Startups — Don’t Focus On Employer Branding
Relieve yourself of the pressure of figuring this EB stuff out. Your small but mighty team only has so much bandwidth. Let's be practical and help you do your jobs more effectively and efficiently.
1:15 read (+2:20 video)
Instead, put your energy into recruiter enablement.
You will get 10X the results and save yourself a lot of time and money. You’ll be doing what you’re already doing—just much better.
Relieve yourself of the pressure of figuring this EB stuff out. Your small but mighty team of a player-coach Talent leader + 1-5 recruiters only has so much bandwidth. Let's be practical and help you do your jobs more effectively and efficiently.
Trust me on this one.
Here’s what I mean:
Generally speaking, the market doesn’t know who you are. You’re probably doing the coolest stuff. But you’re early in the market. So it goes.
And the way that your candidate market meets your startup is when one of your recruiters shows up in their inbox.
The problem is that most of you are doing a terrible job at showing up. Change that and you change the way your market feels about you.
Your job: Create the experience you’d want if you were to receive a cold message from a recruiter.
It’s likely personal, written like a human actually talks IRL, isn’t trying to convert on the first date, and includes the INFORMATION that you'd want to know if you were the one exploring new opportunities.
This isn’t rocket science.
The more that you enable your outbound efforts by shifting your messaging from “buy my job now” sales to unattached, information-rich content marketing, the more brand cred you build.
Why? Because candidates notice the difference. You’re showing empathy and respect for the process. From there, you unlock trust.
If you focus on making your outbound really, really good, you will organically build your “employer brand” through sentiment. The more content you layer on to distribute via recruiter outreach, the more that you can also distribute on social, on your careers site, on your eng blog, etc.
I’m telling you, if you just start seeing your recruiter outreach as your content marketing channel, and create tactical assets that allow your recruiters to offer the experience that they’d want themselves, this entire employer brand thing takes care of itself.
You don’t have to think about big strategic projects that require budget. You don’t have to stress about not doing employer branding the way that big tech and the traditionalist EB folks in Facebook groups say that you’re supposed to.
You can focus on what’s actually important: changing the way that candidates meet your company.
And right now, they meet you in their inboxes. So you sure as hell better respect that space enough to make it an incredibly refreshing experience.
Some content ideas to get you started:
The lowest hanging fruit is a robust candidate FAQ. It can go on your careers site and sent in outbound messages.
Get more creative with one-pagers for each persona: eng, sales, etc.
Go next level with team-based landing pages. (Sorry, had to do it.)