Employer Brand Should Matter...But it Doesn't

Employers are always complaining about the talent crisis while treating their existing employees like garbage.

Every enterprise has the same platitudes.

”We’re a family.”

“We hire the best people and trust them to do the best work.”

When I worked in the fashion retail hereditary oligarchy and the new, wholly inexperienced and unqualified by every measure VP of Supply Chain tech arrived, his first action was to demote my boss and fire one other director. Despite a very uncomfortable first conversation, he divulged this to me because he wanted me to act as a spy and tell him secrets. Of course, he had no idea that leading with an abrasive and transactional approach in the first 30 minutes of meeting a person might impact their willingness to trust him. The only faster way to disseminate information in an organization than saying, “Don’t tell anyone, this is a secret,” is to be an absolute muppet and treat someone you just met like garbage before saying so.

The following morning, I discussed these “secrets” with my closest confidant on the leadership team. I trusted him completely, and it was immediately apparent that we all had an existential risk of having to work for this absolute potato.

Just a couple short weeks later Mr Potato texted me that he’d be late for our weekly 1:1. He texted me this when he was already five minutes late and I was sitting in the room waiting for him to arrive. I’m sure he gets big mad when his lessers leave him waiting because of professionalism or whatever.

He walked in twenty minutes late for our thirty-minute 1:1 meeting and said

Potato: This won’t take long. I will put (demote) you under (the person he hand-picked from his last job), and she will teach you how to be a Technical Program Manager.

Me: Okay then.

Potato: How do you feel about that?

Me: I have feelings coherent with being demoted, and after the recent HR debacle that changed my pay scale, my feelings are coherent with two subsequent unearned and unjustified demotions. In short, I feel similar feelings as the ones I suspect you’d have if I told you I would put you under <person> so you could learn an entry-level role.

Potato: What should I do instead?

Me: You should promote me to the role for which I was hired.

Potato: Can you explain the role and how it should function?

Me: I could if we had time, but you’ve used up the ten minutes you allowed for our thirty-minute meeting. Perhaps we could start on time next time you plan on demoting me?

Potato: Okay, fair; why don’t you write up the JD, and we’ll review it at our next 1:1

Just like that I’d George Constaza'd my demotion.

Seinfeld fans might remember the episode in which George tries to break up with his girlfriend, who refuses. He is flummoxed and has no response. This is how the VP Potato responded.

I was glad I did this because he sent an email announcing the demotions and firing a few days later. That email was immediately leaked to Geekwire. I was happy my name wasn’t on Geekwire announcing my demotion to an entry-level role, especially one the “director” he hand-picked was poorly suited to teach me, given she had considerably less expertise than I did.

I was not the leak, but I immediately knew who the leak probably was.

A leader should know his organization and who the players are. An actual leader would have built rapport with his inherited leadership team to avoid such embarrassing outcomes.

Potato was livid about this leak. He railed to me in our shared office.

Potato: These leaks are immature and unprofessional; I want to know who leaked that email, and these leaks must stop!

Me: Yeah, employer brand is important, especially with new leadership. I think it’s reasonable to expect leaks, and instead of being angry when truthful things leak out that embarrass us, we might choose to focus on doing things we’re proud to have leaked. We missed our hiring goal last year by over ten engineers. We have an obvious morale and employer-brand problem. I’ve been working on addressing it for some time now. Maybe we can work on it together?

Potato: This childish bullshit must stop immediately.

So, yeah, he wasn’t keen. But the fact is, even if it’s not as egregious as a Geekwire front-page story, towns are small. Labor talks to each other, and that fashion retailer in particular was already suffering from one of the worst reputations in the technology enterprise in Seattle.

Nepotistically hiring mean-spirited, inept, authoritarian potatoes who don’t know their asses from how Cloudwatch Factors into things doesn’t improve an employer's reputation.

I remember a leadership offsite wherein the SVP who hired his best potato announced that he and senior executives knew we had a reputational problem. They knew that the primary retailer had a rating of 4.6 on Glassdoor and that the retailer’s tech org had a dismal rating of 1.6.

SVP: We could consolidate the two and have a higher average rating, but we’re committed to doing it right.

A few months later, SVP’s bro was hired in the CTO role, and he instantly began announcing we’d no longer have separate “<retail> tech” branding. Unsurprisingly, the “<retailer> Tech” entry quickly disappeared. I guess they did it “right” after all.

Ultimately, as long as we eschew accountability for executives and allow a revolving door and reputational protection for them in service of protecting the stock price, these problems will persist. The reputation of the transient senior executives is more important than the organization's reputation as an employer. If the purpose of the corporation were shareholder or customer value, there would actually be some accountability for these muppets. Still, that's unlikely to happen until labor wrests power back from the plutocrats and hereditary oligarchs.