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 Winston Churchill was visibly upset during a meeting with Josef Stalin during WWII. Churchill had just learned that a family friend had died. He apologized to Stalin for being carried away by the death of his friend while the Russian people were losing millions during the war.
“The death of one man is a tragedy,” Stalin remarked. “The death of millions is a statistic.”
Stalin understood that stories count more than numbers.
Stalin understood that stories count more than numbers.
Stalin was coldly correct. Many of us remember the book and movie about Anne Frank who died in the Holocaust. Hearing about the millions who also died doesn’t have the emotional impact that this young girl’s story continues to have. If you visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., you will be given a “passport” that bears the name and background of someone killed by the Nazis. The creators of the museum understood that the number of deaths is overwhelming, but that individual stories make these crimes more real. (I still think about the Seventh Day Adventist conscientious objector whose background I was given.)
What does this have to do with recruiting and employment?
Lately it seems that the field has become obsessed with metrics. Vendors claim that their dashboard or their tracking method or their search engine optimization technique will build your employer brand. And while all of these can help convey the brand and measure its uptake, they cannot and will not build the brand. Only stories can do that.
To go back to Comrade Stalin’s observation, statistics can quantify your employer brand, but they do not embody it. For that you must have stories about real people in your workplace.
An example of how employers have forgotten this can be found on Twitter. Follow most any employer’s tweet stream and the messages typically contain a job title, location and a short URL linking you to the careers Web site where you can learn more.
In today’s economy, these tweets are bound to attract a number of applicants. But are they the best applicants? And, to be brutally honest, does any recruiter really need more candidates to sift through nowadays?
Far better are the employers who share some of what it’s like to work in the organization, alerting followers to events where they will appear, even admitting occasionally that the poster is having a bad hair day. We can relate to other people and their foibles, and we begin to bond with these people much more than with an anonymous corporate entity that simply spews out the 21st century equivalent of newspaper help-wanted classified ads.
Think of the great employer brands today and what springs to mind are the stories associated with them. Southwest Airlines? You think of the flight attendants who tell jokes during the safety announcements. SAS Institute? The CEO going around at 5:00 PM and telling people to knock off and go home. Starbucks? Read “How Starbucks Saved My Life” by Michael Gates Gill. Apple? Steve Jobs (who, even though he could be a holy living terror, pushed people to do their best work). Ritz-Carlton? “Ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.” You get the idea.
What stories do people tell and re-tell about your organization? What processes do you have for identifying and archiving those stories in order to perpetuate your culture? Could you summarize that body of knowledge into a short phrase (< seven words) that could serve as a rallying cry for your employees (à la “Freedom Begins with Me” at Southwest)?
This concept was neatly summarized by another famous person of the 20th century, Albert Einstein. The physicist once observed that, “Not everything that counts can be counted; and not everything that can be counted, counts.”
About the author
D. Mark Hornung is Senior Vice President at Bernard Hodes Group and leader of the Hodes employer brand practice. Mark has studied and taught branding for over twenty years, starting as a copywriter and later award-winning creative director. In 1995, he joined J. Walter Thompson and was privileged to attend the JWT Brand School in Chicago. Briefly seduced by the siren of the dot com, Mark returned to employment marketing with Hodes in 2003, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He writes the company’s blog, “Hodes Voices” and speaks at conferences throughout the world on his passion, employer branding.
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