Tag: branding

Sneak Peek!

December 9, 2024

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I am working on two book projects. It is likely I will self-publish the books, and as soon as next year. The “things I’ve heard in job interviews” is further along than the “stuff I’ve seen in concerts” concept, so that one will get published first. Here is a sneak peak of three stories that will be in the book.

When the candidate’s phone rings…

Instead of saving the best for last, I will start with one of the strangest things I’ve ever encountered. We were hiring a content writer for the team, this writer would be one of my peers, and I was one of the interviewers. It was a few days before Thanksgiving. How did I recall that factoid? Because the candidate’s phone rang during the interview. She glanced at her phone and took the call, diving into a lengthy discussion about logistics and menu-planning for Thanksgiving dinner. Her call went on for about 10 minutes. Remember, she’s the candidate and is taking a call during an interview in my office! Boundaries? None. A few minutes later she ended the call but did not apologize. You can bet who didn’t get the job…

I’m a candidate just like you!

This was something my dad would have described as a Rod Serling Moment. Rod Serling was the genius creator of The Twilight Zone TV series. He also created Night Gallery, which played on similar themes. Serling was a brilliant author with a deadpan delivery. This story would have fit in well with the Rod Serling canon. Back in 2010, I applied for a director of marketing communications position at a trade association that was based here in North Texas. I matched the requirements well and was one of the first to apply. Three months went by, and I never got an interview. Adding insult to insult, the association re-posted the position on their website and on job boards. The position had one change – they used my email address and cell phone as the contact information! Did they hire me and not let me know? Soon I was getting calls and emails from other candidates to ask about the status of their applications. Unfortunately, I had no answers. My calls, emails, and personal visits to the association (their office was a mailbox in a UPS Store) all went unanswered. Can you hear the Twilight Zone theme playing in your head?

Shall we speak Klingon?

Technical people such as programmers are a breed unto themselves. They can be very big into science fiction. I am too, but within limits. Imagine my surprise when a candidate for a website programmer role asked me if we could conduct the interview in Klingon! Since my knowledge of Klingon is nonexistent and nobody else at the company is at all conversant, I quickly answered, “English would be fine.” While the candidate may have gained bonus points for totally out of the box creativity, it quickly evaporated when he admitted he had never visited our website. He had no idea what we did nor had any notion of what he would be programming. Priorities? None. Asking to speak in a made-up foreign language while ignoring the basic reading material for the role is a great way to get yourself withdrawn from consideration.

There are plenty more of these stories. I’ve been offered a cigarette, given an incorrect location, called out for dressing too flashy, and more. But I’ve given too, such as offering to take the drug test there on the spot, or helping put up holiday decorations in the lobby because I was early, and explaining why a company’s recent marketing campaign would tank (and I was right!!).

Candidates are customers, too

July 9, 2024

My inspiration for two upcoming book projects is “I Killed Pink Floyd’s Pig” by Beau Phillips. His book is an often-hilarious collection of short stories from a life spent in the music radio business. While I never drank beer from or with the late Dickie Betts nor discussed hedgehogs with Robert Plant, I enjoyed his story-telling style of brief (usually 1 to 2 pages) anecdotes. One book project is about things I’ve seen at many decades of attending and performing at rock concerts. The other is what I’ve seen or heard in job interviews, both as a hiring manager and candidate. Some of the candidate experience I’ve had don’t apply to either concept, so I’ve included a few in this post.

I was ghosted…and then hounded. In early March, I applied for a VP Marketing role at a healthcare SaaS company. Minutes later I received an autoreply email to confirm that my resume was in their system. That was the last I heard from them. Until yesterday. Yesterday morning – 4 months after I applied for their job – they sent me an email to participate in a survey about my candidate experience. I was at an offsite meeting in the morning, so I planned to complete the survey when I returned home. A few hours later they sent me a text to remind me to complete the survey. Now here’s where it gets a little obnoxious. After the text, they called me to remind me to complete the survey! Not a robocall, a real live call center agent called me. But in all these months I’ve heard nothing from them about the job, despite calling them several times to check on the status of my application. The agent who called me was apparently with their survey partner and knew nothing outside of the script. As a marketing professional who has been in the CX industry for years, I totally applaud the concept of surveying. But my candidate experience was practically nonexistent until yesterday. An email, a text, and a phone call within a few hours, to survey me on what? The company would have done better to follow up with candidates at points during the process. Opportunity squandered.

Do you have to kick me twice? Go ahead, send me a rejection email. Tell me I’m not a fit for this role. But please only tell me once. I’ve seen an increasing number of companies that send two or more rejection messages for the same role. Sending two identical emails is probably a glitch in your applicant tracking system, which is regrettable but it happens. I’ve seen Marketo, HubSpot, and Pardot do it too. But sending two different emails, sometimes a day or two apart, is just plain heartless. Come on employers, do better.

Master class in dissatisfaction. My worst application experience in years was applying to a marketing leadership role at a well-known healthcare company. Their application took more than two hours to complete. Not only did they require excruciating details such as the street addresses and phone numbers of every company I’ve ever worked for, their buggy application made me go back and re-key entire paragraphs. As I noted in a previous blog post, there are a lot of off-the-shelf Applicant Tracking systems out there now. No company should have to build their own. If it is not your core business, then work with an expert.

Bottom line – prospects and customers interact with your brand on multiple platforms. Companies have an opportunity to showcase their brand when inviting people to apply for jobs. Candidates are customers, too. Make the candidate experience so good that they’ll want to tell the world about your brand.

Do you have an irrational brand attachment?

July 22, 2010

Everybody has one. There is one brand that you will buy no matter what. Perhaps they dazzled you with great service, or their reliability is out of this world. Maybe their stuff is just plain cool.

I have a couple of irrational brand attachments for very different reasons. The first one is Dell. I have been a fanatical Dell customer for 10 years, and it was early in my customer life that I became one. My hard drive suddenly stopped. Dead. My attempts to revive it were futile. When I called Dell, I was floored to hear that a local agent would be calling me to arrange to have the new hard drive installed. The story gets better – the agent informed me that my hard drive was obsolete and their smallest one now had twice the storage space. When I inquired about the cost, the agent answered “nothing, it is under warranty.” Within 24 hours (on a sub-zero night in February), I had a gigantic hard drive installed and ready to go. That is dazzling service!

My other irrational brand attachment is to Fender. They’ve been in the electric guitar business for 60+ years and didn’t get to be the leader (sorry, Gibson) by accident. Fender guitars sound great at first grab – you don’t have to do anything to them to get an amazing sound and feel. Every Fender I’ve owned has been an incredible out of the box experience.

There you go. Two ways to build an irrational brand attachment. You can make your customer service an unexpected delight. You can provide an expectation that the product will be wonderful. There are many other ways. Pick yours.

Only 57 channels? Is anything on?

June 16, 2010

Think back to the good old days. Remember when you used Twitter as the bastion of refuge from the clutter of other channels? Time to think about that channel plan again. Twitter has more than 120 million users and adds at least 6 million new ones per month. Even with only one tenth of its users actively tweeting, Twitter has not only become the clutter, it has basically become full to capacity. Marketers who choose to use Twitter are faced with a double whammy of a high noise level and (so it seems to this user) a high instance of site unavailability. So what is a marketer to do? Do you find another channel that is less crowded, or soldier on with increasingly crowded and unusable channels, or what?

Twitter is just a channel rather than a means to an end. Marketers cannot live by Twitter alone. The same can be said for Foursquare and even Facebook. Just because one of your TV networks (take GSN, one of my guilty pleasures, for example) may experience some overloading, that does not mean that your TV set is broken or your satellite/cable service is down. Switch to another channel and see what you get.

Think long-term about changes in your market and how your customer behavior will evolve, and try to forecast where they are going next. See if the channel still fits.

Call it what you like, but I call it…

June 11, 2010

This must truly be the end of an era. Or is it? General Motors recently distributed an internal memo, instructing employees to “communicate our brand as Chevrolet,” effectively stopping the use of the name Chevy when referring to their long established Chevrolet brand. Then, they backtracked. Claiming that their original memo was “poorly worded,” General Motors clarified by saying they wanted to use the name Chevrolet as they expanded into global markets.

This brings up a host of questions:

  • What is going on here? The names Chevrolet and Chevy have been pretty much synonymous for 100 years. This is one of the world’s oldest brands.
  • Is dropping the shorter name going to hurt the brand? Only a scandal of Toyota-like proportions could hurt such an established name.
  • What is General Motors afraid of? Is it is doubtful that anyone would mistake a similarly named company (OK, there is a Mexican restaurant chain with a similar name, but their food tastes better than the car) if they only used two of the three syllables.
  • Has General Motors done anything wrong? They did what nearly every major corporation has done at least once – issued a statement and then clarified. Clarity is good. The original memo was described by a General Motors executive as a “rough draft” that got out, so now they are stating what they really mean.
  • Isn’t it still an honor to have customers name your product? Many brand and company names (think IBM, KFC, and FedEx) evolved into their current forms because customers knew them by a less formal name. Shortening the name doesn’t cheapen the brand at all, rather it increases the customer’s affinity for and identity with the brand. Keep the brand top of mind, regardless of the syllables used.