of, like Unilever, BP, and Ferrero (just to name a few). Enjoy! Show notes: Talent Chooses You: Hire Better with Employer Branding is available on Amazon right now! Get yours on Kindle or paperback. My free newsletter on employer brand headlines hit 1,250 subscribers, so I decided to revamp it on a better platform. Same great content, easier to read! At ATAP, I'm talking with Todd Raphael about budget-constrained recruiting and branding, August 18th I'm going to talk about data-driven talent branding over at The Goodhire Summit, August 20th

We all make decisions based on mental shortcuts and pattern recognition. It's just what humans do. But if you're building a brand, these same shortcuts can keep you from seeing the brand that's right in front of you. And the more you learn about these biases, perhaps there are ways you can use them in increase talent attraction and engagement. Thanks to Jason Kent Crowell for the question! Show notes: Talent Chooses You: Hire Better with Employer Branding is available on Amazon right now! Get yours on Kindle or paperback. My free newsletter on employer brand headlines hit 1,250 subscribers, so I decided to revamp it on a better platform. Same great content, easier to read! At ATAP, I'm talking with Todd Raphael about budget-constrained recruiting and branding, August 18th I'm going to talk about data-driven talent branding over at The Goodhire Summit, August 20th

We are seeing the end of "monolithic employer brands," concepts that focused more on consistency that connecting to a person. But if you start thinking about your brand and how it can leverage its pillars better to various micro-cultures, suddenly your brand has more meaning. Show notes: Talent Chooses You: Hire Better with Employer Branding is available on Amazon right now! Get yours on Kindle or paperback. My free newsletter on employer brand headlines hit 1,250 subscribers, so I decided to revamp it on a better platform. Same great content, easier to read! At ATAP, I'm talking with Todd Raphael about budget-constrained recruiting and branding, August 18th I'm going to talk about data-driven talent branding over at The Goodhire Summit, August 20th

In the last four months, everything has changed, including our candidates. They want different things, they behave differently, and the act differently. Have we changed our own processes the same way? Or are we still tweaking and optimizing? If the world is 100% different, why aren't we? Show notes: Talent Chooses You: Hire Better with Employer Branding is available on Amazon right now! Get yours on Kindle or paperback. My free newsletter on employer brand headlines hit 1,250 subscribers, so I decided to revamp it on a better platform. Same great content, easier to read! HRTX Virtual, July 30. Be there! It's free!

I'm seeing a lot of comments/chatter around businesses jettisoning their interest in employer brand as the pandemic/recession takes hold. And it makes sense: if you've built all your metrics and value around filling the top of the funnel, not having much of a recruiting funnel makes employer brand redundant. We all know employer brand is much much more than filling the funnel, but somewhere along the way, we got pigeon-holed into this limited value. So maybe it's time for employer branding as a function/concept to break free and own more of its destiny.  Maybe it's time for us to start the People Brand revolution. Show notes: Talent Chooses You: Hire Better with Employer Branding is available on Amazon right now! Get yours on Kindle or paperback. Sign up for my free newsletter on employer brand headlines D&I and Data webinar with Torin Ellis and Gabriel Hitt. (TUESDAY!) HRTX Virtual, July 30

Last year, employer brand was the buzz word, but where is the buzz now? Given a year or three to consider and implement employer branding strategies, where has employer brand landed as a corporate function?  Show notes: Talent Chooses You: Hire Better with Employer Branding is available on Amazon right now! Get yours on Kindle or paperback. Sign up for my free newsletter on employer brand headlines Have a questions you would like two employer brand experts to answer on the show? There's a way to record your question on the homepage (look for the big orange button) D&I and Data webinar with Torin Ellis and Gabriel Hitt. EBNow Survey Results

The age old question: where should employer branding live? TA? Marketing? Comms? Like the "chicken or the egg" question, the answer involves a lot of evolution... Show notes: Talent Chooses You: Hire Better with Employer Branding is available on Amazon right now! Get yours on Kindle or paperback. Sign up for my free newsletter on employer brand headlines Have a questions you would like two employer brand experts to answer on the show? There's a way to record your question on the homepage (look for the big orange button) D&I and Data webinar with Torin Ellis and Gabriel Hitt. EBNow Survey Results

Who's in charge of the company? Leadership, right? Well, recently it sure seems like the employees are making their voices heard in the strategic direction of a company. How does having staff more "in charge" of a company impact your ability to manage the employer brand? Show notes: Talent Chooses You: Hire Better with Employer Branding is available on Amazon right now! Get yours on Kindle or paperback. Sign up for my free newsletter on employer brand headlines Have a questions you would like two employer brand experts to answer on the show? There's a way to record your question on the homepage (look for the big orange button)

Yes, it is absolutely time for your employer brand to quit playing it safe. You and your brand need to take a stand for something. And while that sounds terrifying (trust me, I know), the opportunity it presents is absolutely amazing. Show notes: Talent Chooses You: Hire Better with Employer Branding is available on Amazon right now! Get yours on Kindle or paperback. Sign up for my free newsletter on employer brand headlines I mentioned Overthrow II (the book) Have a questions you would like two employer brand experts to answer on the show? There's a way to record your question on the homepage (look for the big orange button)

It may seem like a simple question, but how you answer it determines the scope of your work. If you want to keep the employer brand function from being a funnel-filler or the "swag maven," you need to answer the question right. Show notes: Talent Chooses You: Hire Better with Employer Branding is available for pre-order on Amazon with a June 15, 2020 delivery. Get yours on Kindle or paperback. Sign up for my free newsletter on employer brand headlines Want to ask me anything? I have open office hours. Grab your free spot. https://bit.ly/talentchoosesyou

Some stories are so engaging and attractive that other people extend them, telling stories you never envisioned.  Which, to be fair, is what you should want from your employer brand. Show notes: Talent Chooses You: Hire Better with Employer Branding is available for pre-order on Amazon with a June 15, 2020 delivery. Get yours on Kindle or paperback. Sign up for my free newsletter on employer brand headlines Want to ask me anything? I have open office hours. Grab your free spot. Learn more at http://bit.ly/talentchoosesyou

For those of you old enough to remember, there was a time when music came on vinyl (sit down old man!). There was a thing (mostly in the punk world) called a "split single," where two bands who were friends would each take a side of the single. In a similar punk spirit, Rob Stevenson of Talk Talent To Me and I decided to have a nice rambling conversation about Covid, the industry, and what was (and wasn't) working for companies. This is part one of the conversation, but part two lives on Talk Talent To Me (so follow the link and listen to it!). Enjoy! Show notes: Yes, the books are starting to roll out!!! The Employer Brand Handbook Vol 1: Working with Recruiters is now live on Amazon Talent Chooses You: Hire Better with Employer Branding is available for pre-order on Amazon with a June 15, 2020 delivery The Employer Brand Handbook Vol 2: Metrics and KPIs is available for pre-order will go live Sept 7, 2020. All books are being discounted at launch, so order your copies today! Sign up for my free newsletter on employer brand headlines Want to ask me anything? I have open office hours. Grab your free spot. Learn more at http://talentchoosesyou.com

Call it "employer blanding" or even "the sea of sameness," but there's a valid reason to think all employer brands look and feel the same. But that's not a rule or anything. The trick is learning how to push beyond the obvious to understand your talent targets and offer them something far more meaningful than what's obvious. Show notes: Yes, the books are starting to roll out!!! The Employer Brand Handbook Vol 1: Working with Recruiters is now live on Amazon Talent Chooses You: Hire Better with Employer Branding is available for pre-order on Amazon with a June 15, 2020 delivery The Employer Brand Handbook Vol 2: Metrics and KPIs is available for pre-order will go live Sept 7, 2020. All books are being discounted at launch, so order your copies today! Sign up for my free newsletter on employer brand headlines Want to ask me anything? I have open office hours. Grab your free spot. Learn more at http://talentchoosesyou.com

Let us be blunt: the metrics we often use (time to fill, funnel conversion rates, quality of hire, cost per hire, etc) are... imprecise. And to be even more blunt, they aren't the kind of metrics that anyone outside of TA cares about. But what if there was one metric that every leader in every part of the business would immediately understand? Something they could all align to? There may be such a metric, even if it may not be possible to use. Show notes: Yes, the books are starting to roll out!!! The Employer Brand Handbook Vol 1: Working with Recruiters is now live on Amazon Talent Chooses You: Hire Better with Employer Branding is available for pre-order on Amazon with a June 15, 2020 delivery The Employer Brand Handbook Vol 2: Metrics and KPIs is available for pre-order will go live Sept 7, 2020. All books are being discounted at launch, so order your copies today! Sign up for my free newsletter on employer brand headlines Want to ask me anything? I have open office hours. Grab your free spot.         Learn more at http://talentchoosesyou.com  

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!!! The Employer Brand Handbook Vol 1: Working with Recruiters is now live on Amazon Talent Chooses You: Hire Better with Employer Branding is available for pre-order on Amazon with a June 15, 2020 delivery The Employer Brand Handbook Vol 2: Metrics and KPIs is available for pre-order will go live Sept 7, 2020. All books are being discounted at launch, so order your copies today! Sign up for my free newsletter on employer brand headlines Want to ask me anything? I have open office hours. Grab your free spot.