Why Employer Branding Sucks ( What to Do About It)

Why Employer Branding Sucks ( What to Do About It) Whats all this buzz about employer branding? According to  Hung Lee, the founder of recruiting tech platform Workshape, it sucks. He says EB is broken and the candidate experience is currently pretty crappy. Struggling to attract the right types of high-quality talent? Read on for a summary of Hungs cold hard truths on where youre going wrong, and how to fix things. You can also listen to our full interview on iTunes  or  SoundCloud. Why is employer branding broken? I think if you take employer branding as part of a general sort of attempt to position the business and kind of a way to improve your brand presence, for instance, get customer awareness, get all those types of good stuff, then fantastic. I think, to a large extent, the investment that we put into employer branding largely misses the point. And whilst I think its one of those things where I think I value the sentiment, and I totally understand companies being very committed to, you know, presenting the right image, but I think it still doesnt generate great candidate experience on the other side if you think about it. You know, you get lots of companies spending a lot of money building their so-called employer brand, but the fundamental mechanics of how a person experiences that brand, as a candidate, hasnt changed. And that is still quite a negative and frustrating experience for the vast majority of people. Employer branding sucks? Ive mounted an attack on employer branding and I want just qualify that. You know, I dont think its wasted energy per se, but I think a large part, employer branding is designed to improve the experience of the candidate because how can you, you know, have great employer branding if you make your candidates miserable or the applicants miserable? But theres a lack of understanding that its actually the applicant flow itself that creates the negative experience. So, if companies could do a much better job focusing on how they deal with people that interact with their brand after theyve acquired them, thats how you would improve the experience overall. And the key to that is not to force them to apply. What should employers be should be doing instead? my biggest problem with employer branding is that its sort of the front end of what is the standard recruiting funnel. If you look at most, whatever companies do, however innovative it is, ultimately, the call to action is, Oh, apply to this job. And once that person applies to that job, you know what? Straight away, youre dropping in recruitment form on him or her, and that is literally a very processed and reductive activity which I think most people dont welcome. Now, I think you can get away with it when youve got an audience that is, you know, highly interested in job discovery. Where  do they start? So, caveat number one is every company is unique. So, youve gotta start internally. You know whenever you see a best practice blog or article out there, you always get kind of a tidal wave of negative response, no matter who actually produces it. And the reason why that is, is because best practice assumes that every company is kind of a venture same. And of course, they arent. So, first thing to do is to understand what your company is in terms of, you know, how interested you are in this activity. Youve gotta analyze, for instance, how many people youve got involved in managing recruiting. Like, is it a priority? Lots of companies say, you knowthe rhetoric is, Im sure, you know, everyone says, Oh, our people are the most important part of our business, but lets see whether that maps to reality. Is the budget there for this? Is there people in charge of talent on the top table of the business? You know, what is the commitment of it? What trends should we keep an eye on? 1. Artificial intelligence I think you need to look at artificial intelligence. And by this, I mean automated recruiters, automated job search agents. These are kind of little programs that are trying to solve the discovery problem in a totally different way. Its not about search, its not about ads, its not even about what we do, which is match. Its about basically empowering a digital agent to go out there and find what you want for you. Now, I think that is going to be a hugely interesting segment. 2. Blockchain if you like, a macro trend as to where we are is blockchain. I think a lot of people dont quite understand how blockchain tech applied to the world of work. But to kind of dumb it down to a level where it shouldnt go, but sort of for the sake of, you know, trying to do a quick explanation, blockchain is essentially the technology which allows you to track transaction but also protect the identity. So right now, its predominantly used for financial transactions, you can trade with it, bitcoins, etc. But of course, its clearly applied to the world of work. Imagine if youre in a situation where you produced a brilliant bit of copy, Jorgen. You ideally wanna track that copy wherever it might be replicated. Why could you not get a royalty for that? Right now, thats impossible for you to do. But with blockchain tech, that allows you to do it because its public ledger of the content that youve produced and the structure youve produced it. Suddenly, you can start seeing workers basically usi ng blockchain tech to validate that, Yes, I am the owner of this bit of labor and I should be paid for this labor. Thats gonna have huge, transformative effects society-wide, I suspect. 3. Digital predictions And the third major trend would probably be another application of AI. But rather than using agents, I think were gonna get to the point where we do have the ability to predict fit and performance based on what this persons behaviors and digital footprint might be. And this goes way back for you and I, Jorgen, when we were, you know, first looking at social media influencing and all of this type of stuff. And those signals at that point were very crude, you know? How many followers? was more or less the measure. But were getting to the point now where I think theres so much data that everyone produces, inevitably produces, that you know, were not even aware of.