James Ellis [00:00:00]:

That is where recruitment marketing lives. Things like remarketing and pushing messages and drip campaign, all those sorts of stuff to get you to go from the three yard line over to the apply lot. Employer branding says, I'm going to make it easier by establishing an idea of who we are, what we're about, what it's like to work here, why we work here, what the reward is, those three big ideas. Everything you think you're doing in recruitment marketing now becomes more effective because people are pre sold on what you're talking about.

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Devyn Mikell [00:00:31]:

Hey, I'm Devyn Mikell and this is Hire Quality, the show where I sit down with the movers and shakers of talent acquisition to hear their talent triumphs, their hiring horror stories and genuine opinions about the recruiting industry. So today I got to talk with James Ellis, who is the employer branding nerd. If you've ever followed employer branding on LinkedIn, he is that guy. When it comes to this topic. He's been in the space for a really long time and done a lot of really cool things. Worked for some great brands like Groupon and Roku and let alone the brands that he consults for. So I really enjoyed this one because I'm a novice when it comes to employer branding, I would say.

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Devyn Mikell [00:01:07]:

But he really laid it down in a very practical way, a very understandable way. He even, you know, made the delineation between recruitment marketing and employer branding, which are two very different things, and he made that very clear. He's all about making your employer brand stand out, finding your differentiator and connecting that to who you're trying to attract. And if you're anyone like that, that's maybe struggling with thinking through how do we actually improve our employer brand and not just make it sound like something we want to do in the next ten years, but you actually want to get it done. This is the episode for you to listen to. So let's jump into the episode. We'll start off with a bank. The audience might not know, you know, so why don't you take the floor, give the quick spin of who YoU ArE and what you do.

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James Ellis [00:01:48]:

Absolutely.

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Devyn Mikell [00:01:49]:

And we'll jump in.

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James Ellis [00:01:50]:

Yeah. So I am like, I have the world's weirdest fame and that if you are anywhere associated with employer brand, you absolutely know who I am. And if you're not associated with employer brand, there is almost no reason whatsoever to know who the heck I am. So I am James Ellis, I'm the employer brand nerd. Everybody's like, oh, so you decided to call yourself. No, I did not. Decide to call myself that, Google calls me that. If you Google who is the employer brand nerd, very often my picture just pops up.

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James Ellis [00:02:11]:

It's terrifying. I'm not even kidding if you type it employer brand nerd in quotes, I pretty much own the first five pages of responses, so Google thinks it is. So I'm just like, you know what? Who am I to fight Google? There are fights to fight, and that's not the one to fight. So I've been doing employer branch for about ten years. I've done in house, I've done agency, I've done consulting, I've written four books. Talent chooses YoU, 18 laws of employer brand. They're all amazonable, very easy to find. I have multiple podcasts at some point or another.

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James Ellis [00:02:39]:

I'm without podcast at this moment, which is a weird thing for me. I've done 3250 some episodes total. I've got a newsletter called the change agent that's been going on for about five years. It's probably the biggest employer brand newsletter. It's not just for employer brand nerds such as myself, but anybody looking to change talent acquisition, recruiting, that's kind of where I live.

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Devyn Mikell [00:02:58]:

Gotcha. So you said something when we were off script, not off cam, but off recording, off the record in the green room, you know, and it was your podcast idea, but now I'm going to use it against you.

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James Ellis [00:03:09]:

There it is.

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Devyn Mikell [00:03:10]:

You mentioned the one question you'd ask people is, if they're in employer brand, how'd they get there? And what trauma brought them there? So what is yours?

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James Ellis [00:03:19]:

Who are you and what trauma brought to you to this horrible, horrible place? Cause the thing about employer branding is that no sane person does this. No. Like, look, recruiting is weird and there are all sorts of jobs that are really, really weird. Like recruiters get told no for a living. Let's be blunt. Like, that is a rough gig. I don't want that gig. But employer branders are responsible for owning the employer brand, which if you know what employer brand is, it means you're effectively owning and responsible for how everybody perceives everything the company does.

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James Ellis [00:03:50]:

So you've got all this responsibility and you have exactly no power whatsoever. Who takes that job but a crazy person to say, hey, I'm going to control. I'm going to be responsible for all this and I can't control any of it. That's nuts. So to me, my trauma, if that lack of this is that I've been a marketer for a very long time and I found this weird part of marketing which defies all the rules of marketing. So in regular consumer marketing, you think, okay, if I'm selling tacos or selling ice cream cones or toothbrushes or, you know, jet engines or hydrogen powered fuel cells for hospitals, the more you sell, the better you are. Like, there's nobody who says, no, please, please sell less. We don't want so many, no, please sell less.

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James Ellis [00:04:31]:

Like Birkin bag can play with that maybe a bit, but that's it. End of that list. In employer branding, I'm not trying to sell a job, which I think is a horrible way of putting it because you can't sell a job because there's only one person who can fit in that role. So you're not looking for more, you're looking for better. And so once you figure that out, you realize this is a part of marketing where all the answers haven't been figured out. No one's written down the four, five, six p's of employer branding they have for consumer marketing. And so it's a really fun, interesting place to, to try new things and think new thoughts and consider new ideas. And I'm just the crazy person who says, yeah, I will accept the lack of control for all the accountability if I get to play around with things that aren't decided yet.

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James Ellis [00:05:15]:

That to me, sounds like a fun way to spend some time.

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Devyn Mikell [00:05:18]:

I mean, I would imagine every company is like, yeah, we need to fix or improve our employer brand. I'm sure you'd be surprised.

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James Ellis [00:05:25]:

You'd be surprised.

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Devyn Mikell [00:05:26]:

I think it's all talk, though. Like that's kind of where I, where I hear it, it lands on me. It's like, okay, that's all talk. Cause, you know, what does that even mean? And I think what you just said was probably the best definition I've heard. Which is like, you're responsible for everything this company does, but you have no control over that.

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James Ellis [00:05:42]:

But he does. Yeah. Everything the company does impacts how people perceive you. Right? Good product, bad product, good customer service, bad customer service, scandal in the c suite, giving a lot of money to people who didn't have a lot of money, who need a lot of money. All those things impact it. So it matters. So the question of where you start is a really tough one. It's completely contextual because only crazy people take this job and because there's never been a fully funded employer brand team.

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James Ellis [00:06:07]:

And I know that because I've talked to people at Amazon who have all of my money and probably all of your money, they don't have any money. I don't know where they're putting all of our money, but they're not spending it on employer rally. They think of it as themselves, like, you know, beggars with the tin cup, hoping for the best. So nobody's fully funded. You start where there's an opportunity. Because the truth is, there is no platonic ideal of how you do employer branding. There is no blueprint that says, do this, step one, step two, step three, and just follow the lines and connect the dots. And it's how it is.

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James Ellis [00:06:37]:

Every company is different, and every company has different opportunities they can offer. So I worked at Roku, and so the big opportunity at Roku is, well, gosh, how many tv shows do they own? How many tv boxes do they own? How many eyeballs do they capture while people are navigating from place to place? There is ad space there, and they don't sell all of it all the time. Can I tap into that? Yeah. If I had to pay for it, would I? No, but if it's free, I will take it. You got trucks driving around the city or driving around the country doing whatever I want to figure out. Well, you got to paint them something, so why not paint them with a message that helps me? Okay. If I had to say, let's go buy a bunch of trucks and drive around the city, would I do that? No, it's completely opportunistic. So you look at a situation and say, one, what is the message you want people to think when they think about you? Two, is it a message that's differentiated? Is it worth hearing? Is it worth engaging with? Saying you're another delightful company is not useful.

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James Ellis [00:07:35]:

I'm sorry. Just saying you're delightful isn't enough, because there's thousands and thousands and thousands of other companies saying the exact same thing with the exact same badge. How do I pick you over them? And that's the thing that it's all about. It's not about how do I make myself look good, which isn't useful. SpaceX does not look good at any measure, by any objective measure. You're like, that's a kind of a messy company. That's a crazy company. The line forms to the left of engineers who want to work there.

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James Ellis [00:08:05]:

Why? Because they can get something there that they can't get anywhere else. That is the opportunity to do something that goes to Mars. And it's all about creating choice, not about making looking good. It's about saying, hey, you don't need to hire everybody. You. You need to hire a handful of people, and you want the people who actually want what you offer to make an informed choice. So that, to me, is employer brand. It's not about slapping on a coat of paint or hanging those really pretty posters with your values printed on them.

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James Ellis [00:08:31]:

Oh, that works. I don't know who told people that works, but it's about saying, how are you different? And that, to me, is where the game gets played, because companies are terrified of saying anything different, especially in ta, especially there where it's, we're hiring and join us, and great opportunity and a job posting that was at least partially copied from other job posting, if not from another company, that we were so terrified of deviating from the norm or the standard, that is where the real fight happens.

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Devyn Mikell [00:08:59]:

So my thought goes to, like, some of my customers and some of my prospects, or whatever it may be, they might have brands that are either boring or, like, for example, like, qualify. It's very easy to rally behind our values, our mission, our diversity at the company, a lot of things that just stand out in the crowd. So it's like, yeah, employer brand here, probably easier than employer brand as some regular company. That's like, yeah. What do you do when you're not necessarily super proud of your brand? Like, what do you do there?

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James Ellis [00:09:30]:

It's not about proud of brands. Again, it's about that differentiation. If a company can exist in the world and make enough money to continue to exist in the world, they are doing something worth doing, worth paying for, is that might be the best way to put it. Which means there's nobody else doing that or nobody else is doing it that way. So there's already some level of differentiation inside the company. You just kind of pull it out and plug it in on the recruiting side. So to make that easy, I kind of have a, like, a framework of thought that says, look, if I'm trying to talk to a customer, I got to figure out what a customer wants. That's how you sell, right? Everybody, anybody who's ever done sales, step one, know what the customer wants, then figure how to put it in front of them and put a price tag on it, right? That's sales 101.

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James Ellis [00:10:11]:

Recruiting is kind of the same thing. What do you have that they want? So that means the first thing you got to understand is, what does a customer, what does a candidate want? Truth is, they want three things they want to know. What is this company doing? What is its mission? What is its purpose? What is the proverbial dent it's putting in the universe? If you want to go full Steve Jobs in it, wants to know, what is the experience of work every day? What is the culture like? What are the values like? What are management like? What is the work life balance like? Are they collaborative? Are they competitive? What is it like when I show up? What do I get? And the third one is, what do we get when we're done? What's the reward? And the reward isn't just about money. Sometimes it's status, sometimes it's in development, sometimes it's in promotion. So you boil it all down, you go, okay, candidates want to know, what are we doing? How do we do it? What do we get when we do it? One of those things is going to be different from your competitors. Now, notice I didn't say different from the known universe of companies because there's 50 million of them. And good luck with that. You know, the research alone there will bankrupt you.

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James Ellis [00:11:11]:

But all you're trying to do is say, look, if I'm in Philly, which is a big city, and I am a, I make boxes. That's a boring industry. How could that be exciting? How could that be an interesting employer brand? Well, look, there's two other companies, say, and they're also making boxes. So boxes isn't super sexy. So in terms of a mission or a goal, okay, not so much there. You pay what everybody else pays. So in terms of reward, mostly not the same. Maybe you offer a little more development, maybe you offer a little more status.

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James Ellis [00:11:40]:

Status. Box makers, maybe not so much. There's maybe something there. But maybe you say, look, we're a place where we're insanely optimized and we perform at a super high level, okay? Someone's going to say, I have experience with boxes. I'm looking for a box that's a performance based company. Because a competitor might say, we make boxes too, but we're super collaborative. We're always innovating in a collaborative way. Completely different experience, completely different day to day.

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James Ellis [00:12:06]:

There's probably not a lot of work from home in a box factory. So I'm going to guess it's a lot of like, hey, look, we take an hour every Friday. We come together, we have a communal meal, we help each other, we ask about each other, okay? That's a different thing. So you just need to find that one little piece of deviance that says, I'm not like the other box companies in this general area because no one's going, I'm going to move to LA to just do boxes. Like, it's not that kind of industry. Now, if you're a lawyer, you have a million options. It gets a little more complicated. But even amongst law firms, they differentiate and they kind of find their own little niches, you know, whether it's personal injury or intellectual property, whatever.

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James Ellis [00:12:42]:

You just have to find the thing that's different about you.

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Devyn Mikell [00:12:44]:

Have you come against companies that want to shift? For example, you know, I talked with a company that was a financial planning company, and I talked to their v of HR on this podcast. She was mentioning how all their workforce is retiring. Like, they're aging out, right? So they have to do things differently. There's not enough. There's not enough coming in. And one of the thoughts I had was like, okay, interesting. Well, when I was researching that, I found that, like, some insanely high percentage were white males. And so thought I had is like, okay, well, I know there's space for some black people, being that I'm one of those people.

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Devyn Mikell [00:13:20]:

And so what do you do as a company that has historically always had a certain brand or certain presence or whatever that may be, and you want to shift that view from outward, but your inward doesn't look like that yet. Like, how do you approach that piece?

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James Ellis [00:13:35]:

Yeah. The biggest danger in employer branding is that the expectation that your aspiration is enough that you can want it to be true. And that's plenty. And there's value in being aspirational. Look, SpaceX is going to Mars. That's no. Every Thursday. That's a big aspiration.

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James Ellis [00:13:50]:

So there's value in that aspiration. But if I just say, I hope to one day be able to dunk over LeBron, that's not an aspiration. That's insane. I'm a 50 year old white, chubby dude. No, ain't happening. Ain't happening, right? I can aspire all I want. So there is the kind of, how do you strip apart this idea of what I want it to be versus what it really is? The other part is very much that as people enter an organization, they change the organization. It's so misused.

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James Ellis [00:14:18]:

Culture is ultimately just, what is the behaviors of the people in the office. So if you hire a bunch of collaborative people in a cutthroat office, either the cutthroat people will chop up the collaborative or the office becomes more collaborative, vice versa. So if you're saying we have challenges trying to attract people, one you want to say, okay, the way in which I attract people has always given me this result. So the way I recruit is always hiring old white dudes. Got it. Guess what? Don't do that. Do something. Different.

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James Ellis [00:14:48]:

Anything different is a start. The challenge is to get people to say, try something new. But it works. Yeah, but you're not trying to achieve the same thing, and it's not enough. And I'm not a DEI expert by any stretch, but I listen to smart people like Torrin Ellis and Madison. They're incredibly smart about this stuff. And I know that being the first of whatever, whether you're trans or black or whatever, is a hard job, and I wouldn't wish that on anybody. Right.

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James Ellis [00:15:13]:

To be the first one through the wall is tough. So to say, let's just hire one and we check a box and they'll attract more. I don't think it really works that way. I think it has to be a marriage. Let's put some extra effort into finding someone who looks in a different way, and then let's say, what are the changes we can make in our process that attract more of the same? Thorn Ellis talks about love and process. That's how you make these changes. You have to want a thing. You have to want that thing to happen.

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James Ellis [00:15:38]:

But then you can't just kind of flip a switch and hope it's different. Think of it like an old steakhouse that always had that big old tomahawk steak, and it's stuffy, it's dark wood. Going to attract lots of old white dudes. You can't say, how do we attract the young, hit millennial crowd? By doing old white dude stuff. You have to do different things. And that means taking that leap to say, look, I may not have an answer. I may not know exactly what it is. So boiling it back to employer brand, employer branding usually gets tagged with this idea that it's a tagline and everybody's going to repeat it like a Meineberg or a parrot.

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James Ellis [00:16:12]:

And I'm like, I don't think that's what it is. Because if you and I are working for the same company, how I see an idea like, we're a company that offers innovation, and how you see an idea like, we're a company that offers innovation. One, we absorb it differently. Two, we understand it and see it differently. Three, we communicate it radically differently. So rather than say, everybody say these five words because they're clever and they've been tested, instead we say, look, this is a company that's incredibly collaborative, and that's the thing that makes us different. James, talk to other old middle aged white dudes about what it means to be collaborative. Devyn, why don't you talk to younger black men about what it means to be collaborative in this space, let's find ways.

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James Ellis [00:16:48]:

Hey data scientists, what does collaboration mean for you? Hey lawyer, what is. And you just kind of go, go, go. And what you find is no one's talking the same thing but they're talking about the same idea. And that creates a powerful brand because how you do anything is how you do everything. So employer brand is kind of fractal. If you pick any one piece it should reflect the brand. It doesn't matter if it looks like everything else, but it should reflect that idea. What's critical is to make it more credible is to make sure people can adopt it, absorb it, understand it on their own terms, in their own context, in their own experience, and then communicate out to their networks.

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Devyn Mikell [00:17:26]:

Yeah, this is what I was hoping for. So recruitment, marketing, employer brand.

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James Ellis [00:17:31]:

Oh, here we go.

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Devyn Mikell [00:17:32]:

Where do those like, how should I, the ignorant guy.

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James Ellis [00:17:35]:

Oh no, no. Okay, so it's so easy kind of because employer branding is so small a network, there's like 20,000 people who do it or say they do it or say they care about it. Let's get out of ta and let's go over the marketing team. And they have a branding team and a marketing team or an advertising team. Now you think, well they're both advertising or they're both marketing. Yeah, but not really. So the differentiation there is brand is the idea and because it's an idea, it's really useful to plant seeds and people who are not, quote unquote in market, people are not looking to buy. Right.

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James Ellis [00:18:08]:

So if you're selling motorcycles and the brand is about, hey, in five years you're going to want a motorcycle. If our brand is done well, we're the company you're going to want to talk to first. We're planting that seed. We're in your consideration set. Marketing says, oh, you're in the market. How about a 10% coupon? How about a sale? How about an event? Here's some commercials. Buy now. Super low financing.

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James Ellis [00:18:29]:

How do I get you to cross the line? You're at the three yard line. How do I get you over the end zone? That is marketing and advertising. One is for out of market, one is for in market. Now take that back to ta. Youre hiring a nurse or a data scientist or a head of sales or whatever. The functional, addressable market for any one of those roles is massive. And that entire audience, maybe 5%, are actually looking for a job. So 5% are actually in market, 95% are out of market.

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James Ellis [00:18:59]:

How much easier is it for you to recruit. If people have heard of you before, they've already heard nice things, they've heard your brand ideas, they associate that brand idea with some things that they want. Suddenly you're top of mind. Now when the recruiter pops up, they go, oh yeah, I've heard good things. I will have a conversation. Which in recruiter world is a huge win because they got a 99% loss rate, right? No one responds to recruiters like, oh no, not a recruiter. But if you know who they are, if you know the brand that they're associated with, it's much better. So recruitment marketing is for people who are in market, they're looking for jobs, they're clicking on buttons, they're showing up to your career site.

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James Ellis [00:19:33]:

Because only people looking for a job would ever show up to your career site. I'm sorry, I'm sure it's very pretty, I'm sure it's very well written, but nobody cares. Sorry, but if they're on your jobs, if they're on your career side, if they're looking at your social, if they're watching your videos, again, nobody wants those until they're looking for a job. That is where recruitment marketing lives. Things like remarketing and pushing messages and drip can, all those sorts of stuff to get you to go from the three yard line over to the apply line. Employer branding says, I'm going to make it easier by establishing an idea of who we are, what we're about, what it's like to work here, why we work here, what the reward is, those three big ideas, so that when someone is ready, it's a much shorter path to go from. I'm thinking about applying for a job. Of course I want to work for that company.

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James Ellis [00:20:17]:

Recruiters get more and more effective. They get better outreach, response rates, their tactics are more useful. People want to hear what they have to say on more buttons, they engage more on social, they watch more of the videos. Everything you think you're doing in recruitment marketing now becomes more effective because people are pre sold on what you're talking about. That is the difference. Now it's a fuzzy line. To be certain, you could kind of push it one way or the other a little bit. But in the end, employer brand does not create applications.

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James Ellis [00:20:44]:

Recruitment marketing is about saying, these people have raised their hand, how do I push them over the finish line?

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Devyn Mikell [00:20:49]:

Got it. You answered one key question that I was going to ask. So anytime I hear someone talk about employer brand and they bring up a career site, I am immediately red flagged.

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James Ellis [00:20:58]:

Moving forward I don't know. I think, look, the thing about employer brand is there's no right way to do it. People said, what's your favorite tech stack for this stuff? And I am like, obnoxiously tech stack agnostic. I like clinch because I like it. Me personally, is it the best career side maker? I don't know. So many other tools out there. If they're right for your context, how you use them is a whole different ballgame. How you present and understand what makes you different, how you communicate that, how you get people into that information, completely different.

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James Ellis [00:21:29]:

And if you said, hey, James, we need to hire the three greatest, let's think of somebody hard. Biochemists. People who are, like, gonna be Nobel listed, hardcore. Like, these are the people who want James, sorry, we have, like, no money, so we don't have an ad budget. We don't have a social ad promotion budget. We barely have a career site. So we have a page of some sort. Yeah.

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James Ellis [00:21:49]:

Okay, so I'm gonna write something that's compelling, defines your difference, illustrates your difference. If I can do it, prove that difference, maybe I'll get a couple people to say, hey, here's seven different perspectives on this idea. That's different. So that you go, it's not just something they said. This is something they seem to live, okay? And I'm not doing that because there's SEO value, and I'm not doing that because it's going to attract people naturally and who will be compelled. Nuh uh. That's not how that works. Then I go to an event, conference, a dinner, whatever, and I show up with a piece of sidewalk chalk and I write a message that is so, like, what? What? Something so compelling that they will stop and look at it.

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James Ellis [00:22:29]:

And at the bottom, I write the little URL and that's that. And then maybe the next day I said, hey, in case you missed it, here's an email with that link. So just touch them. Just something that sparks, something that makes them think, oh, wow, I never heard that before. Oh, wow. That's a new way of doing something. So that when they get that email or they decide to type in the URL, that's never going to happen. But in case they do and they go to the career site, there's further validation.

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James Ellis [00:22:51]:

They go, all right, there's something here. And after that, let them do what they do. Right? They're going to go, look at your glass door. They're going to google you. They're going to go look up who they know over there. That's fine. But I got them to start their journey and I did it spending zero money. And that's just as valid as a big old budget and a big old career site and a big old kind of built in section and a hacker rank section and a whatever sorts of tools.

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James Ellis [00:23:17]:

There are all sorts of ways of doing it. There's no one right way. It's just about saying, who do you want? What can you tell them that is compelling and interesting, and how can you get it in front of them? Those are the only questions. The tech stack doesn't involve itself.

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Devyn Mikell [00:23:30]:

So who do you think is doing a good job? Like companies?

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James Ellis [00:23:35]:

Yeah. Yeah. You see those kind of events where they say, hey, we're going to do a shark tank thing and you're going to pitch your weird ass specific recruiting solution to a bunch of grandmas who's never had a job before, let alone hired before. And maybe some of them are rich. And I'm sorry, if you're rich, you've probably not had to apply. You've never hit the apply button. You don't know the love that is workday, right? Seeing that workday load, you're like, oh, God, no, you don't know. You don't know.

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James Ellis [00:24:00]:

In which case, who are you to judge this recruiting or hr talent acquisition solution? You're nobody. So in the same way, employer brand is very hard to say. Good brand, bad brand. So I don't think of it in good brand, Brady. I think of it in terms of strong brand, weak brand. So a strong brand is Spotify, classic. Everybody's favorite employer brand. They've got a clear message of how they're different.

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James Ellis [00:24:23]:

It's all this metaphor about how they're a band. We're all in a band, which, of course, they sell streaming music. So it makes perfect sense. And every piece of their website, of their job postings, of their experience as a candidate, find ways to tag back to this idea that we're in a band. Like the contracts, talk about their riders. Anything legal has this kind of sense of, like, it's like you're on a tour and you don't want any brown m and Ms or whatever, right? And it's a joke. It's a shtick, no question. But it makes you feel like they believe this.

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James Ellis [00:24:54]:

This is on some level, a unifying principle of how they operate across a global company with tens of thousands of people. Okay, they believe this, but I get that. I think oatly does a great job. I think buffer. Weirdly, like, when's the last time you thought about buffer as a company, right? You're like, what year is this? Is it 2012? But they were hot in 20 12, 20 14, 20 15. And now, okay, there's a case that they're not. But their career site is incredibly clear, incredibly transparent. Like, that's the thing they're offering.

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James Ellis [00:25:25]:

It's like, we're going to tell you what people make, okay, that's different. And they show it to me and I believe it. Strong. Do I want it? That's a different question because that's about me, James Ellis. And right now, I'm not looking for a job. So none of that stuff's attractive. And even if I was, look, I'm not going to work at Goldman Sachs. I'm not going to work at SpaceX.

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James Ellis [00:25:44]:

There's a lot of things about them that they have. Strong brands. No, unquestionably strong brands. I don't want to work there because that's the deal. Ultimately, hiring is about finding the lid for the pot. Right? Every pot has a lid. Every lid has a pot. It's a question of how do you find them? And the person who you think is a schmuck and a moron is going to be considered a genius someplace else where their approach, their thinking is going to line right up with how they do things.

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James Ellis [00:26:09]:

It just doesn't line up with you. And that's fine. It just means hiring is hard and it just means it's a painful process. But these are the realities of hiring. And so that's not about good or bad. It's about strong or weak. So strong brands are focused on a single, maybe two messages. They're consistent on every single touch point.

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James Ellis [00:26:27]:

They find a way to talk about how their CFO is going to this conference that you don't care about, but they find a way to kind of just touch on the idea of the brand. They find a way to say, hey, we won this award. Connect it to the brand. Hey, there's a thing. Connect it to make it look like you believe it. And it's not something a consultant handed a recruiting leader and said, here's your deck, give me $40,000. Right. And that's usually how most employer brands go.

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James Ellis [00:26:52]:

The activation is about how do you make this less the costume you put on once a week and more the life that you live.

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Devyn Mikell [00:27:00]:

So it is a parallel, straight to the marketing realm.

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James Ellis [00:27:04]:

Absolutely.

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Devyn Mikell [00:27:04]:

And so in brand, you know, the struggle of brand is measurement. Same with, I assume, with employer brand. So when you work with a company, what are you trying to get them to measure you against, you know, measure the efforts.

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James Ellis [00:27:17]:

The best way to think about how you measure employer brand is how it changes and how you change the vectors. So if you're hiring process and all your key metrics are going in a certain way, and there's one you want to change, does it change that? The problem with employer brand as an industry is because we are inside a TA and we tend to, by osmosis, absorb some really bad ta habits about thinking about metrics that only Ta people care about. Like, time to fill is a really important metric. If you're a recruiting leader, c suite barely understands that until you can connect it to dollars lost, dollars made, risk averted, customers created, businesses don't care. So what I say is, look, if you want an employer brand, you should look at where you are now and what you want to change. And then I will show you that employer brand will change it. I can show you how, via argument, via kind of explanation, how that makes that change. And then we can kind of calculate what an anticipated financial value that might look like.

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James Ellis [00:28:15]:

But there's like no one number that says, ah, I have a brand score of 17. Yay, good for me. It doesn't work that way. If you think about the best marketing brands out in the world, Coke, is there a human on earth who doesn't know what that brand means? They spend $4.4 billion every single year. That's billion with a b billion every year. And that's a lot of polar bears and a lot of Santa clauses and a lot of commercials about first dates. And they're all about making you associate sugar water with happiness. How do they measure that? They don't need to, because every person knows what that is.

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James Ellis [00:28:51]:

So the question of measurement is not so much. Is there a number that says yes or no? Is there a measure? It's not about that. What are you trying to achieve? I think in terms of, like, look, what's a big old crazy goal that you want? Like, I want to spend all of 2025 hiring without doing one outreach. Okay, that's a crazy ass goal. But to get there, you need to do, like, 100 little things right. You have to get 100 things right to make that rule. You want a big crazy goal of no referrals, no agencies. Give me something where you're like, in a perfect world, recruiting would look like this employer brand can help you make that happen.

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James Ellis [00:29:28]:

It can make your tools more effective. It can make your recruiters more effective. It can make the content that you build more attractive to the right, people? So it gets shared more often. What are you trying to do? Because when people kind of go, oh, employer brand, it does a lot of stuff, which it does. They effectively equate employer branding. The swiss army knife, it does a lot of stuff, but it doesn't necessarily do any of them well, when in reality, what you should think of it is a toolbox and say, look, it's not like I got a screwdriver glued to a hammer. It's, I got a screwdriver here and I got a hammer over here. What are we trying to do today and what are we trying to achieve? So to me, if I'm trying to convince a leader the employer brand is effective, I talk about things like, first off, lowering ad spend and lowering agency spend, and I think conservatively, you're talking about a 10% change.

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James Ellis [00:30:17]:

People go, oh, that doesn't seem like much. I'm like, have you looked at what you spend on your agency's madam and or sir? Like, not what you spend. I mean, like, what everybody spends. Because that's the trick about agency. Like, it never lands in one budget, it lands all around. It gets scattered and no one notices. Collect that up together and look at what 10% would save you. That's real money.

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James Ellis [00:30:37]:

Like, that is money in the bank that you can spend on other things. That's not hypothetical cash. That's not future savings. That is real money. You can also look at in terms of, if you get fewer people to say no to your offers, right? If you've got an offer acceptance rate of 70, 75%, not bad. But if I can get that 10% less, if I can make 10% fewer people say no to you. And I do that by communicating what I'm all about in a credible fashion. It's amazing how that works.

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James Ellis [00:31:05]:

So if you have a second, let me kind of walk you through, because I think it's every, like, well, it's not a magic wand, it's not fairy pixie dust I sprinkled on things to make magic. Like, no, no. Let's say we're all about opportunity. Autonomy. Autonomy is a good one because it's unusual. So you build and you've embraced this brand. It's specific, it's attractive, it's different, it's real. You're going to make it credible.

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James Ellis [00:31:22]:

You're going to make it strong. So it's a strong employer brand, which means the ad that you post is about autonomy and the job posting, the headline is about autonomy, and the social post from recruiters is about autonomy. And the hiring manager talks about how much autonomy they're offering in autonomy, autonomy, autonomy, autonomy. And it's said a bunch of different ways, but in the end it's talked about this idea. So someone clicks, guess what? You know something about that person now that you didn't know before. They want autonomy. So now as they go through the interview process and you talk about autonomy, maybe you've seeded one question about how much they care about autonomy or where they get autonomy, or what autonomy means to them. At the offer stage, when you spent the most amount of time and money with this person to get them to this spot, instead of saying, we'd love to make you an offer, slide the virtual piece of paper across the table with the number on it, because when you do that, the entire conversation becomes about that number, I want more.

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James Ellis [00:32:15]:

I want to give you less. Whatever it is, it's a fight about numbers. And that's crappy fight. If instead you say, look, we know you care about autonomy. We know that's why you started to become interested in us. We hope that over the last three, four, five weeks, you started to realize how much we care about autonomy, how much autonomy we truly offer at every stage of the game. And you see what we're really about, and that's why we're thrilled to offer you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, sliding piece of paper. Now, it's not about what the number is, it's about the whole experience with the whole package of what you're getting.

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James Ellis [00:32:45]:

And suddenly more people say yes. So if you think, average company spends $8,000 per hire, so if I can make 10% of those nos turn to yeses, how many actual people are that? Ten, 1000 times by $8,000. That's real money saved because you didn't have to go back to square one and go back to zero and start again. So that's a big pile of cash saved. And then you start to talk about what is the value that that person would bring to the table and what is the cost of an empty seat? Can I lower time to fill by five or 10%? Yeah. Employer branding does that because it builds a pipeline of people ready to go tomorrow. Right. If only five or 10% of your roles are filled via pipeline, that means they got hired in the space of like three weeks, right? It's not three months.

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James Ellis [00:33:32]:

Imagine the cost value, the cost savings of that, how much value you bring to the table. Add those three numbers up. I'm sorry if you got real money here, this, something happened here. And so the thing is, ta doesn't think in those terms. They think in terms that are non monetary, the non financial. And that's always been to their detriment. But the more you can tie it to financial terms, the CFO shows up. And I'm going to tell you, here's something funny in the C suite.

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James Ellis [00:33:55]:

If the CHRO or the CPO wants something, they got to wait to the next budget and they request some things, and there's a conversation, and they get about 80% of what they asked for, and they have to figure out how to make do. When the CFO wants something, they cut a check. That's the end of that statement. You want to make change happen? Make the CFO your best buddy. That is how change happens. And that's what I'm trying to do, is trying to tie the value of employer brand to CFO's.

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Devyn Mikell [00:34:21]:

I love it. I love it. I'm going to transition us to the hot seat segment of the show.

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James Ellis [00:34:25]:

Yeah.

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Devyn Mikell [00:34:26]:

Which is just five questions that I ask quicker than my normal face, and you answer quicker than your normal face.

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James Ellis [00:34:32]:

Is that possible?

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Devyn Mikell [00:34:33]:

I don't know if you can get any faster.

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James Ellis [00:34:35]:

Like I joke, if you listen to any of my podcasts on like 1.25 speed, you void the warranty of your phone. I mean, it's like, it will melt things. What are you doing?

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Devyn Mikell [00:34:42]:

You can't. No, it's hilarious. But we ready to go? All right, cool. So one person that has changed your life and talent acquisition, probably.

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James Ellis [00:34:52]:

I've been doing this stuff for a long time, and there's this sense that you keep finding these little tidbits that are right. And so I've had two bosses that have been really helpful in kind of telling me, no, this is valuable, this is useful, this makes sense. And Stacey Kraft, formerly at Groupon, now over at Tempest Labs. Brooke Clark, formerly over recursion, doing her own thing. Right now, they are the people who have kind of given me what I needed to go to the next level. And so they fed me what I needed to be fed to kind of get to this insane level where I am now. And I mean, I'm insane. Not the levels insane.

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Devyn Mikell [00:35:23]:

Got it. All right. This one you can spin to apply to you. But most challenging role you've ever had to recruit for.

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James Ellis [00:35:29]:

Oh, boy. So honestly, that's actually an easy question. So when I worked at the big agency, whose name I will not name, I helped really grow out their content development employer brand activation team. And I made the mistake of hiring someone cheaply once by accident. Not realizing that set the bar for everybody else. So I was hiring kids who were 22, 23, straight out of college, maybe had one job. I was not offering them great money and I knew that I could not change that financially. But you know.

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James Ellis [00:36:00]:

So you have to make this case of like, look, I know this isn't the number you wanted, but let me tell you what you're going to get in this jump. Your job, you're going to get a lot of training, you're going to get a great team that's going to support you, you're going to grow, you're going to develop yourself, I'm going to help develop you. Your next job is going to pay for what this cost and it's a hard pitch to make. I had a lot of people say, no, man, no. I'm like, I get it, I get it, I totally get it. But the people I got to hire, the people who are willing to try something a little crazy, they were amazing hire. So it was hard work to do it. But honestly I had really fast turn routes.

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James Ellis [00:36:34]:

I was really good to say, look, I'm not here to have 7000 review processes. I'm here to say I know what I want. Someone who can write and who can get things done. I would have one conversation in a coffee shop with them, get a sense of what they did, saw some of their writing, and I would kick into my three people on my team and say, you look at them and if I'm good, if you're good, I'm good. Let's go. And we could do it in the space of two, three weeks.

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Devyn Mikell [00:36:55]:

Where do you go to stay up to date on the latest trends and changes in the Ta landscape?

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James Ellis [00:37:00]:

I read a lot and the newsletter I do every week has a section on just links to other places. So it's the stuff I've been reading and I try not to get too blindered into ta. It's too easy to be the snake eating its own tail. Have I pulled an article out of a lot of recruiting magazines and blogs from ten years ago? You'd be like, yeah, that sounds right, because we don't seem to change very much. I always joke that the really interesting companies and the really interesting stories we see compromise one, maybe 2% of the market. 90% of companies recruit like it's 2002, let's be honest. And it's not their fault, whether it's structurally, whether it's leadership wise, whether it's budget wise. They haven't figured out how to move forward.

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James Ellis [00:37:41]:

But for the most part, it's just these tiny companies. So I like looking at branding people and marketing people outside the industry. So Alex Mh Smith wrote an amazing book called no bullshit strategy. Cannot recommend him enough. Jasmine Bina over at Concept bureau, cannot recommend her enough. Rory Sutherland over at Ogilvy, who is insane in a way that I only dreamed to be. He's like the world's smartest man, but, like, just how he thinks. It's crazy.

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James Ellis [00:38:06]:

His book is alchemy. It's amazing. So the people like that who go, how do I change people's thinking? That's the stuff I ate up with a spoon. So I like to try and keep a broad, open view of all these ideas and all these people talking about stuff. But my biggest ideas are usually sparked from far outside the industry.

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Devyn Mikell [00:38:22]:

Gotcha. What's your go to interview question? If you could only ask one.

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James Ellis [00:38:25]:

It's a two parter, so it's, what's something professional you believe? Okay, can you explain the other side of it? I'm a big believer that there's no right answer. Even the stuff that I say and sell, I can't say for sure. It's 100% always right all the time. And if I did, I'd be a jerk. I believe that there is always another side to it. There are a handful of exceptions. We won't have to get into politics wise, but in professional belief, like, hey, launching that product, why was it a good idea? Why was it a bad idea? If you can't see both sides of it, you're not seeing the full picture, and you can't make good, smart decisions. And so people who can see the bigger picture, who can see both sides at the same time and then still have an opinion, those are the kind of people who can think through problems that we've never thought of before.

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James Ellis [00:39:10]:

Right? If I'm giving you a whole brand new challenge where you can't google it, you can't ask OpenAI what the answer is, you got to think through it. I like people who can think through stuff.

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Devyn Mikell [00:39:19]:

Last question. What's a common talent acquisition activity that needs to die?

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James Ellis [00:39:23]:

Oh, my God. This one's easy. The we're hiring post. If I could take the we're hiring post and get it and hit it with a shovel and dig it and bury it in the desert, I would. I would take the time to make that happen. And it's not just that they're bad and they are, it's that they make this assumption that they're fine, that they're okay. Like, the more I see it, the more it tells other recruiters, that's okay, this is an acceptable thing to do. And it's not like the time it took you, the two and a half seconds it took you to write that post.

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James Ellis [00:39:54]:

It's not just that it was wasted, it's just that you wasted an opportunity. Someone saw that and you had an opportunity to tell them something interesting, engaging, useful, helpful, something that connects to the brand, something that makes them say, huh, that's interesting. And you went with, here's some crap you don't want to read, and they just went scrolling. You missed the opportunity. As someone who owns a business, and I am very cognizant of how many people see my posts and when I have an idea and how do I push this out, how do I get the maximum number of people to see these ideas? I know the value of opportunities, of eyeballs. And if I can't get you to engage, I know how expensive it is because I'm not going to get my chance again for a while. And if you're just writing, we're hiring and join us. And great place to work and all the other place.

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James Ellis [00:40:37]:

I said, dammit, it's not getting you anywhere you want to go, and it's just keeping you stuck in the mud.

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Devyn Mikell [00:40:42]:

That was a good banger for the last hot seat question. James. I've appreciated this. I've appreciated this a lot.

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James Ellis [00:40:49]:

It's been a blast.

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Devyn Mikell [00:40:50]:

I knew I was gonna come in and learn a lot. This was uncharted water for me. So I know the audience would love to keep up with you, and I just want to give you the floor to tell them how to do so.

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James Ellis [00:40:59]:

I appreciate that. I love these. Not because I'm a loudmouth. Well, not just because I'm a loud mouth. There's no question I am a loud mouth, but because this is my dining room. Welcome to my dining room here in Chicago. I talked to my wife a bit about this. She doesn't care about what I do.

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James Ellis [00:41:13]:

Like, she's so sick of employer brand. And I get that. It's very rare that people kind of dive into that, pull that apart, make that make sense to me. And I love the challenge because that helps me think about these challenges better. That's really what I love. So if you thought this was at all interesting, I'm always on LinkedIn. It's easy to find me. But my newsletter is called the change agent.

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James Ellis [00:41:32]:

If you go to changeagent news, go ahead and subscribe. It's free. It's every Monday. And if you go to employerbrand dot ing, that's employerbranding or employerbrand dot in dot all my employer brand resources there. Courses, books, podcasts, videos, articles, all of it's there. Most of them are free and they're all for me. So if you want to start to get into this stuff, that's where I would recommend you start.

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Devyn Mikell [00:41:52]:

Awesome. Well, those who are listening, this is one of those rare occasions where you get to not only hear the story, but also get some really practical tips. And I think this has made me even think about our employer brand different. So, you know, if you like what you've heard, make sure to subscribe. Cause we're gonna continue to do things just like this and have great people on this show.

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James Ellis [00:42:12]:

You've had killer guests. What are you doing, man? You were killing it. I came to you, let's be honest, I came to you cause like you are getting some great people. How do I be on this list?

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Devyn Mikell [00:42:21]:

Right? But anyways, make sure to like and subscribe wherever you're listening or watching. Be back up more every other Tuesday. Appreciate you, James, and have a great rest of your week.

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James Ellis [00:42:31]:

Thanks, Devyn.

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