If a client chooses another option over the one you’re selling, there are two things you can do.

The first is to attack the client directly – accuse them of being unprofessional, complain that you didn’t do your best and deserve another chance, bad-mouth the competitor, complain and use all your sales skills and existing knowledge of the client to try and guilt them into reversing the decision.

The second is to take it on the chin, to wish them well and tell them that the door is always open if there’s anything you can ever do for them. Keep it professional and objective, get feedback on what you could have done better, and stay in touch.

Guess which one means you might get the business back eventually? That’s right – the one most of us don’t do.

Criticism.

There’s a poster on my wall at work that says “If you’re tired of people exposing your mistakes, don’t attack the people. Attack the mistakes.” I’ve seen a few people in the industry respond to criticism by publicly attacking the critic. How does this make you look more credible? If you have issue with the review, address the review, not the reviewer. Attacking people, instead of issues, just weakens your argument. Or, just for something different, be confident enough in what you’re doing to ignore the criticism. If you don’t credit the reviewer, don’ respond publicly – just ignore it. Drawing attention to nasty things someone said about you on the internet doesn’t create anything but antipathy. And I’m pretty sure we’ve got enough of that already.

If it works, do it again. if it doesn’t, do it again. And don’t feed the trolls.

Your EVP (and your employer brand) should be an echo. It should be an echo of how people feel every day about working for you, about how you treat them as an employer, about how working with you adds to their lives. It should not be propaganda, which sets out to convince. It should not be a campaign for change or revolution. It should be the quiet affirmation of something people may not already realise – this is how it feels to be a part of your business. (I can’t over-emphasise the word feels enough either- the EVP isn’t about what reason, but emotion).

When you’re applying the brand, it should be with a light touch. It should feel like an accent. Whether you’re taking it as far as some (designing forms and technological interactions to connect more meaningfully with people) or simply implementing an EVP at the basic level, the rule always applies. You don’t need the town crier. You need a quiet ‘yes’ whispered in the ear of your staff. That’s why it works – because you’re not selling them, you’re reminding them.

Externally, a heavier touch is needed, but still nothing excessive. People are convinced by emotional connections – you’re not offering them a bargain-basement deal, so don’t advertise like you are. Go out for talent by using different means of creating an emotional impression. Draw them into conversation, so that their interaction with you becomes a human exchange. After all, this is the brand that’s made up of people, so it’s much easier to be conversational and honest. Talented people looking at your organisation should see no difference between the story you’re giving them and the way you conduct yourselves (both on and offline) with other talent. They should see that this is who you are, and, once they’ve joined you, see that this is STILL who you are.

Most people won’t notice that you’ve made your intranet more user-friendly, or that you’ve made it easier to change their details themselves, or that you’ve restructured your career development framework. The won’t notice the specifics – they’ll notice that when they interact with the business as employees, it feels like they expect it to feel.

There’s another post coming up about how this applies to your employer brand in social media, but for now I’ll say this – your EVP is supposedly the aggregate of every thought your employees have ever had about what it’s like to work for you. Social media lets them publish those thoughts. Now, if you could read every conversation every single employee of yours had online about working for you, would they match?

Traditional sourcing methods are still delivering good candidates, everyone’s talking about social media and its “potential” as a sourcing tool, newspaper ads (like the newspapers themselves) are dwindling, and more and more people are looking at referrals, alumni programs and human-contact sourcing as viable, cost effective alternatives.

As the talent pool shrinks, there are seemingly two schools of thought about how to tackle the market: (a) talent as an acquired commercial asset and (b) talent as an investment in human potential. Each has its strengths and ROI, and each is viable as a resourcing business model. One recognises contribution to the bottom line, and one is more about contribution to the business culture.

There’s something we tend to forget about people when we look at them as resources, or candidates, or applicants, or generations. They’re people. They’re individuals in possession of souls and dreams and passions, fears, doubts and their own little peccadilloes. And if we did more to understand those passions and motivations, we’d make better hiring decisions, find better mentors and build better careers for our people. We’d also build an employer brand that doesn’t just focus on people, but maximises their potential and their humanity at the same time.

A lot of people talk about social media as a way to get candidates, but very few people (by comparison to the average) talk about using online social tools to build communities. Some of this is fear – fear of empowering employees to speak for the company, fear of backlash, fear of negative commentary. Some of it is a resourcing issue – monitoring and continuously engaging with a talent community is not free; it takes time, knowledge and skills that are still pretty scarce in the recruiting world. And some of it is ignorance – ignorance of why people like communities, of how communities can help the bottom line, of how a community transforms an individual’s passion and interest into something approaching a cause.

Your community is a massive part of your brand, because it’s the organically grown experience of all your people. That community has a massive influence, and tremendous power to motivate, inspire, revive and foster its members. It’s your culture that lives your values and promotes additional work from the right people. It’s your culture that makes the people who don’t fit in, stand out, and eventually self-select to go elsewhere.  Go inside any company and you’ll find acolytes of the corporate culture who seem overly passionate about the culture by any scale. Those people define the culture, and are advocates for you beyond all expectation. So why not let them interface with the people who want to work for you?

It ties back into building a one-to-one relationship between the business and every employee (or potential employee). The business isn’t bigger than the sum of the people who make up the staff. Your people are literally the company, and from an employment standpoint, are the biggest part of being an employee. The company is a smaller part of the equation than the culture. People rarely love companies because of the task – they love companies because of the team. And that’s fundamental to attracting, and retaining, the best people for you.

Plenty of companies built pretty employer brands – slick ads, nice careers pages, a nice tagline and a level of consistency and visual compliance only dreamed of by dictators around the world. For many, it was an attraction strategy – better ads get better candidates, right? Well, no. Honest ads get better candidates, because the people you want might not care about the design, or read all the beautifully phrased copy, or be inspired by your imagery. That might not be what your people want, whatever your agency says. In the war for share of mind with time-poor talent, meaningful trumps pretty, every day.

Your brand isn’t a marketing exercise. It’s your soul, the distillation of the experience of all your people. It’s the emotional experience you want like-minded people in the market to catch, and hunger for. It isn’t the marketing – it’s the attitude. The execution is your branding, but not your brand. And all the marketing in the world won’t help you create an experience as powerful as one human connecting with another about a passion or a belief. Let your people communicate to the market, and the talent, the people who fit what you’re about – they’ll find you. And when they do, and they’re welcomed in with open arms, they’ll start to love you. And isn’t that what you want?

Twitter at its best is about interpersonal connection. I chuckle whenever I read that Twitter, Facebook et al are about narcissism. It’s not narcissism to believe that you have an opinion worth sharing. Five minutes interacting on Twitter shows you that Twitter’s real value isn’t about broadcasting. It’s about connecting, about finding a balance between listening and talking. To broadcast on Twitter is to tacitly assume that your audience has nothing to say of interest to you. Don’t we already have enough websites that can do that?

If you’re going to recruit from Twitter, then you need to think about how you can connect with, add value to and engage the candidates you want to find. You also need to know that your online reputation, particularly in this world, depends on your capacity to do all those things. If you’re friends with someone in the Twitterverse right until they’ve started the role you put them in, your online reputation is going to take a nose-dive. Social media connections aren’t like the one-way traffic of a sent resume. They need to be maintained, grown and nurtured.
Like LinkedIn, Facebook and Myspace (to name a few) the recruitment angle is there to be expolited. If you’re going to succeed at building a reputation as someone worth talking to as a recruiter ina field, this isn’t just another channel. It’s a whole different way of interacting with your people. It’s conversation multiplied by SMS multiplied by the atom bomb. And if you try and use it for a one night stand, instead of a relationship, you’re going to find it very tough to do long term.
Sure it’s full of people who might be the right person for your vacancy. They’re there to connect with other people. If you can’t recruit in a way that respects and takes advantage of that, you’re in for a world of online hurt.