What defines a strong Employer Branding & What we can learn from Open-Source principles?

In simple words: Your employer branding should allow people to get to know your organization same as you do yourself.

Your employer brand should give people a straight-up and raw inside look into the life at your organization, your culture, how you work, think and the people behind your critical mission.

This allows people to get a real feel for what it’s like to be a part of your organization.

Only this way, people can understand if they are a good fit or not.

We all seek people who take ownership right?

So we need to give people the right insights so they can make good decisions for themselves.

All your efforts should be to avoid painting a beautiful picture that doesn’t exist.

It’s like bad sales habits or dating a person… When you oversell or make up stuff, people who you successfully convert will sooner or later realise the truth.

So you sell yourself for 180% and even if 100% is the truth it’s still bad.

We all know that nobody is perfect. After all we are humans and not Gods and they aren’t perfect either ??

Sharing The Good, The Bad & The Ugly is what makes humans trust humans.

Here is a simple example:

Some years ago, I supported an early-stage startup as interim Head of Talent…

Throughout the initial conversations, I realised that there were leadership issues affecting the culture. The energy and performance were at a low and people started leaving.

So I asked the CTO about it and he was super open with me about everything and we started reflecting together on how we could address this. From that moment on, I knew I was in the right place. It didn’t matter to me where they were at, but the level of honesty and the will to learn and improve motivated me a lot.

It was what created the initial bond of trust between us. Me and the organization.

When we got started with hiring, I had to get my pitch ready to start the reach out, but there was no career page, nothing. So I went back to all my notes to come up with something… while going through the doc I felt again how powerful all this information was to me in building trust.

So I said to myself: Aren’t we trying to achieve the same result with candidates? Let’s start sharing this! It could have the same effect!

So I went to the CEO and CTO and pitched my idea! They agreed, but I think didn’t fully realize the depth of information I had documented there.

So, long story short: I shaped the doc and started sending it out to leads during my sourcing and guess the reaction?

The majority didn’t talk about the great mission, tech-stack or benefits… They reacted exactly to those questions:

Why are people leaving the team?

We’ve received so much positive feedback about how transparent we are and how refreshing it is that a company is honest about not being perfect.

So we took what was at the current situation BAD for us and turned it into something GOOD to attract new talent.

Throughout my time there, the FAQ doc became the main reason for talent to enter the interview process with us.

And the best: People knew we had nothing to hide. So they were more open with us too.

What we can learn from Open-Source principles?

You have probably heard about open-source in the context of code and software only. But, why is it just limited to those areas if the principles have led to so much innovation and success?

• Basically, our whole industry is built on. ?
• Our infrastructure runs on it. Without it, you wouldn’t be reading that article. ??
• Open-source is everywhere. Jesus was open-source ???and the church probably like proprietary software. ??

Don’t get me wrong, I am not religious at all, but I strongly believe that the open-source mindset can be the answer to a lot of problems we are facing in the world.

Open-source just needs to be redeemed from the dark realms of our code editors and be let out into the light.

Before we continue, here is a powerful example:

One of the most famous open-source stories is probably Linux, but I want to share a more recent event with you that has shaped today’s industry a lot.

I am not a fan of Facebook, but they did something genius back in 2013 (almost 10 years ago! OMG). When Facebook got big they had to build software on the web on a scale and complexity as we had never seen it before. They needed to be able to iterate extremely fast and build software on a rapid scale that was robust and highly performant.

The Facebook engineer Jordan Walke invented the UI library React.js together with his team and they smartly decided to share that with the entire ecosystem.

Today, React.js has thousands of contributors and is used in hundreds of thousands and maybe millions of websites and apps.

It has shaped a big part of our industry of how we are creating software today.

I guess from that point onwards Facebook never had to worry about finding talent again.

The result: They have created an endless stream of (trained!) talent for themselves and have thousands of people indirectly working for them while contributing to the project.

OK, great story! But how does all that connect to Employer Branding?

In my point of view, these are the main principles of the open-source mindset :

1. Transparency

2. Collaboration (aka Contribution)

3. Community

4. Inclusive meritocracy (aka Diversity)

Going back to what defines a good Employer Branding, if you are transparent about your values, how you work, think and your challenges, you enable future potential talent to identify if they would be a good match for your culture and if they are able and motivated to contribute to your critical mission or NOT.

If you start collaborating and sharing more openly with the community outside your organization, you gain more diverse perspectives on your beliefs, challenges and ideas.

The most impactful result:

You will start resonating with the exact talent of similar (and diverse!) mindset and skill you are desperately seeking to hire.

Sharing what has brought you value and success is likely to impact others positively as well.

Open-source is a win-win for everyone. Inside and outside of your organization.

Ok, I am with you, but how would that look in practice?

You can (and definitely should) start applying those principles inside your organization first.

There are also different communities (groups, teams, hierarchies, closed cycles) within your organization where you can destroy silos by creating more transparency to enable more collaboration and diverse thinking.

Yes, you could also develop another React.js, but that’s rather unlikely ??. There are much simpler ways how you can get started. And, you don’t have to cover the full set of the principles described above to positively impact your Employer Branding and your Culture.

Transparency is the foundation and the enabler for all other things to follow.

Now, please forget about the term Employer Branding… at least for a while ??

Probably, the most popular example of an organization being radically open about their culture is GitLab .

GitLab are the Godmothers & Fathers of open-sourcing company culture.

Born as a remote and async organization, the founder Sid Sijbrandij started very early on documenting how he works and how everything runs in the company. With his example in leading the organization so openly, he quickly affected the entire mindset of each and everyone within and outside of his organization, probably affecting thousands of founders in building successful remote companies.

Check out their Company Handbook and Remote Playbook .

And with their new Venture fund Open Core Ventures , Sid Sijbrandij and Betty Ma, CFA are empowering open-source founders to build open-source culture ventures! Love that!

Conclusions

Going back to the GitLab example, we can see that Sid, the founder never really focussed on Employer Branding. His main focus was to bring value to his people to build a successful company.

Just by open-sourcing everything, he and GitLab became internationally famous for their great culture and extremely high operational excellence.

I haven’t asked Sid personally, but I am pretty sure they are receiving a lot of applications from strong and motivated talent from all over the world.

Here are some projects I have built myself:

With all due respect to GitLab, I started building my first alike handbooks with startups before I knew about GitLab myself… ???But ever since they have been a big inspiration to me on my way forward!

• Clipboard Health’s Culture Hub
• Wonder.me Handbook
• HelloBetter Handbook
• Layer Handbook

Do you like to learn more about how to get started yourself?

I am happy to offer you a free 30-minute call to get to know you and see how your Employer Brading can benefit from open-sourcing your culture. ??

https://calendly.com/ffeichtinger/meet30

Ahoy!

Flo ??

#employerbranding #opensource #culture #companyculture #startups #remote #remotework #remoteculture #transparency #transparencymatters