#7: Measuring the Impact of your Employer Brand with James Ellis

Rhona Pierce:
00:00

Imagine spending just $500 on employer branding and generating a 100000 page views. Sounds too good to be true. Right?

James Ellis:
00:08

When I was at Groupon, I developed their employer brand and activated. And the 1st year, I spent $500. We got a 100,000 page views for $500. And the next year, they said, what would you do if you had a 100 50,000?

Rhona Pierce:
00:24

That's James Ellis, a digital strategist turned employer brand expert who has helped companies of all sizes build strong employer brands. In this episode, James shares why the goal of employer branding isn't to look good to everyone. How to make the financial case for in your employer brand to leadership, and practical ways to build a strong employer brand on a limited budget. Welcome to throw out the playbook, the podcast for recruiters tired of hearing that hiring is broken and ready to do something about it. I'm your host, Rona Pierce.

Rhona Pierce:
01:00

Let's dive into my conversation with James. So I don't think I've ever asked you or I've never heard the story. How did you get started in employer branding?

James Ellis:
01:09

I am a a marketer from birth. I mean, like, popped out of the womb just going and trying to sell people things and trying to position things so they're more attractive. It's what I've kind of it's how my brain's wired. I guess the best way to put it. And I've done every kind of marketing under the sun.

James Ellis:
01:23

I've done b to b, b to c.bomb.com. I've done nonprofit marketing. I've done state government marketing. Yes. It's a thing.

James Ellis:
01:31

I can't believe I did it, but it's true. I've done event marketing. I've done pharmaceutical marketing. I've done it. Higher education marketing.

James Ellis:
01:37

I've done it all. I've done it all. It's terrifying. I know. Is there something wrong with it?

James Ellis:
01:41

But when you do all that, you realize pretty quickly it's kinda all the same. Whether you're selling, you know, donations to the Wisconsin Historical Society or you're selling jet engines or you're selling coupons, it doesn't matter. It's all about understand what you have to offer that no one else has to offer. Understand what the person in front of you wants. Connect some dots.

James Ellis:
02:02

Wrap it up in a bow. Measure it, and do it again. I mean, it's it's it's pretty straightforward. And if I saved any of you from getting a marketing degree, you're welcome. There's a couple of books I'd recommend.

James Ellis:
02:11

Just kinda fill that space out. But beyond that, that's the core of it. Look. There's that's that's the core of what it is. And then about 10 years ago, I got poached from a very to a very big agency, recruitment marketing agency, who I will not name because there's no need for them to get any more, big.

James Ellis:
02:25

And so, they said, you know, this is funny thing, James. You, you have jobs a lot. I'm like, yeah. Guilty as charged. And they said, and you're a digital strategist.

James Ellis:
02:34

Like, yeah. That's true. I mean, you know marketing. Yeah. We've got a job for you.

James Ellis:
02:39

It's where you combine digital strategy marketing and understanding how people find jobs. Like, that's a thing. How is that a thing? And so that is really where it started. And what's interesting to me is that as I do this, the reason I stuck with it, whereas I haven't stuck with anything else in my entire life, not counting my wife and my daughter.

James Ellis:
02:58

It's because it's interesting in a way that other marketing isn't. It's there's this really weird like, every other marketing is kind of the same except employer brand marketing is this different in this very unusual way where it's not about selling more. It's not about getting more leads. It's not about getting more shelf space. It's not of getting more sales.

James Ellis:
03:14

It's not getting more, more, more, more. It's about better. You've got one role to fill. You wanna put the best person in that seat, and it doesn't matter if you've got one application or a million. It ultimately who is the best person for that, and it seems like a teeny thing.

James Ellis:
03:31

But when you explain that to marketers, like, it's like it's like explaining, water to a fish. They've just been so surrounded by this sense of what more is, and they should always be more it was gravity. Like, they they couldn't imagine a world in which they wouldn't want more. And here I am going, there's this weird space where that's actually true, where more is actually worse for you. And it's like conducting science experiments up in space where there's no gravity and all and all the kind of the givens of all your standard physics equations are all different now because it's a different space.

James Ellis:
04:07

So it's exciting. We get to work in branding and marketing, but in an environment where it's never really been done like that, and it's super fascinating to me. That was a very long answer, and I hope everyone listen to this podcast is prepared for that sort of response.

Rhona Pierce:
04:22

No. But it's it's so true, and it's interesting that job hopping, which is a term I absolutely hate because I'm a professional job hopper too, I guess, actually helped you get that job. That is so cool.

James Ellis:
04:37

Yeah. It's crazy. It's totally crazy. Yeah. When you find out, like, they say you're you're hopping jobs.

James Ellis:
04:41

I said, yeah, kinda. They said, I bet you know how recruiting goes. Like, yeah, I got friends who are recruiters, and I know how to make a recruiter's life easier by, you know, helping them, you know, find a job for me or helping to hire me. It was like, I didn't think that was a skill. I really didn't have any thought at all that that was useful.

Rhona Pierce:
04:57

We'll get into my favorite topic, which is less is actually what you're looking for with employee branding later on. 100%.

James Ellis:
05:06

Not more.

Rhona Pierce:
05:08

Yeah. Is there are there any, like, common misconceptions that you run across working with companies about employer branding?

James Ellis:
05:16

Okay. I don't know how long this podcast I mean, we've only booked to record for an hour. But if anybody has time, we could do a full afternoon on this question alone. I think the biggest challenge is that because employer brands started, in for historical record, Simon Barrow started it. He was effectively saying, look.

James Ellis:
05:35

Why isn't it the way we sell fish fingers? He's British. He says fish fingers instead of fish sticks. Why isn't the way we sell fish sticks or fish fingers different from the way we sell jobs? That seems crazy.

James Ellis:
05:44

Let's apply one idea to the other. And I was like, your peanut butter is in my chocolate. That's amazing. How did you do that? And at the time, absolutely revolutionary.

James Ellis:
05:52

Not even a question. Not even a question, except it kinda stopped there for a while. And so you're it it's like do you remember when you first got that iPhone and all the little icons were designed to look like other things? Like, the notes icon was designed to look like a notepad and the, you know, the the video, I I you know, icon was designed to be like a little camera, and and when you took a picture, it goes like, it takes a click. It takes that that shutter sound.

James Ellis:
06:18

There's no shutter. Right? There's it's what it's doing is when we get to a new idea, we usually very often adopt lots of old models to make this new idea feel super comfortable. It's super common in technology and all sorts of other places, and it happened to deploy our brand. We took all this like, oh, okay.

James Ellis:
06:34

Yeah. We want more fish sticks. We need more leads. Therefore, we must need more customers if we're moving one model to the other. So the myth is we don't need more.

James Ellis:
06:42

But what happens there is once you realize you don't need more, you start if you think about it for half a second, and I joke because I always say employer brand is what a recruiter would do if they had more than half a second to stop and think about it for a second. Right? It's not rocket science, but recruiters don't have time. The biggest myth is this idea that the job of an employer brand is supposed to to make a company look good. I don't know what good means because there's lots of people telling me that working in Goldman Sachs is good.

James Ellis:
07:13

I don't wanna work there. No. Thank you. I I you know, I've decided the fact that I'm I'm old, and I can't hustle for a 100 hour work weeks anymore. And I don't wanna wash myself in the company washroom in on the weekends because I can't can't make it home, which apparently is what's happening there.

James Ellis:
07:27

But to them, it's a great place to work because it's clear what they're giving and what they're getting. The post office, crystal clear what they're giving and what they're getting, says a lot of people that is a great place to be. I don't wanna be there, and you might not wanna be there. That's fine. And that's the thing is that there's not some sort of sense of there's a good brand and a bad brand.

James Ellis:
07:48

It it doesn't work that way. In the end, we're lids looking for pots or pots looking for lids depending on how you wanna stress that metaphor. It and there's a fit for everybody. And just because it fits someone else doesn't mean it fits you. And so this idea that we're gonna make a brand that makes us look good to everybody as some sort of goal to achieve is actually wrong.

James Ellis:
08:08

It's a cul de sac in which we've driven it out. We're lost. We're so obsessed with we need more clicks, and we need more brand awareness, and we need more people to like us, and we need to get more reviews on this review site, and we need to get more people to want to do about more, more, more, more, more. No. Once you realize that you don't want more, you start to realize a lot of the stuff you've been told to do is predicated on getting more.

James Ellis:
08:32

Right? Posting click baity social media posts is there to extend the reach to get more people to want to be there. You don't want more. Outreach designed to be optimized for maximum open rates because the headline is or subject line's a certain way, and you lose 2 emojis, but not 3 because the data says blah blah blah blah. No.

James Ellis:
08:52

In the end, you're just trying to find one person who goes, that sounds amazing. That thing that you offer that I can't get anywhere else, that's amazing. I want that, and that's where it begins. And so the myth is it's you know, that you're supposed to be a great or attractive company. The truth is, no, you're not.

James Ellis:
09:12

Because if I surveyed people who know, they would not necessarily consider Goldman Sachs an attractive place to work because it's always attractive to a very niche, tight audience, and that's great. It means that they're not trying to be everyone to everything to everybody, and that's a horrible place to be. So the myth is not how to be good or bad, but how to make your employer brand strong. Meaning, I know what it means. I know what it means to work there.

James Ellis:
09:39

You know what it means to work there. You know what it means to work there. Everybody goes, yeah, I get what that's about. It's a strong employer brand. Now after that, whether you want to be associated with that brand is a separate question.

James Ellis:
09:50

But if it's a strong employer brand saying what it's really like to be here, what you get when you're here, what the expectations are, people can make informed choices and suddenly you win. So the myth is it's not about attractive. It's about strength and clarity. That's an employer brand that wins.

Rhona Pierce:
10:07

Yes. And it's oh, I think if I've had these conversations, I'm sure you've had 10,000 of those conversations where it's like, no, we're not wanting more. We're not, oh, why are you sharing that about the company? And I always look back and say like, well, you you work here. Are you cool with that?

Rhona Pierce:
10:24

Yeah. Then someone else will be cool with that too. 400 people that work here are cool with that. We need those people. We don't need to sugarcoat stuff so that the people who aren't cool with that end up working here and then think we catfish them or whatever.

James Ellis:
10:38

Honestly, if you look at the average career site, you think having read it, why do they pay people? This sounds great. This sounds amazing. I should pay to work here. This is fantastic.

James Ellis:
10:49

Look at all this impact I get, this innovation I get, and the support and the camaraderie and the love and the thing. Like, it I should pay you. And the truth is everyone knows that's not how jobs go. It's you know, there the my favorite is the sense of, you wanna make a job so attractive that people would wanna do it for no money. But the truth is since everybody knows it's a job and everybody knows they wouldn't show up to a job unless there was a regular paycheck involved, that's effectively telling them you're lying.

James Ellis:
11:18

Right? If I said, look at this really nice Porsche, it's free. Every other word associated coming out of my mouth is suspect. Everybody knows the Porsche isn't free. Everybody knows that thing comes with a big old paycheck or a big, dollar signs on it.

James Ellis:
11:35

Yeah. Everybody knows that. And so to to say this is such a great place to be that you almost don't need to pay people, everybody realizes that you're full of it. And that's the problem. It's you're not trying to sell them a candy bar.

James Ellis:
11:46

Like, if I sell you a candy bar and it's a mediocre candy bar, what are you gonna do? Yeah. Okay. This is okay. This is a minute out of my life, and it was not it was subpar.

James Ellis:
11:55

There are worse things in life. If I sell you a job in which you are not a good fit, but I tell you all sorts of wonderful things showing how amazing it is, and you show up and you've quit previous jobs. You may have moved your body and and house and family to go to this place and it's not what you were told. That is life changing. So if we understand the stakes we're talking about here, we realize it's useful to put the negative side.

James Ellis:
12:22

It's useful to tell the full story. And I'll take it one step further. In a lot of if you just say nothing but positive things. If you just say, meet my friend, Elena. She's fantastic.

James Ellis:
12:34

She's wonderful. She's attractive. She's smart. She's rich. She's like, I start piling up all these superlatives, how great Elena is.

James Ellis:
12:42

Now Elena is a friend of mine, so I can say wonderful things about her. She knows I'm joking about this. But if I say all this great stuff, at some point, your brain goes, what's the catch? Exactly. That's how brains work.

James Ellis:
12:54

It's it's it's innately human to say, what's going on there? What's really going on there? And the second, your target audience has that, what's the catch, thought. Every following positive is further proof. Not only are you lying, but that the catch must be so big and hairy and disgusting that you must be desperate to try and distract everybody from it.

James Ellis:
13:18

Is it a little racist? Did it kill somebody? Like, what is this horrible thing that you're desperately trying to not get me to see? However, if I say, Elena's great. She's smart.

James Ellis:
13:26

She's attractive. She's rich. All these wonderful things. And I say, look. She's a horrible driver.

James Ellis:
13:31

What? Just adding that negative makes you go, okay. I can start to believe all the other positives. So it's not about, you know, the it really equates that more positives equals more positives. And the truth is no.

James Ellis:
13:43

There's a there's a there's a curve at which point the positive start to actually make things worse until you start to say, let me show you how honest we can be about this stuff.

Rhona Pierce:
13:53

I'm sure you've had this conversation 20,000,000 times, but everyone or not everyone, a lot of companies think that investing in employer brand is too expensive that they can't afford it. How do you respond to that?

James Ellis:
14:08

Oh, I have a couple of tricks up my sleeve on that one. First off, there is a lot of dogma and a lot of expectation about what people think employer brand is. They read the article in Harvard Business Review 4 years ago, 5 years ago, had the apples on the cover. It's literally the worst thing that happened to our whole industry. Thanks for HBR.

James Ellis:
14:26

But everybody knows it's $40. It's $80. It's a $120,000. It's it's just a huge piles of cash, and everybody knows that. And the truth is they're not wrong.

James Ellis:
14:37

Like, there are plenty of agencies. I've seen employer brand pitches that cost just under a quarter of a mil. And these were the problem is you're talking about massive global companies. And, yeah, if you're a massive global company, you need to do your research and you need to do a lot of stuff to kind of build a brand that isn't just true in one area and not at all true with the other. You gotta do your due diligence.

James Ellis:
14:58

But the law of numbers says that 99% of companies are not global multinationals. They are 500,000, 2,000, 5,000 people companies in a single country, sometimes in a single city. And why do you need to spend a $120,000 to build a brand there? If you understand what a brand is supposed to do and we haven't even gotten into this part, you'll start to realize pretty quickly that it doesn't have to be that expensive. There's places where it's justified.

James Ellis:
15:26

And if I'm building AT and T's brand, yeah, I wanna spend a little bit of money to make sure I I'm I'm checking my boxes and and do and and doing all the work. If I'm building Boeing's brand and Boeing could use a little help these days, right, I'm gonna do a little extra work. I'm gonna make sure it happens. But if I'm talking to a 400 person biotech, if I'm talking to an 800 person video game company, if I'm spending more than $15,000, that's wrong. And the reason you can have that shift is because once you understand what employer brand is supposed to do, you realize that it's everything we think about employer brand has been couched in terms of an IBM level company.

James Ellis:
16:03

So what is an employer brand? An employer brand is simply what people think it's like to work there through individual perception. Okay. That's pretty standard. I never really likes to use the, I guess, Jeff Bezos.

James Ellis:
16:12

Your your brand is whatever people say about you when you're not in the room. Yeah. Fine. I you know, and there's no, like, right answer for that stuff, but it's a perception. That's really what it is.

James Ellis:
16:21

An employer brand perception is about what it's like to work there. It's not about what I like to be around you or to to to know you, but it's like what what's like to work there? The purpose of having an employer brand is to help someone have a better be able to make a more informed decision about whether they should work for you or not. It's to help them create a little bit of desire that says I want to be a part of this or I don't. That's its purpose.

James Ellis:
16:45

So back in the napkin, you're a 800 person video game company. Okay. You're probably gonna hire 40 people this year, maybe a 100. Okay. How many people need to know and fall in love with you to hire a 100 people?

James Ellis:
16:57

A 1,000? Oh, so if you only have to get a 1,000 people to fall in love with you instead of 10 1,000, which is what everything is predicated on. If you're IBM, it's like a 100,000. Right? I it makes sense to spend a lot of money and have to think about that stuff.

James Ellis:
17:11

If you're just trying to get a 1,000 video game people to go, that's the company I wanna be. That's a place where there's a lot of community, and I don't see a lot of community in other places. I want I see it here to fall in love with you. It doesn't take much to do that. So if you understand that it's all about creating desire in someone, you start to realize that desire comes from not from looking good because if everybody looks good, how do you choose?

James Ellis:
17:37

The desire comes from how do I choose you over all the other companies. And that means find the thing about you that's different. Whether it's in your mission and goal, whether it's in your work experience, whether it's in your reward structure, wherever that difference is, find that difference, turn the volume up on it, and the people wanna be there. Now expressed as find what's different about your company, express it out as many places you can. Who's paying a $120,000 for that?

James Ellis:
18:05

Hopefully, nobody. Instead, if you define it like that, it's a thing that almost every company could take advantage of. Of. Then you go, okay. Let's say I have a strong employer brand.

James Ellis:
18:16

It defines that difference for me. And I know that my industry is rife with people who say it's really hard to measure this stuff. And it yeah. It's really hard to measure perception, but it's not hard to measure perceptions impact. If you have more people who wanna work for you, that's something you can measure.

James Ellis:
18:34

If you have less need for ads because each ad is targeted to the right person and saying something worth listening to, and it isn't saying we're hiring because stop that people, please, then you're gonna save a lot of money because you're not gonna use those ads. And if you start to use the ads right and create a consistent message of who you are, you start to fill a pipeline. And once you have a pipeline, you have to go back to the RPO agency well a little less often, and that's saving you some money. And when you are consistent with your message, at the offer stage, more people say yes because it's not so much an argument about the number on the piece of paper. It's about, oh, I know what you're about.

James Ellis:
19:11

I want this thing. And having less requisitions go all the way back to square 1 and start from square 1 because it you know, because you've lost it, that saves you money. And you're, like, doing back and neck and work. You're like, this is real money. I'm like, yeah.

James Ellis:
19:24

Wait. There's one more. When you get a pipeline and you have it such that when a role comes out, 1 of the 10 or 20 role shows up and you go to the pipeline and you have someone who's perfect for that and your time to fill is measured in a week instead of months, That means you have potentially a 5 to 10% decrease in time to fill. Average value of job divided by days per to work week times like, the math gets crazy good, crazy fast. So if people who say it's expensive, like, yeah, a bad brand is expensive.

James Ellis:
19:55

A strong brand that is clear that shows your difference, that creates financial incentives and financial outcomes, that is not necessarily the case.

Rhona Pierce:
20:05

I love how you quantified or, like, everything, the financial impact of the brand. Because a lot of people talk about, it's like, oh, we'll get more candidates, and it's all about the feelings. You know, that's a thing in our industry. Everyone's talking about the feelings and how everyone feels and how the surveys are. I love that everything you said is about the financial impact because, really, that's what people care about, executives and the people with the money.

James Ellis:
20:29

And that's the thing. Right? You like, I've been in house enough times to know that the budgetary process for HR and TA looks like this. Well, it's June. Let's get our wish list together.

James Ellis:
20:39

Let's go have some demos. Let's go talk to some people. Let's get some pricing on this, that, or the other thing. And then September comes, and you submit your wish list. And October comes, and they submit it back to you, and it's 10 to 20% less than you want it to be.

James Ellis:
20:53

And then you have to pick and choose, and then you have your wish list down. And December, hopefully, but more likely January and sometimes February, let's be honest. They actually approve the stupid budget. You can actually go spend the money. That means once you get the okay in February and you have a month to put stuff out there, you're back to the square one again.

James Ellis:
21:12

It takes a year to spend a dollar in TA and HR. Now that's not just because your CHRO is weak. That's just how CHROs have to be because there's one person in every business who, if they say, I wanna spend $10,000 tomorrow, they just start writing the check, and that's your CFO. And if you get your CFO to stop seeing employer brand and more importantly, to stop seeing recruiting and TA as some sort of cost center, and that is a loaded term, and see it as something that's driving financial output, they will cut you a check tomorrow to make that happen. And that's the value of talking about this kind of work and not just deploy your brand.

James Ellis:
21:52

Recruiting needs to talk about the value they bring to the table, the skills that they're able to bring to the table that weren't available to them before, the speed at which the lack of loss of value because they've done it quicker. All that stuff is down to dollars and cents. Businesses only care about 5 things, making money, saving money, get new customers, limit my risk, stroke my ego. End of list, there is nothing else. There is nowhere did it say higher, better.

James Ellis:
22:18

Nowhere did it say create a strong culture. Nowhere did it say increase morale. Nowhere did it say anything other than money, money, money, create customers, limit my my my my, risk for losing money, and make me feel good. That's the end of that list.

Rhona Pierce:
22:32

And for anyone who didn't catch that, listen to it again. Everyone's saying, oh, we want a seat at the table. That's how you get a seat at the table.

James Ellis:
22:40

That is exactly how you get to see the table. You speak the table's language, not recruiting language. Recruiting language is for recruiters to recruiters, and it's got its own value, but leaders do not care at all what about any of that stuff.

Rhona Pierce:
22:53

Yes. How many times have we sat in those meetings where there's another HR person just talking, and I'm just thinking they don't care. Like, literally, no one cares about what you're talking about. Yep. I understand what you're saying.

Rhona Pierce:
23:07

Change the way you're saying it.

James Ellis:
23:09

Time to fill is my favorite example of that. We talk and we're HR talks time to fill all day long, and it it's measured in days. What's the value of a day? I don't know. But if you say total value of a company divided by the number of people creating that value divided by 220 days in a week, that is the value of a day.

James Ellis:
23:32

High. Your time to fill times that number is real money, and people will lean forward when they speak to you because they are super excited to get that number down. Going from 48 days time to fill to 45 days doesn't say much. If you're a 1,000 person company, that change could save you $80,000 a year. Now you say we're lowering time to fill by 3 3 days, time to fill.

James Ellis:
23:56

Who cares? You lower $80,000. Oh, I'm I'm there. We're all paying attention to that. And it's just these minor changes in how you describe the work that's gonna matter.

James Ellis:
24:06

It's exactly it's gonna get your seat at the table. It's gonna get you the respect, and it's gonna get you the budget to do really cool stuff.

Rhona Pierce:
24:13

Yes. So, everyone that listens to this podcast knows that it's always about actionable things. Like, you can literally take notes. This is how you do it. When you're presenting the case to for employer branding to leadership, like, what strategies have you found are the most effective?

James Ellis:
24:33

So I've actually productized I guess that's a word that some people say. I don't know if I'm allowed to say it. I'm just talent acquisition marketing. I've productized this that this entire conversation we've had. And I said, look.

James Ellis:
24:45

If you can tell me the dollars you spent last year or anticipating spending this year on on ads and the dollars you spent last year on the RPO agency, your time to fill, and the relative level of your candidate. If you're hiring high volume, assume a value of per role of $50,000. If you're hiring directors of biotech, biochemistry, that's a 140,000 a year value job. Not your salary, the value it brings to the company. And then what's your relative cost per hire, which by the way, if you can't calculate it, go talk to HR, they will help you.

James Ellis:
25:20

With just those pieces of information, I can calculate how much employ a strong employer brand can save a company. And that usually makes me in a position where they're gonna listen to the other stuff that they don't get. Because if they know this $20,000 project is gonna save them a $120,000 this year and next year and the year after that, Okay. They don't need to know about the definition of employer brand. They don't need to know the difference between making you look good and making you look different.

James Ellis:
25:51

There's all sorts of stuff that kinda go, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Whatever.

James Ellis:
25:53

Just show me the money again, kid. That is where it starts. The other challenge is when I'm talking about this is that because there's so many preconceptions, this conversation around making us look good. And and and for the record, I blame leadership and executives as a class for associating employer brand with ego stroking of leadership. There's the sense that as the CEO, I want to be known as someone who is part of a or leading a good company with a good employer brand that everybody wants to be a part that is 1,000 percent ego stroke, 1,000%.

James Ellis:
26:26

It doesn't cost or save anybody a dime, except it makes the CEO and the CFO and the CEO feel really good about themselves and pat themselves on the back when they're off their way on their way to the golf club. If instead you say, look. That's not what the employer brand is for. And the more you decide an employer brand is how do you make you look good, you will not see those savings. You will not see that impact.

James Ellis:
26:47

An employer brand is strong because it shows how you're different and the right people choose you. The more it's about how you're great and you're running this morally good company and you're doing so much social good, which I applaud, and I'm thrilled you're doing it, but that's not how you save money, and that's not how you build a brand. Why? Because everybody does that, and this is about branding. Right?

James Ellis:
27:08

The difference between Coke and a Pepsi to an alien is negligible. To you and I, night and day. You know why? It's called marketing and branding. So if you can make this minor minor minor virtually undetectable at a chemical level, difference between 2 sugar soft drinks worth 1,000,000,000 of dollars.

James Ellis:
27:27

Yeah. Stop making it about making you look good. It's about finding that difference for your company. And I got a couple of kind of good tricks I use. You know, I talk about usually, what I do.

James Ellis:
27:36

Here's here's a talk about tactics here. This is one of my favorites. One of the things I like to talk about is is something everybody knows. And for for those of you ever deal with the leadership, there's a couple of things you have to remember. 1, speed.

James Ellis:
27:50

Get to your point fast. 2, be interesting. Not clever, not smart, not well thought of. Just be interesting, and then show them the money. So that was the 3 ideas, and this is how I do that.

James Ellis:
28:03

I say we all know Coke. Right? Yeah. Yeah. We all know Coke.

James Ellis:
28:06

Just out of curiosity, what's Coke's brand? And there's a silence that fills the room as people suddenly realize they don't know what Coke's brand is even though they they buy them and they see them all the time and they know what's going on. Everybody knows what Coke is. I say, you've got the Santa Claus ads. You've got the you've got the polar bear ads.

James Ellis:
28:22

You got the first date ads. You got the ballgame ads. You got everybody feeling good like Coke. It feels feels good. What's Coke's brand?

James Ellis:
28:29

And Coke's brand is happiness. And when I say that, leadership goes, oh, yeah. That makes sense. You go, look. You don't have to say happiness.

James Ellis:
28:36

You have to make people feel happiness. That's how marketing branding goes. They go, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

James Ellis:
28:39

I said, by the way, Coke spends $4,400,000,000 every single year. That's a billion with a b. $4,400,000,000 every single year to make you think happy without having to say happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy. This is the game that gets played. And when I tell that story, the what a lot of executive realizes, one, I don't really know what I'm doing when this in this area, and that's fine.

James Ellis:
29:00

This guy seems to know what he's doing. 2, branding isn't what I thought it was. It's an idea, and it's and if I can then say, look. This is the reason why people pick Coke over Pepsi or Pepsi over Coke is because of all this money spent on making these tiny little differences. That usually gives me the leeway to talk about let's talk about how much employer brands gonna save you, getting to the money, and getting them to say this is a low investment, that this doesn't have to be a massive, massive project.

James Ellis:
29:27

That is kind of my process. And thanks, Coke, for for making that data very public and allowing me to kinda, you know, surf on your coattails as it were. But since everybody knows Coke, everybody gets that story.

Rhona Pierce:
29:39

That's so good. It's so relatable, and I can picture people in the room being like, wait. What's the brand? And then when you say it's like, oh, yeah. It's happiness.

Rhona Pierce:
29:48

Because even as you were talking about it, it's like, wait. I don't know what Coke's brand is. Is it

James Ellis:
29:52

the curly scripty language? Is it the shape of the bottle? Is it the polar bears? Is it, you know, what you know, and that's the thing with Coke. Because when you spend $4,400,000,000 every single year, there's a lot of taglines floating around, and they're not all the same.

James Ellis:
30:06

Like, GEICO, GEICO caveman, GEICO motorcycle, GEICO Centaur, all the GEICO GEICO. All it is is about saying, do you remember 5 minutes will save you 15% or 15 minutes will save you 50%. That's all it's trying to do. That's its brand. It's its promise.

James Ellis:
30:23

And so once you understand, you can kinda see how the strings get pulled on the puppet. You understand what is happening there. You see it everywhere, and that's a great example of it. You know, it it doesn't have to be clever. It doesn't have to be deeply strategic.

James Ellis:
30:36

When it comes to insurance, it's incredibly tactical. So it's just about how do I get people to remember this simple line which differentiates us. Hi. How you doing? There's that line again.

James Ellis:
30:46

That's what it's all about.

Rhona Pierce:
30:47

So many. I I'm having, like, flashbacks to so many conversations because people here employ your brand, especially people in our industry, right, TA people, and they immediately think EVP. And there's an obsession with creating a EVP, a slogan, which that's a whole other I'm sure. I mean, if I'm on that soapbox, I'm sure you're you are too. And it's an obsession with creating this, spending tens of 1,000 of dollars to get this slogan.

Rhona Pierce:
31:13

Yes. And then assuming that everyone in the company is gonna know what the slogan is, and that's how you're gonna get people. And that is absolutely

James Ellis:
31:23

Yeah. The modern expectation around employer branding is that employees are actually just parrots, and they need to be told what to say over and over and over and over again. We're a great place to work. We're a great place to work. Oh, cracker.

James Ellis:
31:33

I'll work for a place to work. Like, that's all that they think it is. Get the employees to repeat this thing over and over again. And, honestly, look. I I make a lot of fun of EVPs, and they'll and if there's a video if you wanna link to it about how EVT EVPs don't work.

James Ellis:
31:46

And the truth is, for the most part, they don't need to work. If you're Disney and you've got ESPN and ABC and the parks and Marvel and all the other intellectual property, they yeah. You need an EVP to get your brand straight because that is a messy as hell brand. It is a nightmare for a brand structure point of view. If you're a Bank of America and you're massive and one minor change to a brand signifies 1,000,000,000 of dollars spent or gained, okay, you need an EVP for structure.

James Ellis:
32:14

But, again, most companies aren't that 0.0001% size that they need that. And it's like saying, oh, I guess you need I saw a basketball game on TV. I guess the way you play a basketball is you start with an arena, and you fill it with 60,000 people, and you get a bunch of tall guys to play or girls if you're playing you know, watch recently. And they like, there's cheerleaders. Oh, that's that's what basketball is.

James Ellis:
32:38

No. No. No. That's what professional basketball is. You wanna play out in your driveway or out in the park, what you need is a a sheet of metal about yay big that's flat and a rim that sticks out of it and put it a certain height and a ball.

James Ellis:
32:51

End of list. So that's really what I think employer branding should be for most companies. It's a rim and a ball, and that's gonna serve them. It's gonna get them that, you know, 10, 5% value you know, increase in in value and savings that they're looking for. They don't need the arena.

James Ellis:
33:07

They don't need the cheerleaders. They don't need the hot dog guy in the stands or the beer guy in the stands. They don't need all the other rigmarole around it if you get to what's core about what employer branding is.

Rhona Pierce:
33:18

And I want to get back to your report because I had an opportunity to see your report, and it's it's amazing. Oh, thanks. Yeah. How are how can people use this report? I think it was just, like, 9 questions.

James Ellis:
33:32

Yeah.

Rhona Pierce:
33:32

How can they use that report to go back to management and have these conversations that we've been talking about?

James Ellis:
33:40

So the a couple of challenges I wanted to try and, if not solve, at least support and help out, and that is stop talking to your CHRO for money. CHRO is not about money. CHRO is to gatekeep and to manage and all the other stuff. The money comes from CFO. But, of course, as a recruiter lead or a talent acquisition lead, your interactions with the CFO might be few and far between.

James Ellis:
34:02

You might not have the relationship to say, hey, Susan. Can we do this thing? Can I get a bunch of money to do this make this change happen? I know it's a relationship driven business, and you don't always have those relationships. So what I wanted to say was with the least amount of information I have, and I've listed effectively already what the information is.

James Ellis:
34:19

I add a little couple like, hey. How how many people in your company and how many roles you're hiring? Just to kinda give a bigger picture. In 48 hours, I take that information. I run it through a couple of really simple formulas.

James Ellis:
34:30

If you listen closely, I actually gave them all the way while I was talking. It's not rocket scientist. I don't know how to spell algorithm, let alone how to build 1. There's nothing crazy in here. It's just simple.

James Ellis:
34:42

Hey. What does 10% of not spending on ads look like? Stuff like that. So give me information and run the report, but it's structured not so much a here are the numbers, but to say, look. I want you to have a better conversation with people who know nothing about your world, who know nothing about recruiting.

James Ellis:
35:00

Lord knows they know nothing about employer brand. They just know when I need to hire someone, I tell HR and a couple weeks later recruiter comes around and does an intake. And a couple of weeks later after that, I get I have phone calls to make. That's what I think recruiting is because from the outside looking in, that's what it looks like. But to understand, there's ads, there's agencies, there's structure, there's process, There's all of this stuff that you and I and everybody listen to this thing, I'm guessing, knows in their bones how messy this process is.

James Ellis:
35:29

But to say, look. There's 3 big buckets in which employer brand makes a difference, and it looks like this. And this is how it saves money on ads in our agency, and this is how it saves money when it comes to keeping making fewer people say yes to this offer. So here's how it saves money by shortening your time to fill and calculating that so that even if you hand that report to your CFO, who does not have the time to read it, but it will skim through it, I'm sure. And, hopefully, they see those numbers and go, what is this?

James Ellis:
35:57

And first, they're gonna go, this is expensive. And they go, oh, wait. This is savings. That's a good number. I like that.

James Ellis:
36:03

Then they'll kinda come back and read, and then they'll wanna have a conversation. So it's designed to be kind of portable, so you can kinda throw it over a fence, and, hopefully, someone will engage with it, have a deeper conversation with you. So if it's a report that you'd like, I give it away for free just because I think, you know, look, it's it's a lead generation tool for me, but, obviously, the more people I get to understand how employer brand is valuable to company, I think we all win. So if you go to bit.ly/ebvalue, all lowercase, the report's there for free.

Rhona Pierce:
36:35

Amazing. And I'll also add a link in the show notes for it, because it it's it's a great report.

James Ellis:
36:41

Well, thanks.

Rhona Pierce:
36:43

So, okay. So you've got everyone convinced. You have the CFO's attention, but you still don't get a huge budget because, I mean, you're TA. We're not we're not changing the world. How can companies with limited resources start building their employer brand?

James Ellis:
37:03

Yeah. I'm a big fan of MacGyveringer duct taping employer brand work. Like, I don't like to spend any money at all if it's not for headphones and audio equipment apparently. I I just don't like to spend other people's money. I when I was at Groupon, I developed their employer brand and activated.

James Ellis:
37:20

And the 1st year, I spent $500. Wow. And most of that money was on stickers. So, I mean, I can happily kinda unpack that for you in a second. But to me, it's like, look.

James Ellis:
37:30

If you understand what you're what you have that's different, and you can package it up in such a way that it stands out a little bit, and you do that thing where you look around at the resources you have available. Everybody has different resources. Some people have trucks. Some people have Internet. Some people have I don't know.

James Ellis:
37:47

Whatever. Like, everybody has something. Right? How do you take this package that you've put up that's you know, that travels with this message that's differentiating and connect it to the resources you already have? That's employer branding.

James Ellis:
38:00

So if you're a plumbing distribution company, you got trucks. You gotta paint them with something. Yeah. You're gonna put your logo on it, your name on it, your phone number. Why not just say, look, this is a place where you can get a career and not a job.

James Ellis:
38:16

Here's a phone number. Here's a URL. Look. You're talking about people who might work at plumbing, where the job they have right now is standing on the highway going slow, stop, slow, stop, making $25 an hour from this from the county or the state or whatever. That's not that's not a career.

James Ellis:
38:30

That's a job. That's a seasonal job. It doesn't happen in this in the winter. That's just it's just money. But if you are driving down, they see that.

James Ellis:
38:38

They're holding that sign, and they see your truck that says it's a job. It's a career, not a job. Suddenly they see a difference between you and what they're doing. And you don't have to pay them $25 an hour. You can pay them $20 an hour, but because it's a bigger idea and because it's longer term and because you're actually offering development over time and not just the money, like, who's developing swing in the stick.

James Ellis:
38:59

Right? Nobody. If you're offering development, you understand how that entire value package works. People are gonna call that number. People are gonna go to that website.

James Ellis:
39:07

You're gonna have no problem filling those roles. At least it's gonna be easier than it is now. If you're Amazon, you put it on the tape that goes on all the boxes. If you're Roku, you make a little ad because Roku has ads on all over all its channels. What do you have available to you, and what can you say that's interesting and different that sets you apart?

James Ellis:
39:24

That's, like, 90% of it. And I've talked to some really well funded companies like Target and Amazon, who I joke, not really joking, they have all my money. They probably have all your money. They have all the money, and yet they will tell you, yeah. We're really cheap here.

James Ellis:
39:41

Like, they they complain all day long about how little money they have access to on the TA team. So nobody is resourced properly. So if you're going, oh, I really wish I could be over there where the research that that the over there doesn't exist. That that's a myth. That's a figment of your imagination.

James Ellis:
39:56

Nobody has the money they want. But if you focus on what's something interesting we can say that differentiates us and using the resources at our disposal, When that works and the company goes, wow. We're starting to see our brand in lots of places, and you only spent 500 or a 1000 or $5,000 on it. What would happen if we gave you 40,000? What would happen if we gave you a 100,000?

James Ellis:
40:19

Like, is that how you get the ball rolling? I think so much of TA goes, well, we are needed for the company to grow. Therefore, we deserve x amount of money, and that's not how it works. What you do is you prove that the money given to you yields a return in value. So at Groupon, we said, what do we have a lot of?

James Ellis:
40:41

People. We had really good people. They really liked working there. They were good advocates if they were could be tapped. And what we did is we built a a little web form on Google Forms, so that's free.

James Ellis:
40:52

And we asked them 10 or 12 questions about what it was like to work there and maybe something goofy. Groupon has a bit of a goofy vibe or at least it did back then. And, you know, you know, nominate nominate a a coworker for a superlative award. What's the award and who gets it? What's your desk look like?

James Ellis:
41:08

Who's your hero at work? What's the last good piece of advice you got from a manager? Just stuff like that. They fill out the form. I scrape the form, and I put it in a WordPress template, WordPress being free.

James Ellis:
41:20

And I know that it's going to be like that because that's the question I asked. And I knew, like, the the the the the bucket it was gonna go into. I said, hey. The survey is really good. Can you send me 2 photos of yourself from your phone?

James Ellis:
41:30

Yeah. Sure. Send it over. Tag it. Stick their name and their title on it.

James Ellis:
41:34

Boom. I have a web page. I have a profile. It took me once the machine starts, it took me 45 minutes to make a profile, if that. And that's all.

James Ellis:
41:42

And just kind of just copy editing their answers to make sure they didn't say anything stupid or mist up type something. You know, compare that to your usual, hey. We have to profile somebody. Okay. We're gonna go interview them and ask them some questions, and we don't really understand what their job is.

James Ellis:
41:56

So we ask them really dumb questions. They have to explain it to us. And then we go back, and we copy our notes. We try to write something, and they explain, no. Actually, mitochondria doesn't do this.

James Ellis:
42:04

Mitochondria does that. And I really focus on the proteins inside this. You know, like, okay. You go back and forth and you publish it, and no one reads it. That's a 10 hour process at least.

James Ellis:
42:13

Okay. In the same amount of time, I can publish 14 profiles that are just q and a's that are more fun, more engaging. So having published that, all of that for free, every person I've profiled shares it on their social. Hey. Look at this.

James Ellis:
42:28

I got profiled by my company. Their parents see it. Their network see it. Other people see it. It goes out to the world reaching networks I couldn't pay to reach or with credibility I could never buy in my lifetime.

James Ellis:
42:40

And the flywheel starts moving. The snowball starts rolling down the hill. And I knew that was happening because managers would come up to me and say, hey. I saw that profile. That was really good.

James Ellis:
42:49

Can you profile this other person on my team? She's really good, and she needs a little recognition. It it became a recognition tool, and the more people saw it as a recognition, the more they wanted to use it. And so we started jamming out, like, so many profiles. What we did after the end of it, when people were done to say thank you to, like, the first 100, we just gave them stickers.

James Ellis:
43:09

And that encouraged them to come back and do more profiles or tell other people flywheel, flywheel, flywheel. So I spent $500 in the 1st year. We got a 100,000 page views for $500. Do the math. Yeah.

James Ellis:
43:22

Exactly. It's terrifying. And the next year, they said, what would you do if you had a 150,000? I had immediate answers. I knew exactly what I was gonna do because I knew that would be coming, and that's how the game gets played.

James Ellis:
43:35

What can you do for nothing? Prove that if you have 2 sticks, you can make a spark or 2 stones or whatever. Now that you can make a spark turn into a bonfire, how do you do that? And then how do you fuel that? Companies love to invest in people who are clearly winning to show that you're winning.

James Ellis:
43:50

That's really what to me, that's really what it's about. Find places to do it. And, you know, get creative with your channels. I like to joke that if I was to hire a data scientist, and we all know how incredibly hard that is to hire data scientists these days, I would say, okay. Google data science conferences.

James Ellis:
44:06

Find out where one is. Go to it. Don't buy a ticket. Get some sidewalk chalk. Write a really interesting, you know, kind of message on the sidewalk in front of the conference where data scientists are gonna go, what is this?

James Ellis:
44:20

That's really interesting. There's a URL. And that what's that cost? What's that cost? If you're interesting and you're in the right place and you're willing to try new things, the money is not the problem.

James Ellis:
44:30

The money is not the constraint. What is the constraint is if you have nothing interesting to say, nothing that differentiates you. Just we're a great company. We have great people. We have a great culture.

James Ellis:
44:40

You're toast. I don't care how much money you spend. You are toast.

Rhona Pierce:
44:44

Amazing. Thank you so much for all of these insights. As you were talking, I was just seeing the the similarities with every other guest that's been on the podcast, some that I haven't released yet and some that I have. And as you said, no one has the budget until you go out, you do something, and you get people's attention. And then it's like, oh, wow.

James Ellis:
45:10

Yeah. The OGs, the people you know who are, like, freaking rock stars, they didn't they weren't born that way. They had crap jobs too, and they found ways to turn tiny little budgets into something that did something and they laddered up and laddered up and laddered up. That's how they have 1,000,000 of dollars in a global brand to just put to to play with. That's how you do that by starting with nothing and showing what you can do just by being smarter.

Rhona Pierce:
45:34

If you're looking for low cost, high impact employer branding strategies, check out episode 1 where I spoke to Tandem Sullivan. Tandem is an employer branding manager who has seen incredible success using podcasting as a way to share employee stories and attract top talent. Tanen breaks down exactly how to get started with using podcasting as an employer branding tool, no matter your resources.