Is Employer Brand Still Relevant?

Welcome everyone.  Employer content show part of the talent insights series brought to you by Hirewell, and before you apply, I’m your host.

James Hornick joining me is my co-host from before you apply soon to be employer brand pariah, they Gucci. Hey, but we were, we were thrown off here because I was going to have Nate intro this one. We decided last minute, not to, because he was afraid of reading on camera. I think he gets like, he’s one of those people that gets choked up and he can’t read, you know, when you’re on off the page and yeah.

But but the reason why is, because I think this, this topic is going to fall largely on you. Cause this is, I I’d like to think that the first 13 shows we’ve done, which is building up to this one. Oh geez. The show where Nate just. Dumps on employer brand has his own profession and all the truth. Is that not where this is headed?

I don’t know. I don’t know. We’ll see. I, I don’t know. I, you, you built it up to be that way. I built up to be that way, but from like our conversation starting this, it sounds like you were waffling on it. And that’s that whole thing that the, the, the title was a question. Is employer brand still relevant?

That is the question. Yeah, I’ll let you jump in with a point to get us started. But I think I, I don’t know, like the whole, the reason I wanted to have this conversation so much is because I don’t think we should ever have like a fixed mindset about the industry that we’re in or about like really like any, anything.

And it’s pretty interesting to like, as I’ve gotten into this and as I’ve been in like a practitioner with like creating content on LinkedIn and I’ve seen how. There’s so much crossover between things that promote your company and promote an employer brand. And like, it’s just my, my mindset. And like my thinking about this as like, has really evolved to the point where I’m at today, where it’s like, I really, I questioned this.

Then I go, like, how relevant is it? How intentional does it need to be? And is that, is there this like cool area that companies can play in that kind of like hits on all the things. So. Yeah. Here’s, here’s what we’re gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna, just so we don’t bury the lead. Here’s what we’re at the end of this conversation.

Here’s what we’re going to land. I’m going to predict this. We’re going to say that it’s very important for some organizations who are trying to get their name out and completely irrelevant for others. I think that’s what we’re going to end up on this one, but let’s get there. Okay. There’s, I’ll start us off since you weren’t prepared.

There’s a reason why actually, yeah, there’s a reason why we call this the employer content show and not the employer brand show. And that’s because I believe on some level and I mean this, I mean this and a half serious kind of kidding, but kind of not way that all brand is inherently bullshit, like on some level.

And I know people are gonna jump out of the chair. People are working in marketing and branding. Like, what are you talking about? That’s my profession. But like on some level, it’s just whatever your brand is, your like your company is doing or you yourself or whatever is doing great, innovative stuff. And you’re talking about what you’re doing and everything else you add into that is just, Hmm.

High level right now. Okay. Before people, let me kind of break this down a bit. Now here’s where people will agree with it. Here’s where everybody who loves branding is going to agree. I’m going to say so corporate brand employer, brand personal brand, right? If I go and say perse guys, personal brands, bullshit, you’re going to have a million people agree with that.

Yeah, it’s, it’s a crock it’s totally made up, but why is that? Why is personal brand some different thing than everything else? Why is it different than employer brand or why is it different than corporate brand? It’s because it’s not so much that on its face, there’s anything wrong with personal brand it’s because that people are sick of how personal brand has been turned into self-promotion people who are don’t really know anything, talking about how they’re experts.

vanity metric chasing. Then those same people selling courses on how to become personal branders talking about talking basically. Right. And everyone just nauseated by it in every industry, this exists, this isn’t just like a LinkedIn thing. Like there’s in the fitness industry, there’s a million of these like charlatans out there.

Right. And, but that’s, that comes back to the point where. there’s, there’s the ability to just spin things exist in brand. Whereas the reason why I, we call this the employer content show is I maintain that regardless of what you’re doing, whether it’s personal, whether it’s,  employer, whether it’s corporate, content is great.

If you focus on creating value for your audience and that’s your goal, your goal is just to. whatever your domain knowledge is, articulate, answer people’s questions in a way that’s going to help them. You then in turn, build your brand. Like the brand becomes the after effect or the afterthought, whether it’s personal employer, corporate, you know, whatever.

because your intention is to just to build value. Right? Cause that’s the thing is like you could go out and say personal brands, bullshit, and guess who’s going to jump on that. You’re going to see a bunch of people who, you know, because they’re very active on social agree with that. And you’re like, But wait don’t these people have killer personal brands.

Like I can say that about me. Right. And they’re like, Oh, freaking James, the like, does that’s kind of hypocritical? No. Right. Because like, I don’t really give a crap if like people know me, I’m not selling any courses. I don’t really give a crap who’s following me. You know what I mean? Like my intention is to help my company build business.

And the way I’m going to do that is by building Goodwill, by helping others. Through content or through direct actions. That’s my entire MO. Right? Yeah. And that becomes your brand employer brands, the same damn thing. So there are companies and I maintained that with employer brand. You’re either, building a good company and then you’re talking about what you’re doing, right.

That’s it. And when this whole, when I hear, and this isn’t my space, I kind of need to lean on you a little bit more for this. But when people talk about the whole theory of it, you need to come with your employer value proposition, all these super complicated things to describe the process of like, you have to.

And I’m going to have some examples of this later, you have to build a cool-ass company, you have to treat your employees. Well, you have to be a destination from which we’ve talked about before. Like, those are the things that are really important and then it’s just using content to talk about it. Okay.

So I want to make sure that we’re, that we’re talking about. I hate to split hairs. It really frustrates me when people do that. But I think it’s important here to like, just establish some context. So like your employer brand, let’s just talk about like what an employer brand is, right?

An employer brand is, is the perception that your employees and candidates have about what it’s like to work at your company  that perception exists, regardless of anything you do. True or not. And the true or not piece is the reputation part. Right. So if we go, you want to say great. No, I’m just agreeing.

Yeah. So, so if we go, okay, that perception of that reputation that exists, whether you do anything intentional around or not we can all agree on that. Now the employer branding piece is what I think about like the intention behind it. It’s like the action, the act of act of. Putting stuff out. So people know about who you are and what you’re doing.

I think there are some companies like . Who have earned the right to not have to do that anymore because they have just, they’re building the coolest thing. They run their company in the right way, whatever,  they don’t have to put. Emphasis or intention behind putting that stuff out there now there’s but there’s a lot of companies who, who haven’t earned that right.

Yet for one reason or another, they just don’t have that level of awareness or maybe they they’re not building the coolest thing or whatever. So now, like I go to like for companies who need to be, be proactive and do something about it,  what does that look like? I think there’s two questions  that I want to like, make sure we answer here is what is, if you are going to.

Do you employ your branding? What does it look like today? Or what should it look like? And two, where should this sit in your organization? Okay. Two things that I’ve been thinking about. Okay. Gotcha. You want me to keep going with that? Keep going. I got a good answer for the last one, but I need you to lead the first one a little better.

Okay. That sounds good. I think in, in the employer, branding space, you mentioned EDPs. For one, we’ve talked about MVPs. I have my opinions about them. I think the reason why either companies or consultants push the EVP thing and say like, this is where we have to start is because they don’t think that they can get to the content piece without it.

It’s like we have to do this level of discovery in order for us to put stuff out. I argue that you don’t have to. I think that you can put stuff out and use that as a mechanism to learn all the things that you would otherwise learn by investing tons of money and time into an EVP. And I also think employer branding now, it’s changed.

best practices would be, you need to tell employee stories. You need to, I mean, trust me, this is all stuff that like we have done as a company and people have paid us to do this. I think now. It’s more of like documenting the things that you’re doing and how you’re doing them and why you’re doing them and things like that.

There’s this wonderful example. There’s this woman on LinkedIn that I’ve started following recently. Her name’s Carrie Rose. She’s the, I think she’s the CEO or founder of rise at seven, which is a digital marketing agency in the UK. She is doing the coolest things that I don’t even know if she realizes that it’s employer branding.

By just recently, she took a screenshot of her calendar and then talked about in a post about how she’s implemented as company-wide policy, where there’s like two hour time blocks that are dedicated to like her employees. I think like getting outside or doing something that is not work-related. Yeah.

That’s employer branding. That’s what it, in my opinion, that’s what it needs to look like today. That is like, it is not sexy. It doesn’t take any money to do it. It is just showing cool things that you’re doing as a company. And like, I’ve been following her for like maybe a week or two, not even that long.

And she does this cut this kind of stuff pretty consistently. Okay. So I’m like, shit. If I was a, if I was a candidate, I’d love to work for her. Yeah, what you’re getting you’re someone who’s an executive of the company, just giving a no bullshit everyday take of what they’re doing. Like that’s what people want to hear about versus like what adjectives would you use to describe your initiatives and yeah.

Whatever. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. okay. Your second part, where do you think it should sit? where do I think it should sit? Yeah. Where do you think it should sit? Right. I think it should sit wherever the resources are. and hold on. There’s a part being, okay. I think it should say wherever the resources are most likely those resources sit in marketing.

now if you would’ve asked me this question, six or eight months ago, I would have said without a doubt, employer, branding needs to sit in talent because it needs to be close to recruiters because they are helping recruiters. Hire people like that. I would have been adamant about that. I’m not anymore because like that is almost, that’s like saying that marketing needs a sit in sales because marketing’s job is to help salespeople we’ll have more conversations or have more demos.

 I think it’s a ridiculous argument. I think it makes a lot of sense for employer brand to sit under marketing. And to maybe not even be called employer branding at all, and to just have it be like a part of one function that addresses the overall audience that this company is trying to reach.

but he can have still have a close relationship with recruiting in the same way that like marketing or corporate branding has a close relationship with sales. I am, unfortunately going to agree. I say, unfortunately, because I was hoping we’d be a little more split on this, but I think if you, if you break it down in terms of, I really think that, people take.

Job descriptions and responsibilities and their silos a little too, literally in most organizations and all it really takes to get people to change their focus on what they’re doing is just comp them differently or bonus them differently, or have them focus in a different area or add something else to their plate.

You know? So if you tell your marketing people like you have this, these responses, like two, three, four things, traditional marketing responsibilities, plus attracting candidates. And here’s how we’re going to measure that. Boom. Like it’s, that’s that solves so much of like the reason why marketers might not care about employer brands because they’re, it’s not their job, you know, like make it, I believe that whoever the kind of, as you said, when you started your answer, like whoever is communicating with the outside, determining what your message is, like, why would you have two different groups doing that?

Like, it makes no sense. Like there should be one unified solidified message. but there’s different organizations that are like, I think that if you wanted to, this is something we’re actually implementing this week, which I’m really excited about. Oh yeah. I’ll let you know how it goes. Is that, because I think it all comes down to content and we’ve always encouraged people to get involved in our own content processes.

our content hasn’t been specifically about, we haven’t done it with the intention of employer of hiring, right.  We don’t create a lot of our content because like hiring is our Main thing, but that’s how it’s panned out. the amount of hires we’ve made. Like it’s come up and like every conversation we have is hats, how people typically hear of us, you know?

And, I know that, like Nathan Jefferson, our friend had this idea and we’ve talked about it before, is that If you want to get your employees talking about things on social or creating content, creating video content versus, wouldn’t it. Make more sense to do some sort of spot bonus referral bonus kicker incentive to get involved that way versus just paying them a month, like a huge amount for individual employee referrals.

Is this like a different concept of going about it? You know, creating the, the overall, you know, getting more people kind of involved, but that still comes down to. how people are aligned and how you’re, compensated and what expectations you’re having. You know what I mean? Whether or not these are kind of mandatory part of the job or something kind of optional they can do.

So, yes, I agree that it, it makes more sense to have this line with marketing. I think recruiting should be a little more aligned with marketing than it is in most organizations to begin with. But I think that marketing’s job and not to throw more responsibilities onto marketing people.

And then maybe they’ll hate this, that hiring needs to be seen as partially a part of marketing’s responsibility. And you know, that way, whatever your corporate branding messages are and your employer branding messages are like, these things are getting integrated and being thought through by the same people.

Yeah. there’s a couple huge benefits stripping away the employer brand terminology or title, and thinking about this in terms of  content, audience, and channels, right? Yeah. And just because there is, we can’t help. I mean, we have to acknowledge the stigma that comes with employer branding.

There’s a lot of marketers who just straight up think employer branding is bullshit. Like.  Whatever. It’s like it plays second fiddle at most companies. and what you see a lot is marketing has been established. Marketing has like built out budgets and teams in this kind of thing. And they’re operating over here in the way that marketing does.

They know their data, they know their campaigns, they’re testing stuff, they’re reporting. They are like held responsible for revenue. And then you have talent and employer brand like plopped on top of it, which gets half-assed. And it came really late to the party. And the reason it came late to the party was because suddenly this company was probably growing really fast and they had to hire a bunch of people and they’re like, ah, what do we do?

Nobody knows who we are. And we have, now we have to start thinking about employer branding. Like none of that even makes sense, but because it came late to the party, nobody has any respect for it. And instead if we stripped all that away and we just saw it as like content channel audience and put it all together, Then suddenly, like you said, there’s alignment on messaging.

There’s alignment on initiatives, there’s joint campaigns, there’s content, there’s shared content resources because. Now, you’re just looking at our audience and there’s budget and there’s respect because you’re all falling under like one umbrella that everybody understands the meaning and the purpose of disfunction.

I think it would eliminate a lot. I don’t have any hope for that happening at a large company. but I think startups who are just starting to think about. Employer branding the need to hire people. They’re seeing how competitive is. They want to like start telling those stories about like how they’re doing things.

I think startups can really change this industry. I put like all my hope in, in startups, like, well, yeah, and this is kind of driving towards what we said at the beginning. I want to get into category design here for a second. I’m still not sure I’ve got my fully formed opinion on it. But as you were saying, this is more relevant in some companies than others.

so here’s the thing. So category design maybe brand is completely irrelevant, period. You know, maybe there’s some organizations that because of the nature of they’ve constructed this persona in terms of their value, they can provide to both.

customers and to employees that like, they don’t need to spend any branding. Cause everyone knows who the F they are. Right. So like, I was like, Amazon is an example, like when I think Amazon, right. Here’s what I think. Tell me how you can tell me what you think. Innovative e-commerce company make their customers’ lives.

Easier. Ruthlessly crush the competition. People there probably work long hours and they get amazing experience and it sets them up for the rest of their career when they go else. When they leave in a couple of years, Yeah. When I think Amazon, that’s what I think, because I look at it from both, I’ve talked, a lot of people work there and as a, I’m a huge Amazon fan as a consumer.

Right. but like, do they do employer branding? I don’t know, but that’s how I know them. Like they’re in a category of their own, like, I don’t know any other company that checks all those boxes, you know, at the same time. Yeah. they might technically do employer branding.

I don’t know how much they do too much money. They, they, they probably do. You know, that’s the only thing that gets skewed from my perspective is that I’m, probably not anybody’s target market for their employer branding. So I don’t know, we see it, but, this is the word on the street, you know?

This is how people know them, because I do talk to enough people that, you know, everyone has that same perception of them. Everyone kinda kind of knows are everyone knows. Like if I go there, I’m going to get paid. I’m going to get like amazing experience burned out, but that’s okay. Because two years later I’m going to get a better job than I have now.

Yeah. I mean last time we talked to you, you use the Zappos example. Yeah. I mean, Zappos was brilliant in the way that like they marketed. Company culture.  They marketed their own, but they just marketed the need to pay attention to it. Yeah. It’s like they influenced an entire industry before everyone else was talking about it.

Like all the stuff we talk about now, because I read that book and I realized that book was written in 2010. Like no one was talking about the shit back then now, you know, and. But I mean, that, that was that a lot of it comes down to like his core philosophy was that, your brand is just a lagging indicator of your culture.

You know, you build what you want and make your company, whatever you want it to be. And then you’re going to get known for that, which is, I guess what happens in my perception at least how have you Amazon? Yeah. Like they are what they are. And this is how, as someone who sees kind of both the employment side of it, talking to people who have worked there as well as a consumer, like that’s how I view Amazon.

And I dig it. So, yeah, no for sure. I think, you know, like I mentioned earlier, like there’s some companies who have just earned the right to like, not have to emphasize the employer brand side of things. and I guess tying it back to the category, like my take on employer category design is when is those companies that they created their own category, where they don’t have to play by the rules.

Everyone else does. It’s not a rat race for them in terms of like, how are we going to brand ourselves to stand out? Because they’ve, they’ve created something and position themselves in a way, then the eyes of job seekers, there is no comparison. Yes. Every other company is competing for the talent that they’ve positioned themselves in a category, a subcategory of the hiring market and they’re the leader and everyone else is just like trying to find a way to compete.

Yep, exactly. , so if that is a company, if that is you, for example, you have to emphasize the retention piece, which is like the employee experience employee engagement piece, because if you’re gonna, if you can dominate. Your little corner, like Amazon, your big corner of the market.

And you can like Hoover up all the talent because of what you’re doing. Then you have to keep those people. You have to do everything you can to keep those people, which that then If you’re doing a really poor job of that, then the whole thing becomes problematic because then that reputation that we talked about earlier is damaged and the word gets out and people know that like, yeah, they’re crushing the competition, but like they suck to work for, and then all of a sudden now, now that’s your employee brand you’re pointing.

Yeah. That dovetails perfectly into last thing. I had prepared for this. Oh good. Okay. This exact same thought, like, okay, isn’t it just really about retention then? Isn’t it just like, how do you retain them? How do you build a company where you retain employees and people just find out about that because your employees stick around forever and they love the place and it just organically, like the word gets out.

So I went back to my team and I’m like, guys, I want to know what are companies that people just don’t leave. Like what are companies that you don’t even try to pull people from? Actively because you notice it’s going to be a waste of your time because people don’t leave these places, not entirely. And I noticed there’s, there’s a couple of recurring themes here.

 I’m going to give some examples and I I’m people at these companies, these are all positives. You should be very proud. You made this list because it means you’re doing something right. the first is actually, they’re a relatively newer client of ours.  Which is good because these are the kind of companies you want to have as clients, because.

People want to be there and love it. So like Ulta, Ulta, beauty. Oh yeah. Yeah. They’re great. They’re Western suburbs, Chicago. so that’s going so in the past, like people, like anytime we talked to somebody from like Alto, they’re like love the culture they pay. Well, good benefits, location. And that’s the thing is a lot of these things in Chicago.

Like lot of times, like these guys are Western suburbs. So it’s like a, they have kind of a niche of like, you know, people who don’t, people who want to have a suite company, because a lot of the best companies are downtown. And so if you’re like in the suburbs and you’re a sweet place to work, that’s even like you have like your own kind of niche kind of carved out and your little category developed.

but yeah, people just checks all the boxes of like good pay, sweet culture, doing cool stuff. That’s going the big three things. You’re going to hear a lot on this list. Crate and barrel, same reasons. They’re in the Northern suburbs. So they got a little bit of a, like a location category niche. A lot of people live in the North shore.

Don’t want to come downtown, but people are happy with the pay and benefits there. People think they’re doing cool stuff. People like the culture, people don’t leave. It seems like genius. I don’t know what kind of employer brand these guys do. I just know that maybe they don’t need to have do anything. then there were some ones I wasn’t as familiar.

I wasn’t at the team. So people at digital labs.  so like that’s everyone who works there, that we’ve talked to over the last several years, like pay well, doing cool shit. Like, it’s hard to compete against that. You know, that’s what retains people, Braintree, which is part  of a part of PayPal now.

Like, like these guys are, you can’t pull people out of Braintree. It’s just impossible. Like they pay well, the culture is great. Great leadership. Like doing cool stuff in a coal industry. Like they created a category, you know? there’s other stuff I just, I could keep going on. There were more potentially, but, you see the theme it’s like, it comes down to of like, if you have rewarding pay, you know what I mean?

If you’re a little above average with what’s out there or way above average, you know, whatever it is, people are excited about the actual work you have them doing and you have a good culture. Like you get those three things, right. You’re going to retain employees. And once you do that, hiring new employees is really easy because everyone’s on the same page saying the same things.

Yeah. And at that point, like for those companies, because I would say you could always argue those, like, those are, that’s how you create your own category because there’s things going to be more specific to these places where their location or the business they’re in, or like the, the industry they were in or whatnot.

But within those of sudden niches, like everyone else is competing against you. Yeah. You know Base camp did an amazing job of this. They came out with rework, you know, like rework was one of those books that was just like company culture, way of working kind of thing. I can’t I’d imagine their retention is extremely high.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I heard him talking on interview one. So it was just, it was just such a different take. It is a creed. Was that, and give him, give her he’s he doesn’t give a crap about trying to like become the next unicorn. He’s just like, we’re just going to create great products and have a great environment.

And the only people that are the only people we care about are our customers, you know, like in terms of like who buys our product, we’re not there. It’s just a different take on. Trying to just provide value to them. That’s their focus and providing value to the customers they have and knowing that not everyone’s gonna be a fit for them, but they’re okay with that.

 okay. There’s, there’s two things like a one I want to touch on content for sure. Cause there’s something I’ve been thinking about, but also like going back, I think like I would accept at this point, the argument. That employer branding is bullshit. I would, because I know there’s definitely a lot of people who feel that way, but if that’s going to be your argument, you have to agree that the retention piece, which is the things that you’re talking about, building a company the right way that makes people stay is extremely important.

And that that’s what matters, because. I just, it’s fine. If it’s fine. If you want to argue that it’s BS, but you have to like emphasize the inches of snow. You can’t. I would say that. Yeah, I agree. You can’t, it can’t be smoking like smoke and mirrors does not work for hiring. Yeah.  So, I don’t know. I mean, it’s all, connected. back to, can we talk about content? Sure. That’s all we talk about. That’s what the show is about.

No, I don’t want to talk about content today. okay. So back to like what I think employer branding should look like now. Today. I think a lot of employer branding that we see  is like from five years ago stuff, but just again, so many companies are like late to the game party. They’re looking back at like best practices or like what consultants are telling them to do.

And it’s just like all like the same old stuff, you know, it’s, it’s why we don’t see like a lot of creativity or like risk taking out there, which is why I love what, like. Carrie Rose is doing, dude. I love it. When Nicole Parrish did yesterday, where she took a  picture, like after getting her COVID shot and talking about how like her company, like kind of allowed her to do that.

And then you jumped in with a funny comment, which is like, That’s perfect. we need more of that, you know? yeah, she got the Pfizer shot. I got the Moderna, but Moderna is far superior, but it was just like, fun little exchange, you know? And, I think about this now, like we’ve talked about this a couple shows ago where like there’s like micro branding.

And this is why I think if we, move the employer branding piece, like rapid into like this overall branding, marketing, whatever function you can look internally and go let’s help all of our functions build their own brands. There’s I had this conversation yesterday with somebody who works with like really early, earlier stage company seed, a round things like that.

She’s like, you know, I talked to them about employer branding and like a lot of them, like, don’t. A lot of founders have no idea what I’m talking about. I said, yeah, that’s because they don’t speak that language. But if you tell them like, Hey, you need to build your engineering brand because you’re hiring engineers, they immediately would go, Oh, I totally understand why I would do that.

That makes a lot of sense. And so looking at it that way and go like, okay, how can we help each one of our functions build their own brand in a way that makes sense for that audience. That industry there’s obviously there’s a lot of ways to do that, but I thought, how cool would it be if like, every department in your company have their own podcast and have their own like creative process, all the stuff that like you and I do with our own companies where like, we record something, we chop it up into video, we turn it into a blog post.

And like, if that was done at like the department level where you had this, like, Sales podcast that was like talking about your industry that could like one just impact the entire industry. It could educate your buyer. If salespeople found it and started following it, it’d be a company they’d want to work for.

But you can do it from a, from a results standpoint. If you could pull it off, it would a hundred percent work. I have zero doubt about that. The challenge though, is going to be getting buy in from anyone actually do the work. Right. So the challenge with any of these content stuff is that it takes a while to, to see the result and see the payoff.

I think, I think everyone who’s done this. Can I agree with that? And it might take six months, you know, but once it does, it’s it’s not a straight line. It’s like a. Hockey stick type graph, where all of a sudden you see that the things start to pay off, but you need someone at the very top to really drive these types of things, even in scent people until you get to that point, you know, and that’s where I, you know, it’s not gonna happen on its own.

So you need visionary leadership who’s bought in on the whole concept that can get everyone else to buy in. And that’s the thing that’s always toughest. Yeah, but if you have somebody who’s like truly leading this and like looking at again, content channel audience, it’s like, okay, I’m going to, I’m going to like guide this.

I’m going to provide the resources, you know, whatever it might be. I mean, it’s totally doable. I just think like thinking in terms, like, instead of going like our employer brand, is this and talking about like the company and stuff, if you just look at it, like our engineering brand is this, our sales brand is this and start like.

That’s how you like really show, show your different,

 which I don’t know. That’s where you can just like, you can really make an argument that looking at it through that lens allows you to like, just see the crossover between your audiences. Like they all meet in one place and they all care about certain things and finding out like, what your customers and were like, what’s your candidates both care about and creating stuff at that point makes this whole thing just like come together and like, I think it comes down to the leadership of those departments.

Do they understand that their team? Is what makes them successful or not. And, do they realize the urgency in hiring? Cause what I see from recruitment standpoint is you see some work with some companies where they have hiring managers who are really bought in. They’re willing to go the extra mile.

You know what I mean, to, to do what they need to get people on board. Then you have others who. Are hard to pin down. They’ve pushed this off to their internal recruitment staff. They’re flighty and not available. They think hiring is somebody else’s job to send me resumes. Like those people are never going to no.

Do you know? You know, man, I think 99% of companies are people aren’t going to do this. that’s how it always goes. Yeah. It’s I mean, even. Well, so maybe this is a topic for next show, so we don’t get completely sidelined. But I think just discussing like buy-in strategies, how to get people bought in, you know, to driving that, like, I don’t know if I have the answer to that, but I think  that’s maybe the hardest thing is how do you get more of an organization to buy in?

Because like we’ve said before, like everyone loves the idea of, you know, employee generated content. Now there’s some other issues with that, but still the hardest thing is whether it’s like your senior leaders or anybody else is like, How do you get by it? So, okay. Let me get a little preview. Sorry. I can’t go for it.

I cannot not say it.  I don’t know if it was like when we were doing our prep or if we were like, actually live when I was telling you about this marketing leader. I was talking to this morning. I think it might’ve been prep anyway. Okay. I was talking to her and I just like, kind of in preparation for the show, I just straight up asked her, like, do you think employer branding is bullshit?

Cause she said like, I used to totally think that and then it wasn’t until. We really needed to hire in a, in a really competitive space. And leadership came to me and said like, you need to build our employer brand. And she’s like, she was just telling me like the terminology. Like they weren’t talking to me in a way that like I understood it didn’t make sense.

You know, like I’m a marketer, I think differently. And I think this is what I was coming back to like, and talking to like a founder and saying like, you need to build your engineering brand. It’s a different way of approaching something and you’re doing it in a way that the person you’re talking to understands.

That’s where I think there there’s  a lot of miscommunication, which is another problem that could be solved by like wrapping this all into like one, department. All right. All right. Dive deeper on this next time. Alright. I like where your head’s at everybody. That’s a wrap for the employer content show.

If you want to hear more of what Nate and I have to say, you can subscribe to the higher world channel on YouTube, where we have a playlist of all our episodes and the talent insights podcast, which is available on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Amazon and Spotify. Nate. Thanks again. And everyone out there, we will see you soon.

Bye.