Max: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I’m your host, Max Armbruster. And today on the show, James Ellis from Employer Brand Labs.

Ellis: He got it. He got it.

Max: Yes. James is an expert in helping employer brands stand out from the crowd. And today we decided we’d have a conversation for you, our audience on this topic on employer branding and specifically how you can gently indicate to some people that this is not the right place for them. And how many employers sometimes fall into this trap of trying to welcome everybody? And so they end up standing out for nobody and James, thanks for joining. And how did you end up in this very specific field of employer branding? Did you come in through marketing or from recruiting?

Ellis: I did Max. And first off, thanks for letting me join this. I’m looking forward to this conversation. But yes, most people in Employer Brand come from two routes. They come from either the recruiting side where they realize that they have a different kind of point of view from most recruiters, some successful recruiters. And that means they don’t really succeed as greatly as recruiters and they find that there’s a space called Employer Brand where their skills do make sense. The rest of us come from marketing where we realize that marketing has been done and it’s a machine.

You go to school; you learn your four or five Ps. You apply them every day. It’s all the fun stuff in the tactics or in the insight and that’s great. And try not going to downplay marketers because I think they’re amazing and they do amazing work, but this is the tiniest slice of marketing in which marketing isn’t about more. It’s the only kind of marketing and branding in which more is actually worse, right? If you’re selling an ice cream cone and you sell a million ice cream cones, your employer of the month, they’re going to put your name on a face, on a poster. It’s going to be great.

You’re a recruiter and you get a thousand applicants. You should think about another line of work. You have made a poor choice; you’ve done something wrong. And so that to me is the fine crux of what employer brand is and why it’s interesting and fascinating and still has so much to uncover, to really understand what it’s all about. Right now, even like seasoned, respected Employer Brand professionals argue all the time over just basic ideas because we still haven’t figured it all out. And that’s what makes me so excited about the field. Even though it’s only a couple of thousands of us.

Max: Well I guess jumping on the question, the number that you just mentioned that employer branding would be, you have to right-size it and if you have a thousand applicants per position, you’ve wasted some resources.

Ellis: Yeah.

Max: Perhaps, I could challenge that a little bit by saying that well, if you haven’t paid too much for the thousand candidates, then that’s all right.

Ellis: Well here’s the deal. The problem is often that there is a gap between hiring managers and recruiters. The hiring manager says I need a, whatever it is. It’s a nurse, it’s an electrician, it’s a data scientist. It’s a litter of people, whatever that thing is and they think that’s enough information as if all nurses and data scientists and electricians are the same and they are absolutely not. Anybody who’s met three nurses goes, oh wow, they are all different. And they have very different skill sets, but they also have very different approaches to how they do that work.

The hiring manager doesn’t want to get into that. So they just throw the requisition over to the recruiter who says, okay, so who are you looking for? They want someone great. And then they walk away to do their day job because they’re busy, right? They’ve got stuff to do. And the recruiter says, I don’t know what the hiring manager wants. So I’m going to write a job ad, add a job description, and a job posting and those things are all slightly different. And we don’t have to get into that today, but they write it to be so generic and that opens the door so wide. Is that anybody who can pretty much spell their last name is encouraged to apply? It just gets crazy.

You’ve opened the doors and the metaphor of course is always, you’re trying to find a needle in a haystack. And you’re trying to say, well look, if I get a thousand or a hundred people to apply, I’ll find that needle. But now we’re in a world where we need more needles and the answer to creating more needles isn’t to make bigger haystacks. It’s not how needles work. That’s not how needles are created. That’s not how needles are found. The goal of good recruiting is when you have enough information, and that means about what the team’s all about, what the company rewards, what they want to be motivated for and rewarded by, and what the tasks are, what the future of that job might be. 

The ultimate situation, the platonic ideal of recruiting is you really only get two candidates to apply. The person you hire, who is amazing, and the person you don’t hire who is almost equally as amazing and you put them in your back pocket because you know, one day you’re going to want them. And you only have that second person. So the hiring manager feels like they made a choice, right? That’s all it is. Everything after that is time the recruiter now has to spend burning up, filtering through resumes and filtering through CVs saying, nope, nope, nope, nope. Or worse yet, it’s time the interview loop has to spend on the sixth candidate to say, yeah, no, not quite because they haven’t communicated what they’re actually looking for.

Max: Yeah, well, James, I mean, there are tools available to–

Ellis: There are.

Max: — do a lot of selection, but I guess you’re right in the sense that the hiring manager ideally would in a dream situation, would just have two or three to choose from. 

Ellis: Yeah. 

Max: I think it’s also the recruiter’s job to expand a little bit and we’re in contradictions here. You’re saying, narrow it down, get it down to this one. Now, two perfect profiles, but I would say, maybe the recruiter can expand a little bit on the definition and say–

Ellis: Yeah.

Max: — well, you’re looking for a nurse, to take your healthcare example with all the professional credentials, certification, that lives 20 minutes away from the hospital, et cetera, et cetera. This perfect candidate when probably doesn’t exist.

Ellis: Probably not.

Max: And so then oftentimes they have to stretch and therefore, I guess play the numbers game. Now let’s go a little bit broader.

Ellis: Yeah. And I think my position is very extreme simply because I think the pendulum swung too far on we’ve made it so easy for anybody to apply. Like I could use my elbow and just hit an apply button and click, connect to LinkedIn. Yes, I accept. Okay, I’ve applied for this job. You don’t want to hire me. I don’t do that job, but you’ve made it so easy that I might as well. And so I want to swing the pendulum back to say, look, it’s not about making things easy. It’s really about how do you speak to this job. How do you speak to this opportunity in such a way that the person who isn’t just going to be okay at this or even good at this, but the person who is that magical unicorn, we all know purple…