Employer Branding for Recruiters

Hi, I’m James Ellis, the Employer Brand Nerd. I’ve done EB stuff for almost a decade, building and activating employer brands for companies of every size and shape, and I’m thrilled to help recruiters like you take advantage of employer branding. 

While I’m not a recruiter myself, I have been able to spend a lot of time with great ones, and I got to see first hand how great recruiting gets done. One of the things I learned is that great recruiters are great because they can focus, they can dive deep, and very quickly build rapport and relationships very quickly. Their skills work best when they work  at the “retail” level: one-on-one. The magic is in building that connection with a prospect or candidate to get them to take action. Effective, but it happens one person at a time.

Where I can help is to provide support on the “wholesale” level: thinking about communicating one to many, generating interest and engagement with lots of people at once. The trick is that that interest isn’t always actionable. 

Employer brand is the yang to recruiting’s yin. One isn’t better than the other, but together, your work will get obviously better very quickly.

In this class, we’re going to cover a few bigger ideas like “what is employer branding” and “why should I care about employer brand?” before we jump into the tactics that will increase your ability to attract, engage and close great candidates.

Because that’s what this is all about: helping you achieve more in your own recruiting work. Whether you’re an in-house recruiter, or part of an agency, whether you’re relatively new in your career or have achieved a measure of success, these ideas and tools will help you close more candidates in the short term and grow your book in the long term.

First, some housekeeping.

This course is designed to be taken over 5 days. Because of the wonders of technology, you can sprint through the content in a weekend, or you can take it slow, watching a video a day. There’s no right way to do it, but the content is being presented in video and text form so that you can absorb it.

There will be exercises throughout the course. If you’re like me, you might be tempted to skip them. You might tell yourself, “yeah yeah, I get it” and jump ahead. Look, I’m not your mom, so you’re going to do what you want, but I highly encourage you to spend the time to complete them. Some of the things we talk about sound simple in theory, but when you put them into practice, you’ll realize that they require some effort. So let’s build some employer branding muscle together, okay?

Finally, no one wants a boring course. I’m going to do my best to not take myself too seriously. I want you to enjoy the course, which means I might get a little goofy here and there. It’s no sign of disrespect, it’s just that I like cracking jokes and hope a few laughs along the way will ensure you keep going. 

At the end of the course, if you have any issues, concerns or questions, you can email me directly. I’ll do my level best to help you out.

Ready? Here we go…

I’m not sure recruiting has ever been “easy.” But I can say for certain that in the last decade, it’s gotten much much harder. 

We won’t go into the macroeconomic reasons why, but I will say that this kind of problem can’t be solved by recruiters doing what they’ve always done, just a little harder. It is a systemic problem that requires system-driven solutions.

First, you know that the more talented someone is, the more choices they have about where they can work. And now that so many companies have adopted remote or distributed workforce plans, that talented person can work almost anywhere in the world. That means they aren’t choosing between your company and your rival, but between hundreds of potential companies, many of which you may not have ever heard of.

Second, talented people are approached by recruiters all the time. The second you notice them, a bunch of other recruiters have noticed them and are already typing up their InMail message. 

As an aside, it might be helpful to note that according to LinkedIn, there are 2.3 million people with “recruiter” listed as their title as of August 1, 2022. Ignoring all the recruiters who’s official title is “talent acquisition” or some such, you are working against a huge crowded field of recruiters, all of whom seem to be trying to hire the same people you are. That means the same tool you use to find and message the talent is also used by hundreds of thousands of people just like you. There’s little advantage in tools and tricks you can get off the shelf because other recruiters have them, too. Talent has generally tuned recruiters out.

Third, because talented people are over-run with messaging from recruiters, there’s little incentive for them to respond. Look at your own metrics: what percentage of initial messages go unanswered?

You might assume that because you have an amazing role available, they should want that, shouldn’t they? You know that this is a role that will change their life for the better. You’re doing something that will benefit them, don’t they know that? It seems irrational to think that talent would ignore you, when you’ve got a 10% salary bump and better benefits to offer them.

But it only seems irrational to you. From the talent’s point of view, it makes sense. They don’t know you. To them, that life-changing job is a promise of opportunity at best. They’ve been promised so many things from so many other recruiters before you found them that they simply don’t trust what you have to say, let alone what you have to offer.

I don’t mean to get all dire here, but it explains why your job is so hard, right? You’re effectively trying to catch fish without a pole or a net. Worse, the fish are on to your tricks.

But what happens when you finally do get someone to engage? If you can get a meeting or a phone call with someone, you probably go into your pitch about how great the company is, how many awards they’ve won, how great the culture is, etc etc. 

The issue is that for the most part, these words are meaningless to the candidate. Every company thinks (and says) they are a great place to work. Every company has an award or twelve to point to. Every company says they have a great culture. 

Beyond that, what happens if the candidate decides to accept what you’re saying? Their next step is to attempt to validate your amazing claims (I mean, yeah, anything you say that hasn’t been corroborated and proven in the candidates’ eyes are just that: claims).

A good recruiter has a long list of reasons why their company and role are great. From opportunity to innovation to culture, to professional growth to status within the industry. The issue here is that recruiters often act like the sheer tonnage of positive thing to say will convince a prospect to apply. But that’s not how things work. The prospect will start Googling and looking at review sites to see if all these claims are true. The more things the recruiter says, the more opportunities for the prospect to NOT find corroborating evidence. And when that happens, the recruiter goes from someone who is making claims to someone who is making false claims rather than someone providing insight. And when that happens, the prospect bolts.

Finally, what happens when that candidate gets all the way through the process and you extend an offer? What’s your offer acceptance rate? 

One of the most painful things a recruiter goes through is doing all the work to entice a prospect into becoming a candidate, supporting and facilitating the candidate through all the interviews and steps, only to have them reject the offer. It’s a situation where the maximum amount of time and energy gets spent on a candidate without anything to show for it at the end. Non-acceptance kills a recruiter's time to fill rate. 

Learning how to use your employer brand won’t make all these situations go away, but they will diminish them. Even if it only increased your offer acceptance rate by 10%, it would still save you time and energy to go after more candidates. But done properly, your employer brand approach will positively impact your ability to attract prospects, to build your book, to convert more prospects into candidates and then close them.

You’re going to work smarter, not harder.

So prepare yourself. As we mentioned earlier, we’re going to go over some bigger ideas. It’s important to see the bigger picture of what employer branding is and how it can help before we get serious about the tactical nitty gritty.

Employer branding as a concept is relatively new, especially in comparison to recruiting or marketing. I mention this because it seems like there are a lot of incorrect assumptions and ideas about what employer branding is.

• Employer branding isn’t:

• Pushing up Glassdoor scores

• Putting jobs on job boards

• Managing recruiting events

• Overseeing the swag

• Getting the world to want to work at your company

• Posting ads everywhere

Employer branding will often do many of these tasks, but to think of employer branders in those terms is like thinking about recruiters as talent order-takers. There’s a lot more strategy behind it.

In real terms, employer brand is two sides of the same coin.

On one side, it is what people think it’s like to work at your company. It is the individual’s perception about working there, based on any number of touch points and experiences that person has had with the brand. Those touch points include (but are not limited to) what people say about you in the news, the stock price, how much they like the product, what their experience with customer service was like, what their friend said when they worked for you, what they see on social media, review sites and google, and even what kind of recruiter you are.

So yes, that means that a prospect’s sense of whether it would be a positive experience to work at your company might be coming from a bad phone call with customer service four years ago that ended in a screaming match.

The process of collecting that information about your company is often unconscious. Maybe they see your sign as they drive around town and think it looks nice. Or maybe they met an employee at a neighbor block party and thought they were smart and kind. Or maybe they saw that story about an executive being accused of sexual harassment. All these things create an impression in their mind.

That impression changes as they go through the candidate experience. Where as a passive candidate, they are collecting perceptions unconsciously, as a more active candidate, they are consciously looking for information and absorbing it in a similar fashion. They may never have noticed that your product is considered top notch in the industry because they are a potential buyer, but as a candidate, that information matters.

On the other side of the coin, your employer brand is your company’s talent strategy for attracting candidates, the things you intentionally choose to say about your company to prospects and strangers to influence their perception about your company.

Go back to the earlier section about all the amazing things you could say about your company. Whether you’re 100 people or 100,000, I bet you could build a list as long as your arm of all the positive things you could say about your company or about the opportunity. So what do you pick? An employer brand effectively filters that thinking down to a handful of core options. These choices haven’t been made arbitrarily, but are things that are specific and credible, but also attractive and differentiating from the competition. I mean, do you think saying you offer great benefits is something that will attract attention? Because most companies say that. But if you tell someone that you close the office two weeks a year to ensure everyone gets down time, and few other companies do that, that’s a strong potential message because it is specific, attractive, real and different.

Aside from keeping you from wasting time talking about stuff that doesn’t matter to the candidate, the real value of that kind of filter is that it tells the rest of the TA (and potentially marketing and communications), what kind of content to build that will validate the claims you make to candidates. It creates alignment between you and the content being built, so that what you say will resonate more.

The purpose of employer brand strategy is to orchestrate all the parts of the company into talking about a tight cluster of messages that attract specific traits and talent. It ensures that you are swimming with the current instead of against it.

It’s not fair to ask you to build your employer brand. So let’s talk about where you can get more information about what your company’s employer brand is, and what shapes it might take.

A note about brands. Brands are abstract concepts. They are the foundation for all your favorite commercials and taglines you can recall, but those things aren’t the brand. They are campaigns. By way of illustration, Coca Cola’s brand has nothing to do with fizzy drinks. Coca Cola makes commercials about polar bears, Santa, and going out on first dates. They trademark the shape of their bottles and the curlicue flourish under their brand name on their products, but that’s not their brand. Coca Cola’s brand is “happiness.” They want you to associate drinking a Coke product with a time in which you are happy, which is why all those commercials and billboards might not seem to have anything to do with each other, but are still brand-appropriate. You’ll notice they hardly ever use the word “happiness” in their commercials, but that is the core brand. 

Okay, back to your employer brand.

At the most formal and likely most established and codified internally, your company may have invested in its Employer Value Proposition, also known as an EVP. 

An EVP is usually something built by your internal employer branding team or with an outside agency, after much research of employees, candidates, interviews with leadership, and input from recruiting. It should connect to the consumer brand, the company mission, and culture. Without getting too in the weeds, which likely doesn’t serve you, an EVP usually looks like a somewhat broad statement about what the company will offer and three to five supporting ideas, which are usually referred to as pillars. 

Somewhat less formal, but no less useful, is the brand promise. This is usually built by the internal employer brand person or team, sometimes with some support by an outside consultant. Like an EVP, it should be a sentence or two that reveals what makes your company great while connecting to the mission, culture and potentially industry. Generally, it often reads as what your company promises a candidate if they join. But it is a little more flexible than an EVP and likely won’t have a pillar-like structure. Otherwise, it serves the same focusing purpose as an EVP.

Least formal is the brand positioning. A brand position differs from a brand promise in that it is less structured. It might be as simple as “Facebook for grownups” or “Where biochemists can do their most impactful work.” It’s not a promise, but simply an idea, often relative to competitors. Think of it as a flag you use to claim metaphorical territory: It’s a lot like Facebook (lots of perks, moving quickly), but without feeling like you’re surrounded by ‘kids.” As an idea, it helps define the company in general (which is a variation on a real brand promise I’m not allowed to share) and focuses recruiting messaging.

Let me say right now, one is not better or worse than another. Just because you have access to an EVP doesn’t make your job easier than someone with a brand position. There’s no right or wrong, so use what you have.

Also, none of these things are generally public-facing. Like Coke and happiness, they are concepts and ideas that create focus, but they aren’t the same as a tagline, headline, or something you’d see on your career site. 

One of the things employer branding does well is be more intentional about connecting what your company offers to a candidate’s motivations. Everyone has motivations, things that drive them, the intrinsic ideas that are core to that person. You know all about motivations, because you play with them every day to engage prospects and candidates. What we want to do is be more focused and intentional about it.

Modern talent acquisition, in an effort to become more “processatized” seems to think that all candidates care about money exclusively. When a role seems to be dying on the vine, after the ad budget has been spent, the next step is to bring in comp and ben to see if they need to re-level the role to meet market conditions. 

But people are far more complex than that. Yes, everyone wants more money, but people are motivated by far more. Look to teachers, people in the military, anyone who works for government, or anyone who joined a non-profit company. These people aren’t fools for choosing these roles, just because they aren’t paying at the top of the market. They have made choices about what motivates them and what satisfying that motivation is worth to them. They have chosen to take a 10-20% pay cut (or more) because they get to feel like they are helping people, that they are growing children, that they are keeping people safe, that they are saving the world. Assuming a role is being paid fairly (no one wants to feel taken advantage of), the next thing they look to is will this role satisfy those motivations.

Here is a map of a human’s core motivations. [link] I didn’t invent it, it’s something that psychologists and behaviorists built to try and map the things that drive people. 

Every company meets some motivations. But I can’t think of a company that can satisfy them all. People who work at a tech startup might want to feel like they get the ability to make an impact, to have agency. People who work at a post office are getting certainty, the knowledge that when they go home at 5pm, they won’t think about work until the next day and know that the organization will always want them.

You might think that people who work in a hospital are all about caring for people or healing people. And that’s true. But that motivation is true of all hospitals. That motivation is table stakes. What a nurse or admin will look for is what motivation is served beyond that. That’s what will differentiate one hospital from another.

Understanding what motivations your company cares about is important. But stating that motivation won’t move the needle. Every airline talks about how much they care about their customers, but we all have horror stories of being stranded overnight in O’hare because the plane couldn’t get a pilot. All the commercials in the world won’t erase that memory of trying to find a comfortable spot in an airport to try and catch a few Zzzs and hoping there will be an open flight the next morning. 

So when we talk about motivations, it is easy to claim any of them. But this process is about focusing your efforts on the stuff that matters. In this case, you want to “prove” that your company cares about what the prospect cares about. And you do that by looking at what your company rewards.

What you reward is who you are. If your company offers bonuses for being the best salesperson, you are rewarding individual achievement, thus proving that your company is motivated by success above all else. But if your reward structure is about the company hitting certain milestones, that reward proves that you care about collaboration.

Beyond bonus structures, you can claim that you care about women, but if your company only offers the legal minimum of FLMA and no mother’s room, that disproves the claim. Claiming that your company is inclusive is easy. But when your company donates to political candidates who campaign against equal marriage, that disproves the claim.

So when you are thinking about which motivations you want to promote in order to attract candidates, also think about how you can prove them. What does your company reward? What stories can you tell that make the idea clear, but in what ways does the company incentivize those ideas?

The next question is who at your company is responsible for your employer branding? 

If you have a full-time employer brand team or manager, that makes this easy. But many companies have employer branding without someone in that seat. It might be someone who owns recruitment marketing, or in the marketing and comms team. It might even be someone in the social media or creative teams who have some simple guidelines as to what’s in brand for recruiters and what isn’t.

If we think back to the Coca Cola example, how in the world would you be expected to take a brand idea like ‘happiness’ and use it to attract customers? It’s way too big and broad an idea to do anything with, right?

The same is likely true for your employer brand. Whether it’s an EVP with pillars or a brand position, how is a brand going to be equally descriptive of the company and specific enough to speak to people who don’t work here? When you build a brand, you inevitably make compromises so that it can be applied to your legal and sales teams roles. I mean, aside from their ability to convert oxygen to carbon dioxide, can you think of any words or ideas you could use to describe those audiences equally? Probably not.

At this stage, we need to take the broad brand and convert it to something more specific, not just to the team, but to the role and even the person. This process is called localization.

I’m going to say right now that regardless of how much your company may or may not have invested in employer branding, teaching recruiters how to localize their brand is often a skipped step in the delivery of the brand. So if you spend a little time understanding what localization looks like, this will be the first major way in which you’ll be able to start unlocking the power of your brand.

Let’s start at the basics: a motivation. If you are motivated by opportunity, what that looks like to you and what that looks like to a developer, project manager, and salesperson are going to look and feel very different. To a developer, maybe that means having access to resources to help take an idea from concept to delivery. To a project manager, maybe that means having access to bigger projects in a place where projects are more likely to see the light of day. To a sales person, that means a solid product to sell and room to make decisions about who to engage and how to talk about the product (or even how to package it up). Take language around having resources (how a developer might see opportunity) and applying it to a salesperson isn’t going to work.

It is a kind of translation process. You’re taking an idea and translating into a language your target understands and connects to. You already know that the best way to create rapport with your candidate is to speak their language. That’s more than peppering your messaging with technical terms they use, but seeing the world through their eyes and what they want.

If you’ve got a brand promise or brand position, the process is very similar: take the brand concept and ask yourself, how do I make this make sense to my target audience? 

If you’ve got a complete EVP, you have a little more to work with. The power of brand pillars is that some pillars are going to resonate more with certain audiences than others. If your brand pillars are “the best answer wins [meritocracy],” “no one wins on their own [collaboration],” and “the doors to success are open to everyone [diversity and inclusion]” you might decide that a meritocracy message plays well with developers and a collaboration message is better suited for project managers. Or perhaps meritocracy plus diversity works better from G&A roles while meritocracy plus collaboration works best for your management roles.

Regardless, you still need to localize these ideas to your audience. If you’re hiring your next HRBP, you need to turn concepts of meritocracy and collaboration into concepts and language they would use. You need to have stories at the ready that illuminate and illustrate that brand, stories that talk about people on that team (if possible) to show that your brand isn’t conceptual, but real and concrete.

Ultimately, these are judgment calls. There are no right or wrong answers here, but that’s where your experience engaging with talent and listening to them is so valuable: you decide that one message will work better for an audience than another. You test your thinking and adjust when the evidence suggests that it isn’t working.

Since an employer brand is really just a concept that helps us focus our efforts, there are countless ways to leverage the brand in a recruiter’s day-to-day. But we’re going to focus on the three most powerful areas across the candidate journey: outreach, conversation and close. Once you understand them, you’ll suddenly see all the ways (big and small) you can use the brand to adjust your work to be even more effective.

Before we start, make sure you have your branding materials and all the localization work you’ve done so far. We’re going to focus on a single requisition, but once you should be able to see how to apply this to all your recs once we get going.

Ready? Let’s start with your outreach.

I have a major aversion to people who say that a certain channel is the “best” way to recruit. I know people who recruit via open Slack channels and even Spotify, so I am in the camp that there is no right way to reach out. What matters is that you are reaching out, and leveraging the brand to increase your likelihood for success.

So regardless of what channel you use, from email and InMail to Twitter and reddit all the way to flyers you hand out at industry conferences, the rules still apply. 

Start with your subject line or headline. If you’re making a Tik Tok or a Reel, think about the first words you say or show. If we’re talking about an image we’re going to post on LinkedIn, think of the very first words someone will see. It’s all the same. For the purposes of this lesson, we’ll focus on email and InMails.

The job of a headline or subject line is to give the recipient a reason to read or watch more. You don’t have to say the name of the job you’re recruiting for or even that you’re recruiting. For someone with their shields up about being “bugged” by recruiters, that’s the fastest way to get them to delete the message or swipe to the next thing. 

Don’t just say any old thing that you think will make them read more. Showing up in the equivalent of a chicken outfit might get their attention, but it isn’t the kind of attention you want. This is where you look to your localized brand for guidance. For this requisition, what are some ways to show that the brand is real? If your brand is all about innovation, in what ways would innovation manifest itself for someone in this role? In what way is innovation obvious? How would a new hire use that innovation? What would they feel because of that innovation?

That’s your starting point. Now, re-write that idea into something more compelling or engaging. Turn it into a question or “you might be surprised to hear…” or “Do you get enough XYZ at your current job?” Remember, you are trying to pique their interest because this idea is something they care about. You just need to properly bait the hook.

Now that you have their attention, the first paragraph of the message needs to do two things: First, it has to show that you know something specific about this person (personalization) and second, it needs to spell out more of the promise you made in the subject line. When we talk about personalization, stop thinking about “Dear {first_name}...” Everyone knows that’s a database trick and it doesn’t serve you. Instead, focus on something you know about this person because of the role they have.

For example, here’s how I would attempt to recruit a recruiter (I’m using this role so you can get a sense of what it feels like to be seen and engaged using the brand. For the purpose of this example, let’s assume the brand is “The Best Idea Always Wins [meritocracy].”

Subject line: Do you feel like you don’t get taken seriously at work because you’re “just a recruiter?”
Body: Every recruiter I know became a recruiter by accident, all but backing into the job. They weren’t trained for it, they didn’t go to school for it. They just saw what needed to be done and did it. Does that sound like you?

I mention this because recruiters at Company experience something that most don’t: respect. We aren’t order-takers, we’re talent consultants. Our hiring managers rely on our expertise to identify, attract and engage the talented people who help the business grow.

In less than 100 words, I am saying that I understand recruiters and what their world is like, and that I am offering them something that they probably want. This starts a connection and offers just enough intrigue to get them reading deeper into my message so when they get to me fulfilling the promise the subject line made about being taken seriously. 

The rest of the email should offer the candidate something interesting or useful, be it a video about the people who work there, a blog post or white paper from the team you’re recruiting for, or even a quick video from the hiring manager themselves about why someone might want to consider working there.

You don’t have to put a call to action or send over the job. Intrigue and entice them. If they are interested in what you have to say, don’t worry. They will reach out to you. This helps you focus less on casting a wide net and getting as many applications as possible, but more on the people who “get” what you’re offering. You’ll have fewer applicants, but they will be better matches for the role.

Let’s be clear. This isn’t a magic template. It’s a model you can use to attract the right kinds of talent in a way that doesn’t ever feel like a “bait and switch.” You are offering them ideas that are core to the brand, so you know that when they google your company or read news and reviews, those ideas will be born out. Rather than their research scaring them off, the research confirms and validates what you’re saying, making you a far more credible person.

And yes, we’ll be using that credibility to pay out shortly.

What you use in your outreach isn’t just useful as a means of attracting a prospect. It tells you what the prospect cares about. As we’ll see as we go through the rest of the sections, you’ll be using the brand to keep the candidate excited about the opportunity.

Be smart: test these messages like crazy. Work with other recruiters in the company to test what subject lines get people to open the message and what body copy leads to them responding. By working together, you’re sharing what you’re learning without having to work any harder.

The next section is the conversation. This can mean a lot of different things, as you generally have multiple conversations over the course of an interview process. There’s the conversation to encourage them to apply, the screener conversation, the interview prep conversation, the “how did it go?” conversation, etc. Reserving the offer conversation for its own section, what you’re about to learn here can (and should) be applied to all your conversations. 

During your screening or conversation, start at the brand idea you used in the subject line. Ask them to talk about what they liked in the idea, what about it appealed to them. Get them to talk about how they aren’t getting enough of that idea in their current job and what getting more of that idea would mean to them in their daily work and sense of professional satisfaction.

Recruiters are great at helping people dream about the future. That means thinking about and talking about what they need to achieve that dream. By now you know that not everyone has the same dream, so talk to the candidate about what they need to achieve that future.

That said, don’t become a parrot or a walking talking point. Don’t fixate exclusively on the idea.  People are complex and multi-factored. Lots of things motivate them, so just because an idea attracted them, it doesn’t mean that’s the only thing they care about. Let them expand and talk about other motivations. Don’t ignore other trees as they describe their forest.

But the fact that they stopped what they were doing to engage a total stranger when presented that idea means there’s value in touching on it at every conversation you have.

I’ll keep this section short because I don’t want to insult you: you know how to engage and talk to candidates. I’m saying that every time you do, you should touch on and reinforce the brand to keep candidate momentum going.

Think of the brand idea as a thread that runs through your entire relationship with this prospect. You want to connect every conversation to it or it will fall away from the rest of the relationship. By touching on it and reinforcing it at every conversation, you’re reminding the candidate what caused them to be intrigued in the role in the first place, while also reinforcing that that is what they will find when they join.

That reinforcement will pay off when you get to the final stage, the offer.

Whether or not you’re the one who puts the offer forward, you can have a dramatic impact on their likelihood to accept the offer. If you are making the offer, make sure to start the conversation with the core ideas. If you aren’t in charge of extending the offer, talk with your hiring manager and make sure you get a few minutes with the candidate before they get the offer.

Remind the candidate that this entire process started because they were excited by a role that offered more X (whatever your brand or brand promise is), that they weren’t getting enough X in their current role.

Ask them what they have seen and learned through the process that indicated that they would get more X in those new role.

The goal here isn’t to get them to ignore the offer amount. That’s impossible. What you’re doing is tying the opportunity to more than just money. With this opportunity, they are getting more of what they want with a fair (I’m presuming) salary. By creating this anchor in the candidate, it minimizes the chance that their current employer will be able to counter. It establishes that money is good, but money plus that idea they want more of is more attractive than money alone.

If you’ve done your job (and your employer branding and marketing teams have done their part), the candidate will feel confident in knowing that they will get more of what they want in this job. It was the reason they engaged, it was discussed at every stage of the interview process, and they had the chance to validate the ideas on their own. It’s real. It’s concrete. And in the face of potential offers and promises from other companies, the certainty they get from you will be a compelling reason to say yes.

Having gone through some abstract concepts about what a brand is and what it means, then showing you how to use those ideas to change your tactics throughout the entire candidate journey, let’s make it real and put all the pieces together. And the best way to ensure that these ideas get “stuck” into your work is to build a process.

One of the biggest issues recruiters face is that hiring managers think they know best how to post and promote a job, putting recruiters (and their expertise) in the back seat instead of behind the wheel, where they will do the most good. It’s not that they are bad people or don’t trust you, it's that very often, they don’t know what they don’t know about the current state of the talent market.

Obviously, you don’t want to try and go “toe-to-toe” with a hiring manager. In a political organization (which is every company), when there’s friction between the business leader and the recruiter, the recruiter rarely “wins.” And in fairness, a fight is the last thing you want. Instead, take the politics out of things and make a checklist.

A checklist is weirdly… magical, actually. When you write out the process and send it in advance, you’re de-personalizing things. The checklist says, “this isn’t how I like to do things, this is how things are done.” It creates an illusion of authority and negates any sense of hierarchy, setting you up for success.

More powerfully, it brings the work you and the hiring manager will do together and aligns them to a shared destination. It keeps things from becoming “you versus them” and keeps things “how we solve this together.”

The checklist should show all the steps from beginning to end, and an indication as to who will be doing each step. The checklist can be something simple that only includes the steps you and the hiring manager will be doing, or you can go big and map the entire requisition process, showing all the people who have to be involved in the new role and the steps they never see. I can assure you that your HR and TA leaders will appreciate it.

The best way to use this checklist is to complete a draft before the intake meeting. During the meeting, after you’ve collected everything you need for the job posting and to plant your outreach strategy, share your document. Make sure to leave a few minutes to review it before the meeting is over, because the most important step isn’t in doing it or sharing it, but in getting the hiring manager’s buy-in.

Share the document saying something like, “This is a pretty complex role, so I want to share with you my plan on how we’ll attract attention to the role from great people. This should be a joint effort, because you know a lot of [role type] and have great credibility in the industry. I want to take a few minutes to show you my strategy.” After you go over it together (probably impressing them with your initiative), close with, “Okay, that sounds great. Can I get your commitment to this plan? If there are any steps you are responsible for that you need help with, just let me know and I’ll line up resources for you.”

You might find that you have to share the document with the hiring managers a few times during the course of the recruiting process. If you have to, be sure to check off the things that have been done so they feel a sense of progress, and that this isn’t a way to get them to spin their wheels.

This may still put you on the hook for drafting a few outreach messages or LinkedIn posts for your HM, but now you can feel confident that what is being put out into the world will align to the brand, increasing the likelihood that messages can be validated by candidates. This focuses their efforts on things that help you get your job done better and faster.

You could build a checklist from scratch, but here’s a draft I put together you can build on. It doesn't have every step, but it should give you a sense of how to build your own.

There are lots of ways to embed your employer brand into your world, but once you master these steps, you’ll be able to find all new ways to use your brand. At the same time, you now know how to better work with your employer brand person or team at your company. You can give them suggestions as to what ideas, messaging and content they should be focusing on building that you can use as further supporting evidence. This helps you recruit better, but it also gives them the insight they need to make better branding decisions. 

Together, you can noticeably lower your time to fill rates and attract more of the talent you want, helping your company grow.

Thanks for taking this course. I hope this class has been useful, and helps you elevate your recruiting game. Connect with me on LinkedIn, and I’ll try to be a resource for you in the future. 

If you found any issues with this content or have concerns or questions, please email me at employerbrandnerd@gmail.com and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

And if you found this content useful, let your recruiting manager or TA Director know. If this thinking can make a difference for you, imagine who you could hire if the entire team used these ideas together!

Thank you, and goodbye!

-James Ellis, 2022