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The World's Most Caffeinated Employer Brand Podcast

From James Ellis, this podcast is dedicated to making you smarter about recruiting and hiring. It's time to reinvent employer branding, recruiting, and hiring from the ground up!

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Chicken or the Egg?

The age old question: where should employer branding live? TA? Marketing? Comms? Like the "chicken or the egg" question, the answer involves a lot of evolution...
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Who's In Charge?

Who's in charge of the company? Leadership, right? Well, recently it sure seems like the employees are making their voices heard in the strategic direction of a company.
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Taking a Stand

Yes, it is absolutely time for your employer brand to quit playing it safe. You and your brand need to take a stand for something.
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What is Employer Brand For?

It may seem like a simple question, but how you answer it determines the scope of your work. If you want to keep the employer brand function from being a funnel-filler or the "swag maven," you need to answer the question right.
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Fan Fiction and Employer Brand Universes

Are your fans telling your story?
Listen to Fan Fiction and Employer Brand Universes

You Can't Party at Lolla Anymore (with Rob Stevenson)

Rob Stevenson of Talk Talent To Me and I decided to have a nice rambling conversation about Covid, the industry, and what was (and wasn't) working for companies.
Listen to You Can't Party at Lolla Anymore (with Rob Stevenson)

Taking Your Employer Brand Beyond the Obvious

Call it "employer blanding" or even "the sea of sameness," but there's a valid reason to think all employer brands look and feel the same. But that's not a rule or anything.
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The Impossible Employer Brand Metric

Let us be blunt: the metrics we often use (time to fill, funnel conversion rates, quality of hire, cost per hire, etc) are... imprecise. And to be even more blunt, they aren't the kind of metrics that anyone outside of TA cares about.
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Creative vs Position

Which one creates the stronger employer brand message?
Listen to Creative vs Position

Finite and Infinite

Does your employer brand strategy change when when you have a fixed talent pool?
Listen to Finite and Infinite

What Really Changed?

Sure, everything seems different, but does that mean your employer brand has to, too?
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The Four Drivers of Employer Brand

What makes your employer brand... your brand?
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Culture Wars

This month probably changed how you see your company's culture, I bet.
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Strength in Diversity

In this conversation with my friend Madison Butler, VP of People at Sourced Craft Cocktails, we try to explore the connection between diversity and employer brand
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Strategy, After the Fact

Can you build a brand strategy after you've built the content?
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Beyond the New Normal

What you do during the crisis defines your success in the future.
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Employer Brand in the Time of COVID-19

Managing a remote-based employer brand (welcome to the new normal)
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How Does It Feel?

What's Beyond "What It's Like To Work There"?
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Employer Brand for Retention

We all know our first job is (or expected to be) one of attraction. And we all know that if we build a strong brand, it will impact retention. But how many of us are intentionally involving ourselves in the thorny retention issues of the company?
Listen to Employer Brand for Retention

The Authenticity Illusion

We all "know" that the employer brander's mantra is to create an authentic brand. What does that even mean? Is that even achievable? Is that even really a thing?
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How to Work With Recruiters

In this episode, we get nitty gritty on building great relationships with recruiters to be the best possible advocates for you and your employer branding.
Listen to How to Work With Recruiters

The Modular Employer Brand

The mistake in employer branding is to treat the brand as monolithic, as a single tagline repeated until you are blue in the face.
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The Three Minds of Employer Branding

In the beginning, many of us saw (and our bosses saw) employer branding as "stuff that needed to get done and solved." But as we solved issues, we started asking, "is this the right problem to solve?" and "how can we solve this issue so it never happens again?"
Listen to The Three Minds of Employer Branding

Employer Bran, Fast and Slow

Most employer brand professionals and practitioners or driven (and often pushed) to solve immediate problems, the kind that have immediate impacts, the kind others can see.
Listen to Employer Bran, Fast and Slow

Lean Into the Suck

In this long conversation with the one and only Elena Valentine, we get into what employer branding means, branding fan fiction, telling better stories and all sorts of other goodies. Don't miss this one!
Listen to Lean Into the Suck

Useless Facts

Facts don't do what you want them to
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The Expectations Game

If you want to attract candidates, promise them the moon. But if you want them to engage and even stick around, you are going to have to learn how to set, manage (and occasionally exceed) candidate expectations.
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No New Tale To Tell

In this episode we think about story structure as a metaphor for how you can build your own brand.
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Why Employer Brands Fail - Part Three

There are six common, but rarely-discussed, reasons why a company's employer brand initiative (or project or function) will fail.
Listen to Why Employer Brands Fail - Part Three

Why Employer Brands Fail - Part Two

There are six common, but rarely-discussed, reasons why a company's employer brand initiative (or project or function) will fail...
Listen to Why Employer Brands Fail - Part Two

Why Employer Brands Fail - Part One

Avoid the most common pitfalls when developing your employer brand
Listen to Why Employer Brands Fail - Part One

The Integrated Employer Brand

Stop fighting with marketing. You are eventually going to be family.
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Employer Brand 101

What does it mean to be an employer branding practitioner?
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Content Creation for Employer Branding

How do you build employer brand narratives at scale?
Listen to Content Creation for Employer Branding

Making an Impact?

Can "making an impact" really be a differentiator in our employer brands?
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On Choice and Employer Brand

In this week's episode, we go deep into how people choose to change their lives, and some surprising ideas on how to leverage that process to get people to pay attention to your open roles.
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Make Your Employer Brand Stick

In this episode, we breakdown the three phases of every good employer brand strategy and how to make it really stick.
Listen to Make Your Employer Brand Stick

Junk Drawer (Vol 2)

We did it a year and a half ago and as we approach the end of year three, its time to clear out the notes and half-baked ideas to create a clean desk to begin year four. From attribution, metrics, behavior change and all things in between, thank you for listening.
Listen to Junk Drawer (Vol 2)

Does Salary Matter?

All the data suggests that salary is still the (or of the) primary drivers for job choices. But in a world where salary is be coming more transparent (and therefore similar), does a few bucks one way or the other really matter? The answer may surprise you.
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Is Your Employer Branding Working?

Okay, okay. You know employer brand is important as a means of attracting and hiring the great talent your business needs to grow. You've invested time and energy (and money!) establishing and promoting that brand, but... How do you know it's really working?
Listen to Is Your Employer Branding Working?

Should Employer Brand Ignore Recruiting?

Have we made a huge mistake, putting recruiting at the front and center of our employer branding strategy? Hat tip to Ted Meulenkamp.
Listen to Should Employer Brand Ignore Recruiting?

Reflect It or Change It

A strong employer brand starts by revealing what exists. Your job is to uncover who the company is and what it's really like to work there. But that's only half the job. You can't stop there.
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How Employer Brand Pros See the World

If you make your living as an employer brand professional, what is your job? Here's your reminder of how you should see your job, and what you are being paid to really do.
Listen to How Employer Brand Pros See the World

Make The Familiar Strange

How do you attract attention to your brand? Interestingly, its a lot like how you're going to build internal buy-in. You're going to make the familiar strange (and the strange familiar).
Listen to Make The Familiar Strange

Elephant In The Room

Every company and every brand has that thing they don't talk about. That thing that everyone knows but bends over backwards to avoid referencing. They have an elephant in the room
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Skin in the Game

The race to "easiest possible application" has not been a race worth winning. Our ATS's are clogged with applicants we wouldn't hire in a million years simply because we've made it so easy. So what's past "peak easy application?"
Listen to Skin in the Game

Create Meaning

Influencing ratings, encouraging talking points, framing values and establishing a shared north star for every one in our company may sound like our job, but it isn't. Our job as employer brand professionals is far deeper, far more difficult and interesting.
Listen to Create Meaning

Raise the Stakes

You know your employer brand is important. I know your employer brand is important. But a lot of people see investment in employer brand as a vanity project, as a fluffy-bunny nice-to-have project and not the crucial element in hiring success we know it is.
Listen to Raise the Stakes

Creating Business Value with Employer Branding

It's not a magic trick. A strong employer brand doesn't just attract a better class of talent, it actually helps shape perceptions of everyone in the business. Done well, you can help people inside and outside your company see the business as more valuable than before.
Listen to Creating Business Value with Employer Branding

What Is A Job?

Hold up! It's not an arcane or crazy question or abstract zen koan. It's a legit question: what exactly is a job. Turns out that how we see it, how we answer that question has huge repercussions on how we find and develop talent in our organization.
Listen to What Is A Job?

Make Patterns, Not Consistency

great brands are about consistency, but more about understanding the core elements within the brand experience and think of ways to re-apply them to other arts of the business. They don't try to copy, they create patterns. Which is what you need to be doing with your employer brand.
Listen to Make Patterns, Not Consistency

Reach and Clarity: Why Your Employer Brand Is Never Really Done

When I audited brands, one tool I developed was the "reach and clarity" model, a way to see how you stack up against another brand simply and see where you should be applying your energy. Want to hear it? I thought you might.
Listen to Reach and Clarity: Why Your Employer Brand Is Never Really Done

The Bonsai Tree

There seems to be two schools of thought on employer branding: reveal the brand and be authentic as possible, or manufacture what you think your audience wants to hear.
Listen to The Bonsai Tree

How To Pay For Your Employer Brand

There are ways to spend a lot of money on your employer brand (and a lot of reasons to do so), but how on earth do you pay for it? In this episode, we walk through one scenario to show you how even you can pay for an impactful employer brand.
Listen to How To Pay For Your Employer Brand

Painful Questions

You can't find better solutions until you ask better questions. But too often we couch, hedge and soften our questions because deep down, we don't REALLY want to know the answers.
Listen to Painful Questions

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