New Money in HR

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My wife and I got to spend some time in the Cayman Islands this past week.  It was great! I highly recommend going if you have the means.

You know what I saw a lot of in Cayman? New money!

New money is people who aren’t from money.  They weren’t raised around money, so they don’t know how to act with money.  They tend to stick out around people who grew up with money.  I’m neither new or old money, but it was fascinating to watch how the two differ.

It started from the moment I was going through customs to get into Cayman.  New money complains about having to wait in line to get through customs with the common folk. Old money didn’t wait in line, as they have been here before and knew the way around line.

My wife and I went to swim with the dolphins. We ran into new money at the facility. One of the workers was helping a family with three daughters and showing them some wildlife at the center. A few of us walked up soon after he started, and he politely asked us to wait. The girls were taking turns holding parrots and such, and getting their picture.  This new money lady walked right up to the worker and said, “I want to hold the parrot and get my picture!”

The worker kindly obliged, and she quickly departed, on to push around the next person. Caymanians are used to new money.

New money buys a $150 polo shirt in the lobby store because walking across the street to a shop that has the same shirt for $75 would be an inconvenience.  New money makes you feel like it’s completely normal to pay $50 for a cheeseburger and fries.

New money seems annoyed that they aren’t treated better, because they have money. New money is loud, impatient and rude. Old money waits in the back, for the crowd to clear, understanding, because they have money, they’ll get what they want eventually, and treating people kindly will get them exactly what they want.

I heard someone last week say HR is the new IT. Referring to how power is shifting out of IT and moving into HR because of how difficult it is to get great talent.  Great technology is becoming easier to obtain and work with, great talent is becoming harder to obtain and work with.

This phenomenon is shifting some organizational power to HR.  In organizations power equals money.

HR pros will have a choice to make.  Do you want to be new money or old money?  You think it’s an easy choice, but it’s not. Money and power make people do stupid things.

Leveraging your new found power for good will be one of the hardest things you’ll ever do in your HR career.  Those who do it successfully are old money kind of folks. Those who use it to push around their organization in ways that satisfy only themselves are the kind of people who push over little girls to get their photo taken with a bird.

Short-timer’s Rules and Guidelines to Getting Fired

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You know what happens when someone is on the path to being fired?  They start doing all kinds of strange things.  They’re actually fairly easy to spot, and if you follow these rules and guidelines you will be able to pick them out, or know if it’s you that is about to be terminated.

In the HR game, we call these people about to be fired or leave our organization, ‘Short-timers’.  I also like to refer to them as ‘dead employee walking’, because so many hiring managers will know for months they want to terminate an employee, but they don’t.

Instead, they begin to treat them like they’re dead.  They ignore them, stop giving them work, ‘forget’ to invite them to meetings, etc.  Almost like they’re dead.

Regardless of what you want to call them, I think we owe it to give them some rules about what to do and not to do when they hit a period of their soon-to-be-over employment.

Short-timer Rules and Guidelines:

  1. Don’t start working harder. You’ve already been shot, you just don’t know it yet.  You working harder to try and save yourself just looks sad and pathetic. You had a chance to save your job, now is not the time.
  1. Don’t start talking about how you’ve been wronged. You actually might be wronged, but no one wants to hear it, and me talking to you puts me in your camp, and I don’t want to be in dead employee walking camp.
  1. Do start lining up references from those who still like you. You’re going to need references from your last employer. Do that now. It’s hard to say no to your face. It’s easy to ignore your email and phone calls after you’ve left.
  1. Do start slowly take personal effects home, little by little, so not to be noticed. This way when the big announce happens you aren’t asking people to help you carry stuff out to our car.
  1. Do start looking for a job. It’s one million times easier (that’s an exact figure from my research) to find a job when you have a job than when you don’t have a job.
  1. Don’t profess your love to a co-worker on your way out. It’s really not a great romantic time to do something like this. “Hey, Tina! I’m out of here! But I’ve always wanted to hook up, call me!” Yeah, just what Tina needs, an out of work slacker to add into her life.
  1. Do clean out your computer files and delete all search histories. You know what we do when you leave? We look at your search history on your computer and laugh. Laugh loudly and often. We don’t know exactly why you were searching for an all-black toilet seat, but it’s funny not to know!
  1. Don’t start trying to take other people down with you. Here’s the deal; you’re about to get fired. You are trying to bring others down with you won’t work because you have no credibility.  In fact, it will probably just quicken your exit.
  1. Don’t burn bridges. It’s a small world when it comes to professions and employment. That boss you tell off today might be the same executive that stops you from being hired someplace else down the road.
  1. Do burn all of your corporate logo wear. Yeah, like you’re really going to wear your old companies gear when you got fired! No, you’re not.  Burn it.  Have a party and dance around the flames.  It’s cathartic, in a way, to rid yourself of these signs and symbols of a part of your life that is now over.

Cayman Islands and HR

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I just got back from the Cayman Islands where I was invited to speak to the Cayman Islands Society of Human Resource Professionals at their annual meeting.  As you might imagine, it was awesome!

This is only the second time in my life I’ve been out of the United States to speak (the first being to Toronto – which is kind of in my own backyard, so it’s hard to count!).  I definitely need to do this more, as I think I actually learn more than those I’m speaking to.

Here are some of the great things I took away from the Cayman Islands, HR and Hugging.

1. The HR and Talent Pros in Cayman are as passionate as any professionals that I’ve ever spoken to. They love HR and Talent Acquisition and they are hungry for knowledge and to get better.

2. HR in Cayman is as unique as you’ll find anywhere in the world. You have native Caymanians who are working to develop their talents and Expat-HR pros from all over the world thrown into the mix. You put all of this together and diversity of thought is incredible.

3. Caymanians love hugs! I got a bunch. Real hugs. Not those fake hugs we tend to give each other in the states.

4. Great HR conferences take a lot of work from a lot of people, but it also is a labor of love from one or two people, usually. Chris Bailey (@anythingoverice) is one of those people in Cayman.  He’ll be at SHRM national, make sure you connect with him, he’s one of the good guys in the world! Also, check out CISHRP’s, Inga Masjule, at SHRM National as she’ll be speaking on the topic of International HR – she’s good people as well, and smart as hell!

5. The majority of Caymanians are very religious (Pornography, sex toys, etc. are illegal in Cayman). They also celebrated Batabano when I was there. I struggled to put these two things together in my mind!  But, I will again go to Cayman for Batabano and dance in the parade!

6. Upon arriving to Cayman I would have thought they have absolutely no issue recruiting any kind of talent to the islands. I was shocked to find out this is a major problem at the professionals levels. Cayman is the fifth largest financial center in the world and they have a ton of highly paid jobs going unfilled. The largest recruiting dilemma to overcome? It’s too good to be true! People can’t believe what a great opportunity is, and believe there must be something you aren’t telling them!

7.  I got to see a speaker named Dr. Graeme Close (@close_nutrition) out of the UK who talked about wellness and nutrition. He is a former pro Rugby player and current strength and conditioning coach for England’s Rugby, Ski and Snowboard Olympic teams, as well as other pro athletes.  If you are responsible for wellness at your company, you must have this guy come and talk to your employees. He’s brilliant, motivating and funny.  He would be perfect to kick-off any wellness program.

8.  In 4 days I swam with Stingrays, Dolphins, Sea Turtles and countless fish, witnessed Batabano,  ate some of the best food I’ve ever tasted (most memorable was local fare from downtown Georgetown directly after Batabano – on one plate I had Lobster, shrimp, breadfruit, rum cake, potato salad, plantain, beans and rice – it was glorious!) and had the single best Gin and Tonic of my life at Catch.

9. Every group of HR/Talent Pros have things that no one wants to, or is willing to, talk about. Those taboo topics. Caymanian’s have theirs as well, and it was empowering watching them address these head on, it’s truly the only way we move the profession forward.

10. HR and Talent Acquisition conference planners! Pay Attention! CISHRP does conference food better than anyone else in the world, and second place isn’t even close! CISHRP had the best food I’ve ever had at a conference. I’m sure having it at the Ritz Carlton has something to do with it, but the leaders at CISHRP still had to pick the menu!

Thanks again, Chris and the CISHRP crew, for having me come down!

T3 – iRevu

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This week on T3 I review the the mobile micrco-feedback performance management technology, iRevu.  iRevü allows you to send micro-feedback to employees in real time, so they can view their feedback and respond in real time.  It’s a simple easy to use interface, that can interact with your system of record or performance management system to auto populate feedback directly into the system.

From your desktop or any internet connected device, you can see iRevü’s that you’ve received, requests for iRevü’s from your team and others. You can tie iRevü’s to company-wide goals and even an individual’s goals and special, short-term projects. iRevü’s and requests trigger emails to managers, and managers are periodically reminded of overdue iRevü’s. All the iRevü’s are exportable into your annual review form at any time by the person, their manager, or the HR administrator.

Adoption of current customers have been really high, with 80% using it daily to give and receive feedback.  Many of us struggle to get our hiring managers to give feedback annually, let alone daily!

5 Things I Really Like About iRevu: 

1. Mobile native. Built and designed to work like your workforce works. The technology helps create an environment where it’s easy to give and receive feedback easily and quickly.

2. Admins (HR team or other) can push out reminders to hiring managers who haven’t given feedback to certain individuals in a while. Individuals can set their own reminders to help them remember to provide ongoing feedback employees want.

3. Blackout Feature. You’re working on something on a Saturday at 9pm after four beers, and you decide it would be a great time to send feedback! Maybe not so much! iRevu has a feature that allows your organization to put a waiting period in play at certain times, so your employees aren’t getting drunk or pissed off feedback. It also protects your leaders from sending feedback they wished they hadn’t.

4. Visual timeline of feedback. Shows you and your hiring managers when feedback was given and to whom on the team. The visuals work really well with so many of our managers who are visual learners.

5. The cost!  It’s super cheap. I get asked a lot from HR pros working in small and medium shops about wanting a performance management system, but they can’t afford the big ones. You can get iRevu at a really good price, and totally re-engage performance management and feedback within your organization.

Micro-feedback was huge a few years ago, and then it went away as all the big systems kind of implemented their version of it within their large enterprise systems. This left many of the small and medium shops without anything that was easy to use for this purpose. iRevu is a great option. Also, larger companies can use it if their system doesn’t have micro-feedback tool, and they can throw the feedback directly into your system.

Check them out, the demo is quick and easy because the system is quick and easy.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

The Secret to Great HR

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The secret is extraordinarily simple, it’s all about a few close relationships. Depending on what type of organization you come from, it has to do with the relationship you have with those who are running operations.

First, every organization has some type of operation, meaning every organization produces something, product, service, etc. Even in church, the pastor runs operations, sharing the gospel with people, for example.

So, in your organization, to have great HR, the leadership in HR must have a great relationship with the leadership in Operations. I’m talking husband/wife great relationship, your best friend in the world type relationship, someone you could go on vacation for a week, and share a hotel room type relationship.  Not, I can ‘get along’ with them type relationships.

The blocking and tackling of HR isn’t difficult, but becomes incredibly difficult without support from your operation’s partner. People miss this and it’s very simple. Instead, in HR, we work to make new processes, new programs, better orientation, more specific recruiting plans, user-friendly HRIS, etc. Then, we get completely frustrated when we can’t get rank and file to follow some very simple steps to make it all run extremely smooth.

Why?

Because we mostly do all this HR stuff, without operations really buying into, or even wanting, our latest and greatest new thingy we just put together. Even though it’s for them, by the way!

If you have a strong relationship with Ops, they will tell you what they need, help you design it, roll it out for you, and make their own processes to ensure it’s followed. Wow! Doesn’t that sound nice? All because of a relationship.

The secret to Great HR has nothing to do with functional HR knowledge and expertise.  It has everything to do with your ability, from a position in HR, to build great two-way relationships across your organization, even with those functions you don’t like!

Sometimes You Just Love Someone At First Sight

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We aren’t supposed to be those people in HR.  We aren’t supposed to fall in love with a candidate the moment we see them. We tell ourselves we’re better than the rest, than our hiring managers.

The problem is, we do. We do fall in love. In fact, it happens all the time.

For the most part when you go to hire and you start interviewing, you either fall in love with a candidate or you don’t. There really isn’t any in between.  If you don’t fall in love, you never really feel comfortable making an offer, and if you do, you feel it’s probably going to eventually fail.

I’m not saying that those you fall in love with succeed all the time, because they don’t.  Without the love feeling, though, you never feel confident in the hire.

Here’s where I really start to think we might just be over-thinking this entire hiring thing.

If I fall in love with a candidate in the first 2 minutes, why do I need to go on with the interview process?  Do you ever fall out of love with a candidate, you fell in love with at first sight? I haven’t.  If I loved them in two minutes, I loved them after 2 hours of interviewing.  Sometimes you just know.

This doesn’t work for every position. Falling in love works best when you’re really hiring for organizational fit.  When you have a position that you could teach to almost anyone willing to learn, good work ethic, etc. If the primary goal to achieving a great hire is organizational fit, falling in love at first site usually works pretty good on the selection scale.

None of us in Talent Acquisition and HR ever want this to get out. It goes against our secret handshake to make hiring really difficult in our organizations. But, when you really go back and analyze your best hires, almost all of them will have the ‘love’ factor!

I believe in two things when it comes to hiring:

1. Do I really love this person as a hire?  If I can’t immediately answer that question, I need to keep looking.

2. Does this person scare the shit out of me?  Meaning, is this person so talented that eventually they’ll take my job! I hope so. I want to be scared, it makes me work harder. I want people who are better than me. Most people do the opposite. If the candidate is better than you, they pass, because they lack the confidence on how to handle that situation.

If I can answer ‘Yes’ to both of the above questions, I’m going to make some really strong hires.

 

Ladies, would you prefer not negotiating your salary?

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An article recently written on NPR speaks to a ‘new’ trend in organizational compensation.  What’s that trend? Apparently, companies are now not negotiating new hire or promotional salaries.  Basically, here’s what we pay for this position, take it or leave it.

Do you believe this would work?

Here is more from the article:

When it comes to negotiating salaries, the research is pretty clear: women are less assertive than men. It’s one reason women who start their careers with a narrower pay gap see it widen over time.

Carnegie Mellon economics professor Linda Babcock, who studies the gender pay gap, says men are four times more likely to negotiate their pay. That keeps women at a disadvantage, though they’re not always aware of it.

“The standard now is that people don’t really know what each other earns, that some people negotiate and some people don’t, and so there’s tremendous inequities in salary,” Babcock says.

Here’s what I’ll say, Yes, we have inequities in salaries.  Having non-negotiable salaries can help these inequities, but this isn’t a solution. The reality is organizations need flexibility to negotiate salary, especially when it comes to attracting hard-to-find talent. Organizations that take a hard stance on this, will lose in the talent attraction game.

What organizations need to do is have a policy on making quicker market compensation moves when they begin hiring in individuals, male or female, at higher rates than someone who might have started a few months prior. Most organizations are very weak on this practice, which causes most of the inequity.

You hire someone last year at $50K, and this year you hired someone into the same position, doing the same job, with a very similar resume at $58K. You now need to go back to your employee making $50K and give them an increase to $58K.  This hurts, but it needs to be done. That’s why it is critical for your talent acquisition team to have great negotiation skills.

It’s not a $8K increase to your budget, it’s a $16K increase to your budget. Now, think about in terms of a company that has hundreds, or thousands of employees in the same situation.  That $8K dollar negotiation can turn into hundred’s of thousands of dollars across the organization in market increases.

This is why most companies turn a blind-eye to market increases, and why so many organizations have pay inequalities. If females are less likely to negotiate higher salaries, and your organizaitons is going to ignore the difference, you’re going to have a growing problem that only gets worse the longer you ignore it.

I recently had a situation with a Fortune 500 client you completely gets this, and refuses to let it becomes a problem. We had a female candidate interview and get an offer. She wanted $47K. She was way under market for the position, and for the company. They knew she only wanted $47K, and they came back and paid her $63K! That was the value of her position to the organization and what similar people in her role were going to make, with her experience.

Like I said, this isn’t a salary negotiation issue. This is a do-you-want-to-do-the-right-thing organizational issue.

What do you think?

What ATS Should You Select For Your Company?

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If you read Monday’s post on Crappy Employment Brands, I told you I would answer the most asked question in HR and Talent Acquisition of all time.  It’s goes with the title to this post, and almost anytime I speak I get at least one person who will ask me this question during the Q&A:

What ATS (Applicant Tracking System) do you use?

The question is basically irrelevant unless the person asking me works in the exact same industry and business that I work in (IT and Technical contract staffing). Which they usually don’t. Usually, it’s a corporate HR or Talent Pro.  My ATS software is designed for something completely different for what they want.

But, more importantly, the question is asked because so many people believe that the ATS is the secret sauce to successful recruiting in corporate talent acquisition.  It’s not.  The secret sauce to great hiring is only expedited by your recruitment technology.  If you suck at hiring, the best ATS on the market will only make you suck at hiring much faster!

The best ATS systems will give you great functionality that includes CRM, recruitment marketing, recruitment automation, talent communities, great sourcing tools, assessment/screening technology and interview technology baked into the product,  onboarding, etc.  The worse ATS systems give you a basic product that will allow you to accept applicants online and process them through some sort of hiring process.

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of ATS systems on the market.  Most people will demo three or less. There is an ATS that is right for you, but you have to be willing to look at a lot of them.

So, what ATS should you select for you company? I’ll give you some tips:

1. Select an ATS you can afford. That sounds obvious, but most HR and Talent pros over-buy on their ATS, for the amount of hiring they do. If you only hire a hundred people a year, you don’t need an ATS that costs $100K per year to own/rent.  You can great ATS software for a few thousand dollars per year.

2. Select an ATS that has the functionality your business needs.  Again, obvious, but missed by most new buyers. If you don’t need talent communities, paying for talent communities is a waste. If you organization won’t use video interviewing, why are you buying it baked into your ATS.  If you definitely need a pre-employment assessments baked in, you can find a system that will meet your needs. Don’t settle.

3. Select an ATS that most closely fits your hiring process. This sounds stupid, but the majority of ATS failures have nothing to do with the ATS and everything to do with you not willing to change your process. You take the ATS and force them to do all sorts of changes to fit your broken process, and in turn break their proven best practice process. In the end, you fail and blame the ATS. Save yourself the headache and find an ATS that does the flow exactly how you want it. Some are very configurable and will allow you to change and keep changing your process. Some aren’t configurable at all.

4. Select an ATS that you feel you could start using immediately after the demo. ATS systems should be very easy to use. If you feel overwhelmed by the demo, it’s not the right system for you.

5. Select an ATS you can grow into. If you aren’t going to grow, you don’t need to worry about this, so don’t get talked into it.  Most ATS systems are designed for a certain level of hiring. The best vendors will be honest and tell you, the worst will tell you what you want to hear. Find out who their clients are that are your same size and demand to talk to them. If they don’t give you that access, run.  The good vendors will bend over backwards to get you to talk to their current clients.

If you don’t have an ATS, you should be fired. There are literally four or five major players in ATS technology that will give you a one user system for FREE (and only a few hundred dollars to add other users)! Of course, you get what you pay for, but you need to start somewhere! No company that is hiring should not have an ATS. The prices range from Free to millions of dollars.

What ATS systems do I like?  There are bunch: Workable, Jobvite, Bullhorn, Greenhouse, Taleo, Newton, The Resumator, Silkroad, iCims, SuccessFactors and Gr8People, in no specific order.

Here’s the funny thing. Some of you use one of these from above and hate them! That’s ATS technology. Most people think everyone elses ATS is better than what they’re using. The reality is, most do about the same thing – post jobs, accept resumes, some stuff in between, BAM you’re hired.

T3 – Workshape

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This week on T3, I’m reviewing a new company in the Talent space called Workshape.  Workshape is a new technology that is attempting to change the way we describe human work, and that is no small feat.

Think about all the changes we’ve seen in recruiting and HR over the past 50 years.  What one thing is still constant, and probably shouldn’t be?  The resume! That little piece of paper almost all organizations still rely on to understand what someone’s background is, and what they might be able to bring to your organization.Workshape.ioTalentmatchingfortechstartups20150220111417

Workshape’s technology describes work without using text-based documents. Workshape describes work using times and tasks.  In a major way, Workshape has uncovered a great way for your organization to ensure an organizational fit between a candidate and a hiring manager’s expectations for a position.

Workshape works by both the candidate and hiring manager using a super-simple interface to tell each other what they want from the position. A candidate might want to spend 50% of their time in front-end development and only 10% of their time in testing when in reality the hiring manager is looking for the exact opposite. This is what Workshape does, without the candidate knowing, so they don’t try and ‘cheat’ the system.

The candidate will give you a great, realistic overview of how they would prefer to spend their time in a position. Workshape’s technology then gives you a spider diagram that shows you how the candidate and the position match or don’t match.

5 Things I really like about Workshape

  1. Ultimately, this technology could be a great tool to help companies hire better for fit, not to the organization, but to positions. For some companies, this is a huge issue, that Workshape could solve.
  1. I love the fact that this technology doesn’t allow candidates to tell you what you want to hear. It forces the candidate to tell you what they really want, and ultimately, that might give you great data on whether they would be a great fit or not, for your opening.
  1. The user interface that the hiring manager uses to choose what they want from the position, literally, takes seconds to use, and it’s super easy and engaging for hiring managers.
  1. The results of the match give you a range on closest match, so even if someone isn’t perfect, you can easily see where they didn’t match and make a determination how important that is or isn’t.
  1. You get to find out from candidates what they want to do, and not to do. I can foresee this technology being used for internal mobility as well to match for succession.

Workshape is currently set up as an open market place so anyone can use it and try it.  Currently, their focus on technology in three major metro areas: San Fran, New York and London, from a candidate pool standpoint. But, like I mentioned above, the technology has much more of market, eventually, from a fit standpoint within your own hiring process.

Definitely worth a look, and a try if you’re in that market. If you would prefer to look at how you could implement into your own hiring process for fit to position, reach out to them, I’m sure they would have interest in speaking about that as well.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

How Do You Turn Around a Crappy Employment Brand?

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I get two questions more than any others since I started blogging in HR and Talent over six years ago:

1. What ATS do you use?

2. How can we turn around our bad employment brand? (You can also replace “brand” with “culture” – I get that a lot as well!)

For question #1 on the ATS selection is for another post. Check back Wednesday and I’ll tell you.

Question #2 isn’t necessarily difficult, but it does take work!

There’s a reason you have a crappy employment brand. You need to find out what that reason(s) is and solve it. Sometimes the reason is difficult to solve, sometimes it’s very simple.  If you have a bad employment brand because you have a history of treating employees like garbage, that is going to take some time to turn around. If you have a bad employment brand because you recently had one bad issue in the news, you can recover pretty quickly.

The first step to turning around a bad employment brand is knowing what the problem is.

Sometimes you just know, sometimes you need to do the employee surveys. I love doing employee alumni surveys for this as well, and only sending to those you voluntarily left on their own. Those folks usually give you better, more productive, feedback, than those you laid off and fired.

The second step to turning around a bad employment brand is you need to get your entire leadership team to agree on why you have this problem.

It doesn’t matter what you do in HR, if your leadership is not in agreement, you will never fix this problem. And, it can’t be just the CEO who agrees with the problem. Any leader with influence needs to buy in completely and drink the Kool aid. Once you have this buyin from leadership, it becomes fairly easy to fix.

The third step to turning around your employment brand is your current employees have to begin believing that real change is happening.

They need to hear it, constantly, and they need to see it.  It starts from within. If your current employees believe it’s changing they’ll begin to refer people to be apart of the change. One step I suggest, that almost no organization ever does is to find your true believer employees. Those who you are 100% sure are on board for the change, and do a special referral bonus for only them. You want your true believers referring people, you don’t want your cancer employees referring people.

The fourth step to turning around your employment brand is to change the perception externally.

Most organizations flip-flop steps three and four, and it’s the main reason they fail. They try and change external perception with commercials and marketing, news releases, etc. This creates buzz on the outside, but your internal folks kill it as soon as that first person interviews or is hired.  Do steps 1-3 first, and step four really is just fairly easy employment branding marketing strategy and plan.

The first three steps will take 90% of your time to fix. You’ll be shocked at how hard step two will be, and how long it will take to come to agreement on the ‘real’ problem. That’s because most bad employment brands start with bad leadership.  Bad leaders don’t easily take responsibility for this, and want to blame everyone and everything, besides themselves.

There’s no silver bullet for a bad employment brand. Unfortunately, marketing firms are going to sell you step four as a silver bullet, which is much like putting lipstick on a pig. The pig might look a little better, but it’s still a pig.