Memos by Daggerfinn | The #1 Employer Branding Podcast

70% of US households now have a pet - catalyzed by an uptick in demand as we transitioned to more work-from-home and flexible work arrangements over the last 24 months. As a result, demand for digital veterinarian services have risen too, especially as the risk from the coronavirus refuses to wane. So do digital vet startups have the staying power to stick around long after the end of the pandemic...

A great employer brand needs. tobe rooted in an honest assessment of the employee experience. Amazon is ending a program where it paid workers to tweet positively about the employee experience. This is good in both the short-term and the long-term because it allows the company to attract the right kind of workers now while building something more sustainable for the future. To learn more about Dag...

A great employer brand is able to not only attract the right kind of talent to your organization but also repel the kind of talent that isn't a great fit. Ensuring that your leadership and staff are aware and familiar with what your organization is and wants to present to the market is the key to employer value proposition (EVP) development and execution.  To learn more about Daggerfinn's  employe...

The entire purpose of investing in, and building up, an employer brand of note is to attract the best talent to your organization - and then convince them to join your company. The hard part, especially in today's hyper-competitive world, is attracting candidates and convincing them to choose you - when there are so many offers out there. So what's the best approach to convincing candidates to cho...

The big banks, such as Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and JP Morgan Chase, all saw enormous increases in activities across investing, trading, and M&A over the past 18 months, leading to increases in hiring and compensation.  Compensation has had to rise to meet the demands of the labor shortage and the Great Resignation but also to reflect wage inflation over the past few months. But what are the long...

A great employer brand is built on feedback from employees and candidates alike. The benefit of tapping into the wisdom and thoughts of your organization's employees, however, is in gathering a true sense of the current state of employment at your place of work. Through employee experience (EX) testing, organizations tap into the collective insight of their employees and can gain a competitive adv...

An easy misstep that business leaders can fall into is trying to drive revenue growth and business growth via expansion into areas that seem like they are value-added, but are actually resource restrictions and, ultimately, dilute the brand and market position of a company.  Brand clarity solutions allow businesses to get a very clear understanding, through customer data and third-party expert ins...

The Great Resignation has been all over the news for the last 18 months, and a question that is probably on peoples' minds is when will it end?  One of our clients at Daggerfinn is currently going through their beginning of year media push, and we put together a comprehensive 2022 outlook survey for their PR and communications efforts. The findings of this report are interesting, especially as it...

Controlling your organization's messaging in the media is crucial, especially as it relates to how to build your employer brand. How candidates, employees, and customers view your organization in the media can make of break the experience of working with and for your organization. Therefore, strategic placements and press engagement is an important pillar of a great employer branding infrastructur...

Two pillar key performance indicators (KPI) of employer branding are cost-per-hire and time-to-hire. These two indicators function as a bird's eye look at how your organization is doing from a talent attraction and hiring process perspective. That said, the hiring process - and all its details - is often overlooked as a point of differentiation for organizations. And the candidate experience can r...

Understanding the difference between feel and real is crucial when it comes to standing up an employer brand that will actually work in the long run for your company. Conducting a thorough brand perception audit or employer brand audit gives companies an objective, third-party look at how your employees, candidates, and the market perceives your company as a hiring organization - and these insight...

There are many ways to grow a company, and different styles of growth tend to appeal to different leaders in different ways. The New York Times has a track record of pursuing growth via acquisition in efforts to achieve very ambitious goals - and the recent announcement of their plan to purchase sports media site The Athletic for $550 Million is definitely on-brand. To learn more about Daggerfinn'...

Hiring the right talent for your organization is one of the most important factors that drive the success of a company. But it's one thing to be able to identify the kind of workers and talent you need at your organization, and another thing to be able to attract them to your workplace at a reasonable cost. This is where employer branding comes into the picture.  A common question asked is what is...

Chipotle, the popular fast-casual restaurant, has unveiled a new plant-based chorizo offering in addition to new lifestyle bowls, and the go-to-market strategy is one that marketers for companies of all sizes can learn a lot from.  First, the offering attaches itself to growing momentum around Meatless Mondays, which is clever from a PR and visibility standpoint. Second, the offering plays to the...

Starbucks, the popular coffee chain, is mandating its employees to be vaccinated or submit to weekly testing by February 9th, as it chooses its path in dealing with the new coronavirus variant and uptick. Is this a big deal, and will we see more companies mandate this for their employees?  The answer is nuanced and unclear - but there are important factors to keep in mind as you think about this q...

We've taken a hard look at the labor shortage from the point of view of the minimum wage over the last few months, but unsurprisingly, the labor shortage affects all aspects of the global economy - and even 'sexy' industries, like semiconductor manufacturing.  Where manufacturers are in dire need of highly-skilled engineers and highly-educated talent, the reality is that the systems are not in pla...

A recent trend in branding has been a shift to flatter, more simple logos. Lots of companies have adopted this approach: Facebook, Saint Laurent, Warner Brothers, Burger King, McDonald's, PBS, Berluti, to name a few. But why have companies decided to rebrand? And why does it seem like so many are rebranding at the same time. The key is in understanding where marketing and the consumer is going - m...

A few years ago Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments, made media headlines when he announced that he would be raising the minimum wage at his credit card processing startup to $70,000 per year. Today, a few years later, we're curious as to what happened to the company and whether the minimum wage tactic had the kind of business effect they wanted. To learn more about Daggerfinn's  employer branding...

MGM Resorts has announced that it will be allowing job seekers to try out jobs at the company via virtual reality (VR), which brings up some great employer branding questions around how companies will use these nascent technologies in the workplace going forward.  VR, AR, and the metaverse are making waves at the moment as some of the world's most well-known companies are transitioning their corpo...

It's been a difficult couple of weeks for Better.com and its CEO, and in the latest news to come out of the company, it has been revealed that the CEO will be taking time off, effectively immediately.  What does this signal to the market? Most likely that the company knows it has made a giant blunder. More concerning, however, is whether the company's employer brand will be able to absorb the shor...

It's been very difficult to pinpoint exactly what the underlying cause of the labor shortage is - which is one of the fundamental reasons why it's an issue that hasn't been solved too.  But, here at Daggerfinn, we've identified 5 real reasons why companies are struggling to hire and why workers are choosing not to return to the workforce. To learn more about Daggerfinn's  employer branding  and gr...

There probably has never been a better time to be a transit worker in New York (or Houston) as retired workers are being lured back to the workforce, sometimes with offers of $35,000 for 3 months of work.  And this phenomenon is happening all across the country as organizations and companies begin to realize that the labor shortage is difficult to shake and that large gestures may be required to a...

Zillow employees, especially those who have been notified of layoffs, are reeling at the news - and by extension, this is hurting the company's employer brand and employee experience. A company's offboarding process is an often overlooked part of the entire employment experience, but it is crucial to get right when thinking about a positive experience for employees. A poor offboarding experience c...

The US Department of Labor announced that it will be raising wages for US federal workers on government contracts to $15 per hour starting in January of 2022. This comes as a result of two main reasons. The first is a reaction to inflation, and how workers' paychecks just don't go as far as they used to. The second, this is an acknowledgement that the government is now competing for talent in the...

Starbucks has unveiled a new retail concept in the New York City market called Starbucks Pick and has collaborated with Amazon Go to leverage its cashierless technologies to provide a near human-less experience for coffee drinkers.  But this brings up interesting questions around brand codes and brand promises, and whether the value proposition of the Starbucks brand is diminished when things get...