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...

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...

“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...

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...

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...

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 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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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:...

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...