Your logo and tagline aren’t your brand! Once you’ve established your employer brand and EVPs, here’s how to live and breathe it.
If you ignore the mountain of garbage science and science fiction within Jurassic Park, you can still take away a simple idea: that the tiniest DNA contains the instructions to build massive creatures. Maybe not dinosaurs per se (DNA breaks down pretty hard after a few thousand years), but certainly whales, emus, and you and me.
It doesn’t matter how many itty bitty little pieces you break us into, we are still ourselves, and the DNA ensures that when you cut your finger, a toe doesn’t grow in its stead.
The same can be said for your organisation’s DNA. If you are all about innovation, if your people live to think outside the box and try new things, if they are happiest when they are surrounded by the most cutting-edge tech or ideas, if they stay late not to make a bonus but because they sense that they are on the cusp of a breakthrough, that drive to innovate is something that saturates everyone in the company.
This is why branding professionals always caution others that the logo and tagline aren’t the brand. Is the Nike brand the same when you can only see half a swoosh? Nope, it becomes something different. You can’t look at just a little piece of the logo or tagline and see the whole brand. In fact, it’s likely that you won’t be able to learn anything from it at all.
Here, we have Starbucks (like pretty much every other place humans exist), but we also have tiny little independent coffee shops. At Starbucks, they may be offering me a quick pick-me-up, but the culture dictates precision, efficiency and consistency. I know that if I get a flat white in London, it will be effectively the same as the one in Sydney and the same as the one in Brisbane. You may not think they have the best coffee, the best service, or the best food, you know exactly what you are getting when you walk in. Do you expect a giggle? A surprising flavour? A little something extra? No. This is Starbucks.
But that independent shop also offers coffee. It also offers pumps of flavours to make my latte taste more like a candy cane than coffee. It also offers me a selection of muffins and sandwiches. Same place? Hardly. The independent place has all their specials listed as jokes from the TV show Arrested Development. They sell little candies that make political jokes. They have a chalkboard out front that makes a cheeky joke about how much I probably need coffee.
They aren’t the same, but that’s obvious. But let’s flip the script. What if instead, I started with the menu boards. At one place, you have professionally designed listings of coffee drinks (and here in the States, it comes with calorie counts and other nutritional data points). The font is professional. The colours muted but aligned with the rest of the space. There might even be a screen on which animated gifs of precise shots being poured and foam designs being drawn may show up. From just this single data point, I can infer that this place is part of some bigger chain, that they make a lot of shots exactly the same way every time.
At the independent coffee shop, the menu made of references to a semi-cult TV series shows personality and tells me I should expect more “fun” than “professionalism.” It might tell me that this place is owned by the person who wrote this (because most “employees” are too scared to go out that far on a limb), which suggests that I might even meet the owner as she pulls that shot. It suggests passion for coffee and life. Is this coffee better than the other place? Maybe not, but based on the tiniest data point, I can infer much of the rest of the shop and company.
Your prospect’s understanding of your EVP isn’t because you tell it to them, it’s what they infer based on lots of seemingly tiny touch points. It is a bird’s nest they build in their mind, collecting bits of whatnot to establish the form of the nest.
As an employer brand professional, your job is to establish and maintain the bird’s nest. But you can’t just tell the bird: no, you’re doing it wrong! Build it wider! If you want to change the nest you change the environment, replacing the coffee stirrers and plastic bag detritus with twigs and grass. The bird, taking what is lying around, will inevitably create a different kind of nest.
So if you want to change people’s sense of your EVP, you need to change the touchpoints. In the same way that you could tell a lot about the coffee shop by their menus, chalkboards and napkins, your prospect will be making conclusions about your employer brand based on all their touch points with the brand.
For example, if your brand is predicated on the promise of better candidate service, look at every element of outreach communication. Is every element driving the idea that you will take care of the candidate? Does it communicate the process and what happens next? Does it help the candidate understand what to expect? Or do you ghost them for weeks at a time and come back surprised that they aren’t interested any longer?
Look at your career site. A company that is claiming to care about its workers had better not have stock art on their career site. It should have stories about how the company goes above and beyond to ensure each person can focus on doing great work when they are there and not worrying about child care, health care, parental care, etc.
A company claiming to truly care about the employee must be clear with exactly how far they will go to provide support. On-site gym? Unlimited paid time off? Maternity and paternity benefits? Spell those out in detail (detail provides certainty and credibility). What about your social channels? Are they filled with job openings or stories about how an employee was supported by leadership, their team, or their boss?
What about your consumer touchpoints? If you sell something that your candidates interact with, will they be getting aligning or dissonant messaging? What about your application process? Does it look like everyone else’s or are you simplifying steps, communicating why you need certain bits of information, how carefully you will protect that data? Yes, even the help text of your application process is another bit of stuff in their mental birds’ nests. Will they be adding another twig or an old cigarette butt?
There’s really no level too granular when it comes to supporting that brand promise and there’s a reason for that: Stating a brand promise is cheap. Proving and reinforcing that brand promise all the way down to the DNA level is how the promise becomes real, because it isn’t easy. (Spoiler: the easier something is to do, the less impactful it becomes because if it is easy, everyone else is already doing it).
So if you think you’ve got your EVP nailed down tight, look around. Look at every single touchpoint a prospect sees in the journey, from passive to active to candidate experience. Look at every item and ask, “is this supporting the brand promise or undercutting it?” No element is too small, from the “thanks for applying” automated message to the signature on the recruiter’s email to the hiring manager’s willingness to turn their phone off during the interview. It all matters.
James Ellis
It’s possible that the stories are true and that a radioactive recruiter bit born-marketer James Ellis years ago. All we know is that James Ellis has become a well-known podcaster, writer, speaker and consultant in the growing employer brand industry. He’s done everything from putting a public Fortune 1000 brand on his back to building a 19-person employer brand activation team within the biggest recruitment marketing agency in the world. What drives someone to write, podcast, speak and work so obsessively towards revolutionising the recruiting and talent industry? Coffee. Yes, he would like another, thank you.
Website: employerbrand.consulting and jamesellis.us
Twitter: TheWarForTalent
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/saltlab