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You're told that this year, you'll need to do more with less. But I bet no one told your hiring managers, who are frantic to get their jobs filled.
What you need is a way to make everything you're already doing (and everyone on your team) more effective.
🚀 You need social posts that actually get noticed and clicked on.
🏮 You need job postings that are attractive and compelling.
🧬 You need video content and testimonial quotes that explain why your company is so great.
💪 You need responses to Glassdoor reviews that prove your brand instead of getting defensive.
📈 You need a career site that gets prospects excited.
🏎️ You need your hiring managers trained on social recruiting
🚰 You need a pipeline of great candidates.
You need to get serious about your employer brand.
Most employer brands are about applying a coat of white wash onto a company so that they look generically “attractive.” You know what I mean. The companies that tout their great culture (but never get around to describing it) or their great benefits (which seem a lot like everyone else’s benefits) or the awards (that they paid for).
An employer brand built on attractiveness is built on fashion more than function. And those companies struggle to chase the fashion of the day trying to stay relevant. And when they falter, they are forced to break out the checkbook and buy more creative, more ads and more promotion just to keep their pace.
An employer brand built on your differentiated value is very different. Suddenly, you build brands for a fraction of the price in just a few weeks. They can be delivered to recruiters and immediately implemented within your job postings, outreach, social content, career site content, and every other touchpoint you’ve built.
That means, you are three weeks away from having a brand, and six weeks away from seeing that brand come to life within your company.
Best of all, a brand built on your differentiated value (instead of finding ever more creative and strained ways to say, “we’re great!”) doesn’t just support your recruiting team. It gives the consumer marketing teams “people brand” with which to tell more emotional (and effective) stories about why people should buy.
The standard model of employer branding was developed around and for massive companies. 50,000+ employees, global footprint kind of companies. The brands for these companies are far harder to build and implement, which is why they cost so much.
But what if we could re-think the process around smaller companies?
Get rid of the rounds (and rounds and rounds!) of meetings and check-ins. Build around your differentiated value instead of some generic idea of “attractive.” Stop trying to boil the ocean. Get super clear on what an employer brand is going to achieve for you.
Not only can companies as small as 250 people have an employer brand designed to support their corporate growth, it can be completely affordable.
The same is true for companies with 1,000 and 2,000 employees: All the impact of a strong employer brand, right-sized for your company.
“[Our new employer brand] was extremely valuable and eye opening. We all knew we had some issues with our employer brand. Your ideas and perspective helps us design stronger recruitment messages and a much stronger employer brand marketing strategy.”
- Dennis M.
Marketing and Culture Leader
To do this right, I took my decade-plus years of experience building brands for companies like Roku, Recursion, Telecare, Groupon and many others, and started with a clean sheet of paper.
What were the vital elements that made a brand successful? What are the things most people do that aren’t critical to success? How can we get to the heart of what matters and bypass the fluff and theater of so many brands?
Then I looked at emerging technology and discovered ways to use AI, not to write polished-but-still-generic job postings, but to provide a more objective perspective on companies and their competitors. This gives a more complete understanding of the competitive landscape in which you are trying to recruit (in a day!).
Then I tapped the proprietary models and frameworks I’ve been working on for years and found that they speed up the brand development process greatly.
And while I also run focus groups, they aren’t what you expect. No one will ask employees “why do you like working here?” because that is a weak question that returns useless data (spoiler: at least 50% of the people will respond “the people,” which is not how you build a brand). The meetings are designed to elicit perspectives from recruiters, marketers, and hiring managers around what makes your company different as an employer.
With this kind of approach, most companies only need to do one or two focus groups, speeding up the process substantially.
When all is said and done, what you’ll get is NOT a deck. You’ll get a briefing paper, which will describe what we learned, what your brand is, the proof points that support the brand, and a functional playbook on how to use your new brand immediately.
It’s worth noting that this process is built to minimize your time commitment. You’ll fill out the intake form, have a meeting or two with me, and set up the focus groups. Beyond that, this process should feel more like “setting it and forgetting it.”
"Thank you James for taking us on this journey. A step-by-step process with the right speed, the right methods and the right focus to find all the valuable insights in its own company. Thank you again, so much appreciated.”
-Theresa H
Employer Brand Manager
Here’s a secret: the best employer brands are supported organically and in-house.
Yes, you can recruit well without an employer brand. But it is a whole lot harder. And more expensiveI don’t care if you can hire pulitzer-quality copywriters, RISD-dean web designers, and Martin Scorsese to record your employee videos. The best brands are those that feel like they are being lived by your people every single day.
No one decides to work there because the videography on your “day in the life” video was Oscar-worthy. They make their decision based on how credible your messaging is. That means your goal is to get everyone who works there to talk about the brand in their own language, connect it to their own motivations, to their own networks.
Sounds impossible, right? It’s not.
The game isn’t to be “attractive” to lots of people, but to become desirable to the right people.
Unlike agencies who are excited by the prospect of charging you an hourly fee every time they think about you, my activation process is designed to get you to fire me.
Over the course of 6 or 12 months, I’ll build a steady stream of branded content for your job postings, your career site, your social channels, and even your outreach. I’ll deliver training to your recruiters and hiring managers, coaching and strategy to you, and even help record and edit remote videos of your employees.
📦 LinkedIn posts for hiring managers to promote their jobs
📫 LinkedIn posts recruiters can use to promote jobs or build a pipeline
📦 LinkedIn posts for your corporate channel
📫 Images of testimonial quotes from staff
📦 Polished job postings
📫 Outreach messages
📦 CRM sequences
📫 Glassdoor responses
📦 Employee spotlight videos
It’s kind of like one of those “sushi on a conveyor belt” places, where there’s lots to choose from. You just pick what you want next.
As this content and training is delivered, your teams will start to see the value of speaking and communicating through the brand, and they’ll learn how to use it in every interaction with candidates. Over time, they won’t need anything fed to them having become brand experts themselves.
And then you won’t need me any more. You’ll be writing your own rules on how to use the brand like a pro.
“Whether you are a talent acquisition professional with an interest in employer brand or an experienced employer brander who is looking for tools to set your organization up for recruiting success. I can guarantee that you will walk away wishing someone had given you these tools years ago.”
-Andrea M
Director of Talent and Brand
The work I do is designed to help your company attract, identify and hire amazing people in the shortest possible time frame.
Let’s be clear: that requires your recruiting team to change what they do.
And not every recruiting team is ready for change.
But the teams that feel exhausted by working 12-hour days, where they find themselves at 10pm with one eye on Netflix and another sourcing on LinkedIn? The teams who work harder and harder and still feel like they are falling behind? Those are my perfect customers.
I focus on companies who are generally 2,000 employees or less, often with minimal consumer brand awareness, and sometimes in industries often deemed “boring” (fintech, construction, manufacturing, etc).
Curious to see how the process would happen at your company? Let’s talk about it.
“110% recommend! We got so much out of it and James was unreal. So patient, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, engaging, all the other great words! It really helped us open our eyes to what was already in front of us and really promote the great things that we offer!”
-Olivia
Human Resources Officer
For me, a strong brand is one that allows you to lower your ad and agency spend by 10% with no ill effects. A brand that doesn’t decrease your ad spend isn’t a brand. It’s a pretty picture. A motivational poster. It’s a message with all the impact of a pre-written greeting card.
So what can you expect?
First, you'll notice that your materials are aligned. Your job postings spark ideas that your career site and social content will validate. That alignment increases your credibility among candidates, who will ghost you at a lower rate.
Next, your hiring managers will see a higher quality candidate pool. This often starts anecdotally, but quickly becomes the norm.
Then, your recruiters and hiring managers will collaborate more closely on messaging and marketing of specific jobs, increasing internal trust and respect for what your team does.
After six months, expect your offer acceptance rate to be significantly higher. At this point, the message that attracted the candidate will be proven and validated over the course of the
After 12 months, your RPO/agency spend will be clearly lower than last year. You might have to ask your finance team to run the reports to see it, but there will be a clear monetary savings, far greater than the cost of the brand work.
But what if I have…
Workday or Greenhouse? Teamtailor or BambooHR? HireEZ or Findem? It doesn’t matter what tech stack you have, a strong employer brand (and the content it spawns) will increase attraction and engagement regardless of your existing platforms. It will draw in more of the applicants your hiring managers actually want to talk to.
What if I care most about…
More applications? Higher quality talent? Higher conversion rates? Increased offer acceptance rates? lowered reliance on agencies? Whatever your most important metric is, content will be built specifically to support it.
What do I say to my CHRO?
The way to get clearly better candidates (and clearly better hires) isn't to spam strangers with the same message every other company sends. The path to bringing in even better talent is in telling a better story about why your company is unique, getting on people's radar before they start looking for a job, and arming recruiters with compelling messages.
What do I say to my CFO/COO?
You're welcome! Prepare to save some money!
"There were no surprises in what James shared from his findings, but rather a clarity we previously had trouble defining for ourselves. The Playbook provided by James gave us actionable steps to make our messaging clear and consistent so we can truly be a competitor for top talent. For a subject that has an ROI that is often hard to quantify, James helped put things in terms that would help create buy-in from other key members of the organization!“
-Ashley S
Head of TA
Talent strategy isn't "off the rack." It's uncovering and leveraging your unique advantages to hire better.
Curious to see what a strong and actionable brand can do for you and your company? Let’s grab some time to discuss it.
Having spent the better part of a decade developing employer brands and EVPs for Groupon, Roku, Telecare, Enova, Recursion, TradeShift, SavATree, Gearset, CreditShop, and others, I focus exclusively on helping companies build and activate their employer brand so that they can compete (and win) against much larger companies. How? By creating and growing the next generation of employer brand leaders, managers, and specialists.
That's why Google calls me the employer brand nerd.
-James Ellis
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