Final Thoughts on Talent Chooses You

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