James Ellis

Yeah, the biggest. I'll call them younger. I'll maybe immature is the right, I mean, I know I'm old, I keep making that joke. but if you're, you haven't been doing this a while. The mistake you make is that you think you have to be the cheerleader. You think you have to be a raw raw. Everything is positive. Everything is wonderful that you think that's the brand. It's not the brand. The brand is a series of trade-offs. I choose more money and less time. I want no, you know, because I'm gonna make a lot of money. I'm gonna have no time for my family. I'm gonna enjoy my time at Goldman Sachs. I understand the trade-offs, and I understand the pros and the cons, and I'm making that informed choice.

Nasser Oudjidane

Hello, and welcome to our series of Scaling Stories, a discussion with talent leaders about their lessons building teams at some of the world's fastest growing companies. I'm excited to be learning about all things employer branding with James Ellis, who has developed brands for companies early as 125 person startups all the way to the Fortune 1000. James, a huge welcome, and thank you for joining me. Oh, now to get started. Can, can you share a brief introduction about you and your Background? 

James Ellis

Sure. I am the employer brand nerd. I, I, everything I think about and listen to and read and do is filter through this lens of employer brand. I'm just obsessed with employer brand and the reason is completely selfish. It's because I don't let the baby face fool you. I am deeply old. I'm really old. Like I remember the seventies. Okay. I am old. My friend, I remember Jimmy Carter. I am old, so I have had a lot of jobs. I had a lot of jobs, and in. To call me a job hopper would not be completely outta line. And I've had jobs which were amazing, great bosses, lots of freedom, lots of agency and opportunity, good benefits. They seem to care about people. And I have had jobs which were atrocious, micromanaging bosses, minimal, benefits, really just, just a complete wretched. . And the problem is from the outside, they looked exactly the same, right? That from the outside they were the exact same movie. It's like, are you walking into Star Wars or are you walking into the last Star Wars? I mean, which one? Which movie are you about to walk into? And that's, that sucks. Like that sucks for me. But I think it sucks for millions and millions of other people who. You know, they think about, oh, I wanna work at this place. But they have such a limited frames of reference, right? They've worked, they've worked at five companies, maybe 10 companies. They don't know much. And I think my job is to encourage companies for their own benefit, for purely selfish reasons, to be crystal clear about what they offer, what they reward. Who they're looking for to stop trying to troll the internet for a hundred resumes and applications for every requisition. But to say, there is a handful of people who are going to be amazing at this job. Let's talk to them. And the more companies do that, the benefits are on both sides. The company gets better talent, they pay less money for that talent, their costs for higher, the time to hire. All that stuff goes right down where you want it to be. For the. They get to make this crazy thing called an informed choice, which in recruiting and hiring is almost unheard of, right? You, you simply don't know what a company's like until you just say, okay, I'm gonna pull the trigger in and walk in and see what it's like. So I'm trying to get as many companies to say, if you nail your employer branding, you are being crystal clear about what you offer, what's your reward, what you care about, what matters, your culture, your benefits, the whole picture so that the right. shows up and says, oh yeah, I want some of that, and everybody else goes, yeah, I'm good. Thanks. And that's the win. 

Nasser Oudjidane

Yeah. I, I I love how you've, you know, delivered that message about being crystal clear and there does seem to be an information as symmetry that exists. Companies don't know who the best candidates are, and the candidates don't know which companies are best suited for them. And that's the one of the major area, major areas of. Problems for recruiting. Yeah. But perhaps just take a step back. How did you get here? How did your experience as an agnostic marketer influence your approach to talent recruiting and employer brand? 

James Ellis

Yeah, I, I've done a lot of marketing and when I say I've done a lot of marketing, I mean, I've done B2B marketing, B2C marketing.com marketing. Yes. I'm old. I mentioned that I've. , non-profit marketing. I've done event marketing. I've done pharmaceutical marketing. I've done state government marketing. I do not recommend it. Please stay away from it. No one likes it. It's horrible. Don't do it. But I did it once so I could say I did. And the funny thing about marketing is, is the stuff they teach you in college is mostly true. Right. Four, five Ps, couple of models, couple frameworks, bang, bang, boom. Most of the work is in defining the insights about your audience and figuring out the placements of ads, right? What's a creative message that that audience is gonna care about and how do you put it someplace where someone's gonna care? And it's true of every single kind of marketing I talked about. That model is very simple. Understand who you're trying to talk to, understand what they care about, understand where they live. one plus two, plus three, wham, bam, bam. Put the message out there and let the salespeople finish the rest. When I moved over to, at the time it was recruitment marketing, but immediately became employer brand, I was struck by this one fundamental difference of what we did, whereas in standard b2b, b2c, whatever, marketing. More is always right. I want more leads. I want more faces. I want more impressions. I want more clicks. I want more shell space. I want more. Share a wallet, share a voice. I want more. I want everything more. They worship at the church of more. I say that it sounds like blasphemy, but it's not. It's true. It's what they care about. They care about more on the recruiting. . It's not the same. They want better, right? If you have 10 amazing leads and they're all qualified, they're all fantastic leads. You have the opportunity to sell whatever it is you're selling to 10 people. The recruiter has that one job, and if they have 10 people who are amazing, it's actually harder than only having two people who are amazing at that job. Suddenly you could only give one of those people that job. So who's it gonna be? And if you have 10 great candidates, literally it, it, it's like analysis paralysis. The hire manager just goes, ah, oh, how do I pick? And what? It's, it's a, it's a wealth of riches. Quality beats quantity. And it says, I think the only kind of marketing where that's true, everything else is qual quantity. Beats quantity. So once you realize there's that fundamental foundational difference, you start to go, okay, so all this stuff that's true about marketing is true. But it has to be refactored to understand a world where quality is more important than quantity. So consequently, say you can, you have a addressable market of a million people is nice, but who cares? That's not actually useful. What you want is two people to fall in love with this job. That's all. You don't need a million applicants. You need a hundred applicants. You need two. So long as they're great candidates and you pick two, cuz the hiring manager can make a choice and feel good about that. Otherwise, you really only need the one. That's the difference. So, you know, that's where I'm trying to do, which is interesting because it says I have to communicate things differently as an employer brander than I would as a consumer marketer. Right. You can't squeeze the, you know, you can't press the button of, of, of scarcity too much because the scarcity's implied. There's just the one job. Everybody knows that that's true of every job. You can't squeeze the urgency as much because. . Once that job goes away, another one will come along. You have to use some different factors, and what happens is, is you start to tap into human motivations. Now, not to say that marketers don't do that normally, but I think employer branders are better positioned because we're not selling a product. I'm not selling a pair of shoes. I'm not selling, sinks. I'm selling the next three years of your life, and that's a human thing, right? If I don't like those pairs of shoes, I throw 'em away. I return 'em, big bang, boom, all things good. I pick the wrong job. That has dramatic impacts on me on a number of levels. Even if I immediately leave, I now have to explain that leaving to every other future employer for the next five years, who's gonna say, oh, you're a job hopper. I don't wanna hire you. Those choices matter. And to the point you made very early, the asymmetry of information and knowledge is so staggering. It's brutal. Like you look at the modern recruiting process and you have on one side, The company whose primary means of communicating to you is this thing called a job posting or a job description. This is never poetry. This is never well written. Most of them is just a series of bullets, looks like a came outta a Tommy gun. I'm American. I get to say those things. It honestly, let's be fair, half of those bullets were either stolen from another job or stolen from another company. And how can you say this properly describes the job you're hiring for if they, that information came from the wrong. That's okay because on the other side, you have the candidate who has put their entire life history and career history on two pages, but seem to have forgotten all the negative things. They're only saying the wonderful things like every resume you look at. Looks like Mother Teresa, mixed with Steve Jobs, right? They, you see, and all the best parts of both of them, right? No Steve Jobs being a jerk or anything. It's just the best part of Steve Jobs. And so you have lying on one side, misinformation on one side, and lying on the other. And they're talking to each other in this weird kabuki theater where they're each trying to look behind the curtain. They're trying to peek behind the other side going, well, what's really going on over there? What's it really like? I looked in Glassdoor and said this, what's it really going on? And that's right. Cuz the company's going, you say you speak Spanish, but do you really, it's, we're on this team, but did you do anything on this team? Like they're accusing each other of lying for like four weeks and at the end of it they hug it out and say, welcome to the family and. how anything gets done is beyond me. If that's the standard model of recruiting and, and it is. 

Nasser Oudjidane

Yeah. A absolutely, and, and also one I loved what you're hearing about with regards to quality and quantity, and I mean, we we're, we're going off piece here, slightly, but the, the measurements that are involved in talent marketing or now employer branding, in some disciplines have marketing metrics. Yeah. And that means perhaps number of applicants or impressions do, do you find sometimes that, that that message actually isn't delivered to employee, that talent acquisition specialists, practicing employer brands who are perhaps looking at the wrong data points?

James Ellis

Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I, I never, it never ceases to amaze me the number of recruiters who kind of have that. when they look at me and I say things like, you care about quality, not quantity, and they go like they've never thought of it in those terms before. It's like, I've kind of revealed secrets of the universe. It's like, no, that's your day every day. That's how you live. You just didn't realize that because you're sitting next to marketers who it's all about more, more, more, more, more. And you just assume that's true. To be perfectly blunt, consumer marketers are a hundred years ahead of employer. easy. At least a hundred years. Like they have so much more experience, so much more case studies, so many more stories to tell each other. And employer branders, we tend to steal some of those things, but again, we have to refactor it. The thing is, even in consumer marketing, you have marketing advertising metrics, and you have brand metrics. As those two things are supposed to achieve different things, they should have different metrics. Right? The goal of marketing and advertis. is to get someone who's interested in the thing to take. click this link, buy this thing, do this thing. Action, action, action, action. It's all about the call to action. Brand messaging is about you've never thought about a, a mattress sent to your house before. Let me tell you a story. Oh. Huh. I hadn't thought about that before. Is it gonna make you buy? No, but it plants that seed so that the next time you're thinking about maybe I should buy a mattress. You go, you know, they send them my. . They're different processes. They're focused on different audiences. They're trying to achieve different results, and consequently they should, but don't always have different metrics. The problem is recruiters aren't good marketers. They're great salespeople, but they're not marketers. They don't understand that stuff. And so they, they kind of glean little bits of things like, oh, all the marketing teams seems to care about numbers of impressions and reach and all these things. I guess we should too. And it's only in the last three or four years that employer brand has said, okay, hold your horses. What are we really doing? What are we really achieving here? What do we really wanna make happen? Because there's, in our space, MySpace, I guess technically employer brand is just like consumer brand, but there's recruitment marketing, which is just like advertising recruitment, marketing metrics are all about did you get the click? You were already looking for the job. How do I get you to look at my job? It's all about that call to action, separate set of metrics. Employer branding is about saying, Hey, look, you're not looking for a job. But have you thought about how your next job would help you in your career for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, I haven't. And now, as a brander, I've influenced you to change your perception, how you see the next job, so that I can position myself. To be the winner like Volvo for, before Volvo came out, no one cared about safety, right? You had Ralph Nader banging a drum saying, oh my unsafe at any speed. These cars are crazy. It wasn't until Volvo showed up and showed commercial after commercial of cars flying off rooftops and crashing like nose first into the ground, talking about safety, safety, safety. When they did that, not only were they saying we're about safety, what they were saying is, Hey, , I know you care about reliability. I know you care about speed. I know you care about looks. Don't forget to care about safety, and it shapes and shifts the entire market. That's what employer branding should be. You're looking for your next job. Is it just about salary or would you actually rather have twice as much opportunity to make a difference? Twice as much connection to a mission, twice as much, access to leadership. Twice as much status, twice as much autonomy. What do you really. . The problem is, for so long we've boiled it all down to salary and money, and there's good reason for that. But that's a separate conversation maybe. But what branding is trying to say is it's not just about money. Money's great, everybody likes money, but if you're being paid fairly, wouldn't you rather be in a place where you get more of whatever that thing is you care about? 

Nasser Oudjidane

Yeah. And why do you think it's so important now? We're being told to do more of less. I've read something that you've written in the past is that there's no other higher, higher ROI in talent acquisition than building and managing a strong employer brand. Why does it make, talent significantly better? Why does it make the job easier?

James Ellis

Well, there's a lot of reasons for that. The, the simple math-based one is that you can do employer brander on the cheap, like it has the lowest denominator of anything you're gonna do. If you're in recruiting, you're gonna drop $9,000 for a single seat on LinkedIn. Like that is just table sticks. That doesn't include, you know, sourcing tools and CRMs and the ats, which, you know, there's some that cost a million dollars, like huge investments. Employer brand could be a couple. . It doesn't have to be a massive stack. It doesn't have to be its own platform. It can simply be, okay, every time we talk, we have to talk about these two things. Let's focus our narrative. So from that point of view, it's got the highest roi, not even a question. The more impactful answer is having a strong brand, meaning a motivation you are trying to tap into in the talent market. Every other tactic. It helps your outreach. It helps your brand messaging, it helps your interview process. It helps your candidate experience. It helps your, it increases your offer acceptance rate. Like that's the thing that blows people's minds. And I've seen it happen. I've made it happen. It's amazing stuff. So you think about your average candidate who's talented, that's really the kind of important part. They have choices. And for whatever reason, they said apply to your job. Now with employer branding, you can make some guesses, some pretty well-informed guesses, meaning they clicked apply because they saw something they liked. And since the employer brand team or person or idea has said everything talks about. They must like X, otherwise, why would they have clicked apply? So if we know they like X, let's keep reinforcing this concept of X all throughout the candidate journey. Like if you, all you care about is innovation, and that's what AP attracted them. Show them innovation. Talk about innovation, show them innovation talk, interview cycles, screening cycles, the the whiteboard tests. You gotta do all that stuff. Innovation, innovation, innovation. And then when you hit the offer stage, instead of saying, let's argue over this. , you nstead. Instead, say, we know you're here because you were looking for more innovation. You weren't getting more innovation in your last job. You weren't getting enough to satisfy you. You're looking for more innovation. And I hope by now, after this two months of interview process, you've learned how much we care about innovation and more specifically how you can play a part in that innovation. By the way, here's the salary. game changer right there, right? If you're a salesperson, you don't lead with the price. You talk about the value. And the problem is recruiters forget they skip past the value when they go straight to the price cuz they know there's a fight there and they have to negotiate and like, okay, I'll just go do it. Focus on the value. Let's take that a four more steps farther cuz I'm a nerd. That way if you have a strong brand and you've hired people who care about X, in this case innovation, that means the people who are working. Also care about innovation, which means you can focus your culture around innovation kind of ideas. It's what you care about. It's what you do, it's your thing. Cool. Okay. That means that when meta starts knocking at your door, you know, Hey, person who's really talented, do you want to come work for Meta? And you're like, Hey, I know I care about innovation and I'm reminded of that on a weekly basis. Cuz the messaging that comes out, and I know I get amazing innovation here. Why would I. to take a chance on another company who says they have innovation, but don't really kind of prove it. I don't have any credible, tangible proof points, whereas here I'm surrounded by every single day I've done it. I've been doing it for years. It makes it so much harder for people to poach your people because you're crystal clear on what you're about. Everyone knows it. It's reinforced on a regular basis, and so you increase retention. So employer brand has impacts all throughout the game. I haven't even gotten to how employer brand impacts your consumer. Because most of your consumer marketing is feature driven. Hey, look at this product. It does this thing. It has these cool features, so it's all about value and features, value and features, value and features, and that's great up until the moment something goes wrong, right? Your product is great. Up until the moment your CEO says something racist. Your product is fantastic. Up until the moment you have a recall, your product is fantastic up until the moment it turns out your leadership has told everybody to make a bunch of fake accounts. Oops. Oh no. What do you do? Have you met the amazing people who work here? You wheel out the human face of the company. It's not about the feature, it's not about the value, it's the person, like employer brand has been the go-to PR move. Crisis move for years, right? Papa John's, the guys are racist. They pushed him out. Meet every franchise owner. You like these people. They make your pizza. They're super nice. Wells Fargo did Wells Fargo in things. Hey, meet all the re the, the, the tellers who work there, aren't they nice? We would never do that thing where we made a bunch of accounts, right? It's all crisis management. The human face is the backup plan for every marketer, whether they know it or not, but it totally is. And if you don't have an employer brand, you have to go, ah, you have to scramble. You have to build that human face from scratch. Employer brand is the keeper of that human face. And if you have good relations, and that person can say, okay, something, you have to be a crisis thing and say, look, it's always good to show the people doing great work here. That's always valuable. Tie it to the feature. Tie it to the, the value. Great. But the human face makes it more real. Makes it more connective. Makes it more emotional. Yes. Yes. And I don't know. Yes, that's what employer brand. 

Nasser Oudjidane

Yeah. I mean, it seems that some folks have been convinced that it's only consultants and agencies that can build the employer brands. can you share some tactical advice for that? Those that want to start, our audience who are interested in actually developing one from, from scratch. What, how would you approach this, this strategy?

‍James Ellis

Yeah. The, the, the, the reason. and I just kind of, for a little historical kind of background here, cuz it, it does get, it does matter. the reason consultants and agencies own this stuff is because it's an ac economic move, right? If you're a company or about a thousand people, do you wanna spend $150,000 on a salary for a person, oh, let's say $200,000 for a salary for two people and benefits and a computer and some, you know, all the ancillary stuff that goes along with hiring people. And of course it's 200,000 a year forever, right? And that number only goes. or you say consultant. Can you build an employer brand? And they do the thing where they take some surveys, they do a bunch of interviews, they look at the competition and they say, okay, here's where your competition is. We decided we don't wanna play and compete in that competitive space. We're gonna go find the blue ocean. It's over here. We talk to a bunch of people. These are the things you should talk about. This is what you talk about. It's $50,000 via condi. That's all you got. That makes perfect sense. And there's a reason that costs money because it. is because the market will bear that. The problem is if you're a hundred person company, that makes no sense, no sense. Oh, you don't have $50,000 for a consultant. There's no way. However, smaller companies are better connected to their people just by virtue of having less hierarchy, less structure. They're better interconnected, like all those soft networks, all those soft connections between people, so much more, better established, so much more crucial for getting things done. Like you think of IBM in the sixties and all the hierarchy soft connections meant nothing there. It was all about, okay, where is my title? Who is my boss? Who is my rabbi? That sort of thing. Smaller companies, it's all about soft connections, which means these are the people who can tell stories. They can talk about why they work here. They can talk about what it means. They can see the company grow. They can talk about an evolution of the company. Those stories. Those stories form the the back backbone of a small company's brand as well as a big ones. The problem is, in a big one, you don't know who to talk to, so you hire people to go investigate and talk to everybody and figure it out. If you're a small company, you can tap it relatively easy. The other side of it is having that brand, because you don't have an army of recruiters and you don't have an army of consumer footprint, you know, a massive consumer footprint or anything like that, the smaller company can take better advantage of the employer. They can start to embed it. They can build their company around that employer brand to say, look, it's not just about market spend. It's not just about how many job slots we can buy. It's about having a core message and making sure the right people hear it. There are plenty of companies, there are 150, 200 people who maybe you know them and maybe you don't, but it's okay cuz the 400 people, they need to know them, love them. Like 37 signals is only about 140. To a small audience of everyone knows 37 signals, right? No, like nobody knows 30. If you're out of the tech market, you have no clue who 37 signals is, but to a particular audience, they are super well known. Does that mean you wanna work there or not? That's a separate conversation, but they have a brand. It's clear, and some people want that and some people don't. And that's the win. That's how you win. So you can be a small brand to take advantage. . What I like to do is think about employer brand as being very democratic, right? If my, my whole mission here is to say, I hope no one has the experience I had where they walked into a job and said, I thought it was gonna be great. Turned out to be har terrible. That's true of every business. So how do you make employer brands small enough that an smaller company could say, okay, okay, this is useful. I can do this, I can build it, I can take advantage. Yes. And so I'm trying to democratize employer brand. So what I do is I teach companies how to look at themselves and rather than hire a consultant from the outside who knows you, not at all, who's just trying to sit in a can, a candidate's shoes and say, okay, let me tell you what I like. Talk to the people inside the company. Let them build their own employer brand. It's actually not hard. It requires a little framework. It requires kind of a structure to, it requires a series of steps, but literally it's a thing that almost any H R P could do. Any head recruiter, any head of ta, any marketer, any comms person, they can learn it. I know this cuz I've taught people this in six weeks now. That seems kind of crazy, but when you're talking about small companies, it doesn't take much time to say, okay, who are competi? , what do they talk about? What mo, what motivations do they trigger? What are they focused on? Or if they are at all, what do we care about? What do we reward? Kind of inter, you know, interconnect those and find out where's the Venn diagram of what's the overlap? And say that's where our brand starts to live. Then you make the active decision to say, which of these messages is most useful to us? Focus on that message, break it out, localize and activate it. And you've got an employer brand that's starting to work for you and the longer you use, . The more strong it becomes, the more clear it becomes, the more that right people go, I know about you, you're a, you're kinda like a hidden secret man. You're cool. I wanna be a part of that company.

‍

Nasser Oudjidane

Yeah. And you mentioned Em, employees are, you know, the, the essence of it, of course, and where you would start. What are some of the ways, that you've found effective to actually engage them from apathy or just from being busy. 

James Ellis

Yeah. The, the biggest challenge is that most people when they do this, they, they, they do the obvious thing, which turns out is the wrong way to approach it. They do a survey and they say, why do you like working here? Well, if I asked you why you liked working there, you're immediately gonna put all your emotional shields up. Okay. Why is this person asking me, is this gonna go on my record? Is this part of my evaluation? Like every alarm in their heads going off like crazy. And no matter how much you try and downplay and say, look, this isn't about that. This is purely about our brand. The question itself is loaded like crazy. It's just full of, of expect. Instead, I like to focus on, first off on, you know, depending on the size of the company, do I have to segment this? Is everybody here a developer? If not, great. If they are, great, if they're not minor segmentation mostly by function. Okay. T tell me, who's the salesperson? Who's the sales team? Who's the developer team? Who's the operations team? Cool. Just those three big chunks. Then I ask them, look, I have a framework that says these are the nine or 10 things that most people care about. They care about money, they care about opportunity, they care about agency. They care about making an impact. They care about mission and values. They care about support from a team. They care about status. They, you know, that's a list of things they care about. Okay. Stack rank. , which is the most important, which is the second most important, and really, which is the least important. I don't need a full stack rank, but just gimme the top two or three and gimme the bottom very quickly. You'll find team A cares about this. Team B cares about that, and they're usually not night and day. They're usually pretty well connected. So once you start to ask the question of what's the thing that motivates you to come to work, what's the thing that gets you excited Monday morning and you have a framework that you also look at your competition through. Okay? If we're fighting against company, this three startups and these three mega companies, using that same framework to say they target autonomy, they target status, okay. You know what you care about. You know what they're talking about. You now get to make a very intentional decision. Do I wanna fight them? Do I wanna try and out status? or do I wanna find Blue Ocean and say, you've all talked about status and impact. We're gonna talk about mission and values. It's what makes us special. The key is, and the thing that most people kind of get freaked out about is that when I say we're gonna focus on one of these, they think the others are unimportant. I, I love the example of Volvo. all they care about is, is safety. That's what they've always talked about. , but never to the detriment of saying, we're a reliable car, we're an attractive car, we're an affordable car. That just wasn't the hook in the message. That just wasn't the hook in the commercial. They just said, safety, safety, safety, safety. They define that space. So when someone says, oh, that's interesting, that's a new way to approach it. Then they said, oh yeah, by the way, we're also reliable. So once you kind of get through that mob and you gotta start to realize, okay, if we, all we care about is. That's what we reward. That's how we think. That's how we process things. We want people who are similarly focused. Great. We also have a mission. We also have work-life balance, and we also have, you know, support and all this other stuff, but that's our hook. Right. In marketing, you only have about a half a second to make someone go, huh? Okay, that's interesting. And, and to be fair, that's all an employer brand does make strangers go, hokay, that's interesting. That's really what it is. After that, you can feed them more and deeper and more complex messages, but that's the focus. So you collect that. What is the hook? Also, what is the ancillary date around that? When I run my surveys, I also ask them questions. Hey, can you tell me a story about why you chose that one? Is there like an example you could spell out that gives a lot more color? So if they're picking status or innovation, it's not just what I think the word status means versus what they think the word status means. Which of course is almost always ais, right? Innovation, strategy, all those words. They're always partially understood and never sh with a shared kind of definition. If you ask them to share a story, you go. You said innovation, but what you really mean is performance. Oh, that's really interesting. And suddenly you can really start to get a sense of what people care about. That's the big chunk of it. That's the most important chunk of it. The other things you care about are what is a candidate's options. If you're a lawyer, you can work in a private practice, you can work for public good, or you can work for pretty much every company that ever existed because we all need lawyers. Like, okay, you have options everywhere, but the difference between a job at a private practice where you're gonna work a thousand hours every single day it seems to fight to get partnership cuz it's a cutthroat dog eat dog kind of situation. Versus you're working at a startup where you're working 400 hours a day, so it's still really hard work, but it's a little less than the private practice. But you also know. Much like the private practice, there's that lottery ticket aspect to it. If this company really succeeds, I, it's like becoming a partner, right? It's there's a big out gain at the end. Or you say, I'm gonna join Bank of America, where there's no big kind of bonus at the end. And it's really about focusing on the ladder. As a lawyer, I have all those choices. As a nurse, I don't, as a nurse, I can work for a hospital, I can work for a clinic and maybe that, maybe private. Us and they're not that dissimilar. Their options are very different than a lawyers from a salesperson, from a developers. So you have to understand what's their options. So let's say you're a company that is in Tampa, Florida for some reason. I don't know why I'm picking that. and you say, okay, our jobs are all in Tampa, so that means your options are based in Tampa. , that's helpful. But if you're remote only, your options are very different. So understanding what those options are, understanding what those competitors offer and talk about, that's key. The other part is to say, do we want a certain kind of person? We say we want a lawyer. Great. Do we want a collaborator or do we want a cutthroat? Those are different people, right? They're very different. If you're hiring a lawyer from school, Do you want the one who would stab their grandmother in the back to me? Be valedictorian? Or do you want the one where, yeah, their grades were okay, but everybody talks about them as just making everybody else better. Same type of role, right? Demographically the same age. They might be the same gender, they came from the same school. Like everything demographically, same, same, same, same, same. Radically different approaches. Knowing what you want helps you focus on one or the other. So once you know what it's like, What the competition is doing, the kind of people you're trying to approach, and if you can embed a sense of where leadership is taking it, something more future facing, something more future focused, that's helpful though, not immediately necessary, but those are the big chunks of how you build an employer brand.

Nasser Oudjidane

Yeah. Thanks for sharing. And speaking of leadership, what's necessary to implement these best practices in terms of stakeholder management and. Any tips with regards to overcoming resistance from the business or how do you get them on board? And something that we've discussed in the past that I, I loved your approach to like gorilla marketing in this specific, uh example.

James Ellis

Yeah. There's, there's, there's two approaches I've found, and they work for different situations, and you kind of have to make your best guesses What you wanna do there is the classic Don Draper big reveal. This is your brand. Ta-da. Aren't you smart? Yay, everybody. Don Draper's the smartest person in the room. We, that's the theme of the whole show, right? That is the big reveal, and that is all about stakeholder management that. . Defining your laundry list of everybody who's gonna touch this thing, everybody who's gonna use this thing, understanding how they're gonna use it, how it's gonna value, how it's gonna help them, where they're gonna value it. It's a lot of work. It's useful because if you're doing a big reveal, if they see it for the first time and they don't like it, you're done. So you do a lot of, Hey, checking in, what do you think about this? I want your feedback, yada, yada, yada. And it works. It's a process. It works and it works because, or the value of that ad. It's gonna get this, the, the CEO or the top person to say, I buy that. And getting top-down leadership approval has value unquestionably, but it's not the only way. You could also say, since you're probably working with ta, you can build a brand and get the recruiters on board and say, look. . Same spiel as I told you. Just cuz we're talking about safety doesn't mean we're not talking about reliability, but we're always gonna start with safety. Everything on our LinkedIn page is gonna connect to safety. It's a Volvo example, right? Everything on our Instagram is gonna be at sea. Everything you were just gonna do it. I don't have to get the CEO to approve this cuz they don't care. They, they got bigger fish to fry. I've got domain knowledge and I've got experience and I've got control over these spaces. So I'm gonna start planting these seeds. , I'm gonna make sure I rewrite the job posting, so they start with a headline about safety. In the Volvo example, I'm gonna make sure that when people are coming in the letter that says, thanks for applying. mention safety. I'm gonna make sure in the interview process, I'm gonna start asking, hire managers or interview pool people to say, can you ask this question about safety? Just want to kind of touch base, and I'm gonna work with the HRP team to say, Hey, can I help rewrite the offer letter? So it starts with safety. Yeah, I guess. So. What do I care? What, what's the big deal? This is, this is paperwork. Nobody cares about the offer letter templates. Like this is stuff that nobody cares about. So long as you're not saying anything illegal, this is not exciting stuff. , but say it over and over and over and over. It's on the LinkedIn, it's on the Instagram, it's on the offer letters, the job posting, it's on the career side. It's everywhere. It's every, it's on the events. It's on everything you do. There will be kind of an osmosis effect where hiring managers go, oh yeah, safety. Yeah, I keep seeing it. Oh yeah, it's on my job posting, and I helped write it. And someone polished it up and added safety. Yeah. Yeah. Safety. Oh, it's on our career site. We must care about safety. Suddenly I'm influencing all these hiring managers and leaders to think about safety and say, that's our. and invariably that stuff kind of leaks upstairs, metaphorically speaking, so that when I do eventually come around and say, oh yeah, by the way, here's the big reveal. It's not a ta-da, it's a a dbecause everybody already believes it. I've effectively created a Gil internal Gorilla Marketing campaign to influence everybody in the company that this is what cares about, because I'm the one doing all the hard. So I get to pick what I say. I get to pick what goes on LinkedIn. I get to pick the pictures on Instagram. I get to say what goes on Facebook. I get to say what's on the job posting. I'm putting it on my back, which is hard work. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. But it doesn't demand top-down approval. And what it does is if you can play the long game, it guarantees top-down approval like six to 12 months from now. So that's like the other way of doing it. The magic about employer branding is there's so many ways to do. I have very much that gorilla marketing mindset. I know people who are incredibly successful at that work, who have a very political mindset where they wouldn't dream of doing anything except the top down model because their superpower is influencing executives and leaderships great. I just don't, I don't have that gene. That's not how I roll. So everybody can kind of do it differently, so there's no right answer for it. 

Nasser Oudjidane

Yeah. I find that fascinating and really, really grateful for you for sharing that. How do you. if your employer brand strategy is working,

James Ellis 

That is a, a very complicated question. I'm gonna try and boil down to some, some simple ideas, but luckily I've kind of spelled it out so when I say it, it'll be like, yeah, that's what he means. So if you've done the process of understanding the core idea or two about what you were all about knowing your employer, branding works, the best litmus test for that is does it come back? Does it boomerang? . I've had plenty of cases where after six or eight months of kind of seeding and pushing these ideas on every channel, I'm making videos around these ideas and kind of being the, the, the very judicious, selector of all those messages I hear from the hiring manager that says, Hey, I just talked to this candidate. They just said that they love this video, and actually this message was the reason they. . That's the moment. I know that is like the, I could hold that and hold, keeps me warm for weeks. Like that message just matters to me from a metric standpoint. Best of luck there. What I do when I'm evaluating a brand activation is I say, look, is everything focused? Am I saying something that matters? So I have this kind of mantra, or it's literally on my t-shirt for those of you who can see my t-shirt. It's specific, attractive, different, and real. Everything you say on your LinkedIn, everything you say on your Instagram, on their Facebook, wherever it's on your job. If you know the motivation you're targeting, everything you say must be specific, attractive, different, and real, and that those aren't like random fun words I pulled out of a, like a Instagram post, right? Specific meaning if I could, if I say, Hey, this is a place where we have, amazing, great benefits. We care about women here. Whatever, like everybody can say that. Oh, but if you tell me that you have 26 weeks paid, maternity leave and family leave. Oh, that's interesting. Oh, you have a dedicated mother's room on site. Oh, that's really interesting. Oh, you have an onboarding program to get women coming back from maternity family leave to get back on board. Okay. You're being super specific and now suddenly I have no choice but to believe the thing. Right. You just say you care about women. Whatever. Anybody can say that specificity creates Credibility. two. It's gotta be attractive. Telling me again, old , I got an eight year old, I'm done having kids telling me that, that we care about family leave, that's great. Doesn't apply to me. Not attractive. I don't, it's not that I don't care, of course I care, but it's just not gonna be the thing that moves me. Understanding your audience and giving them something they care about because it's attractive. That's important. Being different is should be obvious, and yet somehow I feel like I have to explain all the time if it's not different that you're like everybody else and that did not. and it has to be real. It has to be something true. You can't say it's all spin. You can't say, yeah, we care about innovation. If you squint real hard and it's at the right light, that makes sense, right? That's that's not useful. That's not real. If what you're saying hits those criteria and talks about that core idea, and you do it over and over and over again, your brand is clear, your brand is focused and strong, then it's just a matter of waiting to make sure it kind of comes back arround.

Nasser Oudjidane

Yeah. And how are you feeling about employer branding specialists or talent acquisition recruiting specialists, performing employer branding functions in this market? In terms of common mistakes that you're seeing, productivity, what do you think are some of the challenges or perhaps areas in which folks can improve their, you know, their craft today?

James Ellis 

Yeah, the biggest mistake, I I, I'll call them younger, I'll, maybe immature is the right, I mean, I, I, I know mold, I keep making that joke. but if you're, you haven't been doing this a while, the mistake you make is that you think you have to be the cheerleader. You think you have to be a raw, raw. Everything is positive. Everything is wonderful that you think that's the brand. It's not the brand , the brand is a series of trade-offs. I choose more money and less time. I want no, you know, because I'm gonna make a lot of money. I'm gonna have no time for my family. I'm gonna enjoy my time at Goldman Sachs. I understand the trade-offs and I understand the pros and the cons, and I'm making that informed choice. Too many employer brand, newbies or specialists, they think the job. Put a pair of rose colored glasses on and say, everything's wonderful. This is fantastic. It's a great place to work. Like there's, we all know there's companies that literally you pay to have that award. You're, I refer to 'em as they're a great place to do work. I think that legally, that puts me in a safe spot. . Okay. Here's the problem with that phrase. It's half a phrase. You're not telling me anything. We're a great place to do some work. For who? In what way? In what way are you a good place to work? Is it because you offer a lot of money? Is it because you offer work-life balance? Is it because you offer opportunity or status or innovation or you know, there's other motivators? I don't know. But so many people, and I mean most people, and I mean like 90% of the posts about, Hey, we won this award. Simply say, Hey, we won this. They're not telling me anything. They're wasting this amazing gift to say someone is paying attention to what I have to say, so I'm gonna give them nothing to use. Oh God, that makes me crazy. Like you have the gift. Make it pay. That's why it's so important to be kind of, this is why I keep harping on specific directive, different reel and focusing on your message. Because if you get that moment to be crystal clear about what your but you're about, they can walk away knowing what you're about The other. It's really complicated. Not really complicated. But the other trick is that we're focused so much on the calendar and I, I am, I am to blame for this cuz he used to sell employer branding activation. Oh, you have to tweet five times a week. You have to put three post Facebook pages a week. You have to put two LinkedIn posts a week. And so we're driven by the. We're driven by the cadence. Hey, it's Thursday, we have to have a LinkedIn post. We have nothing to say. I don't care. It's Thursday. We have to have a LinkedIn post. You're like, oh, putting garbage doesn't help you. Checking the boxes. Say we hit certain criteria of how often we post. It does not help anybody. If you have nothing to say, shut up. Right? That's saying nothing. Taking up space, you're just gonna hack people off by saying like there's, there's certain publications who I will not name, or if I click the link, I. . I don't know why I clicked this link. It's a really good click bait link, but I know that when I read it, I'm gonna feel, feel like I got nothing out of this. I know it. Right? That's what I feel about when I see these posts about, Hey, we won this award. Hey, we're gonna be at this conference. Why did I need to know that? How did that change my perception? How did that inform my sense of what it's like to work there? It's useless. The other part about being positive is that it's very easy to over. like, if I'm trying to sell you a, a car or talked about my best friend, how's this? I'm gonna introduce you, like get off the cars thing. Talking about my best friend. You should meet my best friend. She's amazing. She's smart, she's clever, she's she's attractive. She's, she's kind animals, she's kind to people. She's, you know, all these wonderful things, like just go on and on and on. How great she is as a human being. The more I say positive things, there's gonna be a moment in time in which your brain goes, what's the catch? Because you're human. And the more I keep layering on these positives, after you have that moment, the more you're like, yeah, there's a catch. Oh, it's a big one. And the more I keep piling on the positive one, like, oh, it's, oh, she's racist. Oh, she's a horrible human being. Oh, there's something horrible. Like she has seven legs. You know, there's something where you're like, oh, what could it be? But if I introduce you to my best friend and say, she's smart, she's clever, she's attractive, she didn't graduate high school. And, and then I pile on the more positives, the one negative. Makes you go, oh, that's the catch. I got it. And I could start to say, I understand the trade offs here. This is why I wanna know this person. It's a function of the negative actually proves the positive. It's not just that it, you know, keeps me from thinking it's, it's, it's a cult. It actually makes all the positives things more believable if he's willing to say that negative thing. I guess all the positive things must be true as well. And so when you're always about positivity, when you're always the cheer, You run into this? Is it a cult? I don't believe it. What's the catch? I'm reading between the lines really hard. And that's where problems happen. If you can be upfront about what the catch is, what the trade off is, the more your people who are reading this stuff are gonna believe it. And that's really powerful. 

Nasser Oudjidane

Do you think that the, the over positivity is the most pernicious part, of folks mistakes or. Do you or have you come across other pieces of advice which you think is just total BS and it needs to be put in the trash?

James Ellis

Well, we, we are living in an age where, Sloan and Harvard Business Review, and every business periodical and every ad age marketing article talks about. This idea of purpose-driven marketing and purpose is what matters. People wanna have a purpose. And I think on the whole, we've so over-indexed on that, that it's starting to kill us. It's starting to just murder our reputations. It's starting to just undercut what we're trying to say. Look, you know, I'm selling beer. The purpose of my beer, , it's beer. I just wanna drink the beer. Right? Oh, what's the purpose to orange juice? Right? What's the pur like? Too much focus on purpose. Just undercuts everything we wanna say. And I think it has trickled down to employer brand like ev. There is this sense that. There is a right culture, that there is a good culture. That culture can be delineated between good and bad. And a great culture is always about caring about your people and listening to them and giving them space to, to give opinions. And it's that you never micromanage. And it's this very particular perspective of what culture should be, and that's not true. Any culture is good for. . You wanna, you think that culture is micromanaging? Yeah, it is for you. But there's someone who just wants to be told what to do so they don't have to think That's a great job. They love that. You want lots of place room to, to think. That's fantastic. Not everybody wants that. So I think there's this sense of, what I like is what everyone likes, which of course, in, in branding and marketing is the fastest way to just mediocrity. It's the fastest way. And I think this overlying assumption of this is a good culture, this is a bad culture is wrong. I, I, I can prove. . I, I did work with Universum a couple years ago and they do massive surveys, global surveys about what people like, why, what do they want when they go to work, why do they think certain things about certain companies? And you ask engineering students and in, in engineering new grads, and you say, what do you want? Well, I want work-life balance, and I want a mission. I can believe in. I want a boss who listens to me. I want a caring environment and I want great benefits. Okay, that's a pretty tall order, but you're an engineer. You can work anywhere. What's your number one place to work? SpaceX, a company well known for not having a gentle, management style, where work-life balance is a myth. yeah, they got a great mission, but the things that people say they want is so performative. It's what they think they want, but in the end, when you show them something real, they go, I want that. It goes, those two ideas are very often. Different. So being crystal clear about not following the fads and not saying, oh, everybody wants this kind of workspace is wrong. Look, I'm as liberal as they come, and there are places that I would like say I will never work there. Guess what? There's someone who looks and acts just like me, who's super conservative, who thinks that's a great place to work. That's fine. There is a lid for every pot. That's the thing. But we're so focused on this perfect utopian vision of what a great culture, what a great work environment is. That's just not how things. 

Nasser Oudjidane

Yeah, absolutely. This last question before going into the closing questions. what tech do you use to do your job? feel free to shout out products that have delivered value and continue to the bit of value for you. 

James Ellis

Well, I, I cheat because I say I'm completely agnostic. I think you can do great employer branding work with Sidewalk Shop. Like, I think if you know that you wanna talk to a certain set of people, you go to their conference and you find out where that conference is or where their hotels are, and you sidewalk chalk an amazing message right in front of the conference, way better than the $50,000 product you're gonna buy. However, . Okay. I get we like tech stacks. I get that they're useful. I'm a big fan personally of tools that give me agency that give me control. So much of recruiting and TA and HR Tech is about control. Everything is about don't, don't, don't get outta your box, don't get outta your bubble. Stay in this space and everything gets checked 17 ways to Sunday. It makes it very hard to engage with. iLet Clinch, which is a, A platform that builds websites that connect to the ats because it's a platform I have directing total control over. I can say make new page like it's like every other marketing tool. . This is the problem. I'm talking to marketers, they're like, Duh. I got convert Pit for that. That's great. I got circle for that. That's great. I got podium for that. That's great. It's like, yeah, in your world you have total access. In HR world, I gotta get 14 signatures before I can click a button. Right? This is a place where it's so prescriptive and how things should be that it's hard to get things done. So a tool like Clinch is actually one of the lower price mo options in this space. but I like it cuz it gives me great agency after. I like, I've, long been a fan of Sprout cuz they're a Chicago company and I'm a Chicago person, so I have to say nice things about them. It's, it's the law. It's the law. but you know, back when it was Bamboo and Sprout, all that stuff, I'm a big fan of what they do. . I say that, but I also know there's great ways to abuse those tools that you can just be a slave to the calendar on those tools. So it, you know, it's, the tool is not inherently good or bad, it's how you use it. but after that, really, it's a lot of like, you know, I look at what marketing does. I love WordPress. I love Convert Kit. I love simple CRMs. I love lightweight duct tapable tools. Not, hey, here's everything in the kitchen sink models of how you're supposed to do things. That's just my approach.

Nasser Oudjidane

Yeah. And moving on to closing questions. What's one piece of advice you wish you had when you started your career in employer branding?

James Ellis

I have no way. I, there's so many ways I could take that. I have no idea. The, the, you know what I'll say this, the, the, the ec, the, the, the feeling I. that despite working in a big agency, which at the time maybe even still is the biggest recruitment marketing agency in the world, the sense that there are no rules was right. Right? There's this, you know, you, you're surrounded by structure, you're surrounded by tradition, you're surrounded by expectations, but the truth is there are no rules. The faster I would've kind of gro to that, the better off I would've been. 

Nasser Oudjidane 

What have you read that's particularly informative and inspiring, that's perhaps informed your position and where you are today? Anything that you'd like to share? It could also be anything that you've listened to or watched. 

James Ellis

Yeah. My favorite books in this, I have a whole list of like my favorite employer brand books that have nothing to do with employer brand, but at the same time are just so about employer brand. My favorite is, a book called, A Beautiful Co. I think Adam Morgan and somebody else wrote that amazing book about this idea that, rather than fight our constraints rather than, you know, kind of bemoan our constraints and our lack of resources, it's actually an opportunity to do better work. And they have lots of stories of people and companies who. given no resources, it forces them to think differently, which actually lets them leapfrog the people who had all those resources. And I joke cause in employer branding and recruiting, no one has enough resources. Now I've, I've talked to Amazon and Target, I, I've talked about every company you think has all your money and they do, but they not given any to employer brand. So we all have pennies. We're rubbing together in the hopes that we can make a dime. So that's a big. . April Dunford book. Uh uh obviously. Awesome. I think that's what it's called. She's a product manager, which you're like, what is, what is this employer brand nerd guy reading product managing books for? It's a book on how to position products, which is like a click away from how you position a brand like it is the best book on walking you through how to think about positioning. I have ever read an employer brand is all about position. We are about this, not about that. Right? That's that idea. So great, great book. The last one, which ironically is also Adam Morgan, is called A Pirate Inside. It's a, it's all about, challenger brands. It's about saying, look, There's the way you're supposed to do it, and if you do that, if you play, follow the leader, you will always be middle of the pack. You will, you can't win the game or follow the leader, right? Everybody knows that. We all go, what's Google? Do what's meta do? Who cares? The more you chase them, un unless you're a 50,000 person company, no. Okay, moving on. If the more you chase them, , the more you will always be middle of the road, the more you will always be back of the pack. You have to find your own path. You have to try something different, or else you're just gonna get crushed by the sheer tonnage of other companies going, what's Google do? What's Facebook do? You gotta figure out what you're all about and do it right. those are my three best books I think. there's a podcast called two. Which, David C. Baker and Blair ends, which if you don't know them, I don't know why they're some of the smartest people about the weirdest things in the world, which is how to run an agency better, which you're thinking, why would that matter? They talk about positioning, they talk about differentiation. They talk about how to manage your product. They talk about how to be perceived. It's such good thinking in such a smart package. I've recommended to everybody, even people who aren't agency people. So those, those are my big recomme. 

Nasser Oudjidane

Thank you. I'll, I'll be definitely putting them in the show notes. Last one, what is one thought valuable phrase, if any, that you live by?

James Ellis 

Just do the thing back when I was wrote, back when I was working an agency, I had a team and it was so easy to get in our heads about is this the right thing? And the answer is 99.99999999% of our work is a completely Ephemeral. That LinkedIn post, no one is gonna remember it 24 hours from now. No one, your mom isn't gonna remember this 24 hours from now. Rather than fret, rather than focus, you know, embrace this idea of the resistance sucks. Just do it anyway. Just do the thing. And so I actually became known amongst my team. They would, they, they knew I was about to say it like they was just, just do the things. See what happens, right? I got you back. I'm gonna make, you know, you have good thinking. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. You'll learn something. Either way, just do the thing. And that is really, Core to what I do. 

Nasser Oudjidane 

James, this has been incredible. Thank you for your time. 

James Ellis

This has been a blast. Thanks so much for having me on.