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Recruitment is a big part of what HR teams do, but its no secret that it can be both challenging and expensive. According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), replacing an employee can cost a company anywhere from six to nine months of their salary. For highly trained positions, research shows that number can climb to as much as 213% of their salary! No matter your companys size or industry, thats a serious expense. The good news? A brand-savvy HR team can help bring these costs down. By addressing the key concerns of potential employees and attracting top-tier candidates who are a great fit, they can save valuable time and money in the recruitment and onboarding process. One of the biggest obstacles for job seekers, according to LinkedIns employer branding research, is not knowing what its like to work at a company before applying. Candidates are three times more likely to trust what current employees say about an organization over the company itself. Plus, 75% of job seekers evaluate an employers brand before deciding to apply, with over half checking out the companys website and social media to learn more. By tapping into these insights and building a strong employer brand, HR teams can turn recruitment from a costly challenge into a more streamlined and effective process. How brand-savvy HR professionals can lower the cost of talent acquisition Unlike traditional HR roles focused on administrative tasks, brand-savvy HR professionals combine HR expertise with branding skills like marketing, storytelling, and people engagement. They use this blend to drive better ROI on HR investments and make a real impact on their companys bottom line. These HR teams know when to handle branding efforts internally and when to collaborate with their branding teamsa synergy I like to call Bhranding (Branding + HR). One of the most effective ways brand-savvy HR teams cut recruitment costs is by applying the same engagement strategies marketers usenot to attract customers, but to create a workplace culture where employees feel excited and invested in their work. This kind of engaged culture becomes the foundation of a strong employer brand, naturally drawing top talent in the industry to the organization. And the benefits are undeniable. The same LinkedIn research shows that a solid employer brand can reduce turnover by 28%, cut hiring costs by 50%, and attract 50% more qualified candidates. Even better, it can halve the time it takes to fill positions, saving countless hours of work. All of these improvements add up, translating into significant time and cost savingspotentially millions for larger companies. How savvy HR teams attract top talent Brand-savvy HR professionals dont just stop at creating an engaged workplace culture that attracts top talentthey go a step further. Proactive HR teams use strategies that were once the domain of professional marketers to actively target potential candidates. This means building impactful career websites, creating engaging social media content, and even managing entire social media channels to showcase their company culture and work environment. These efforts directly address a common challenge for job seekers: not knowing what its really like to work at a company. Take Spotify, for example. A quick search for Life at Spotify pulls up their dedicated career website, Instagram page, X (formerly Twitter) account, YouTube channel, and the hashtag #LifeAtSpotifyall designed to give potential candidates an inside look at what working there is like. Understanding that candidates trust employees descriptions of a company more than the companys own messaging, many organizations also encourage employees to share their experiences in their own words. Googles Build Your Future With Google and Marriott Careers blog are great examples of how companies leverage employee stories to attract talent. Some companies even take things further with full-blown marketing-style campaigns. General Electrics Whats the matter with Owen? campaign repositioned the company as a destination for top talent and boosted recruitment eightfold. Similarly, Britains Royal Marines launched the intense Whats Your Limit? campaign, targeting only the toughest individuals willing to endure their grueling training. With the tagline 99.99% need not apply, it made a bold statement and resonated with its audience. These examples show how using storytelling, creative branding, and marketing-inspired strategies can elevate recruitment efforts, turning potential candidates into excited applicantsand eventually into highly engaged employees. Candidates as customers By treating candidates like customers and engaging them as effectively as marketers engage customers, brand-savvy HR professionals can play a big role in attracting and engaging highly qualified candidates, reducing the time to hire, and having a measurable impact on profitability. By treating candidates as customers who need to be wowed by the brand not to buy products and services, but to buy into the companys purpose and vision for the future, brand-savvy HR professionals can optimize their efforts and convert curious candidates into highly engaged employees. If youre looking for ways to positively impact your bottom line, consider encouraging your branding and HR teams to work together and find creative ways to attract the best and brightest of your industry to want to work at your organization. By engaging candidates with the same vigor that your marketing team engages customers, your brand-savvy HR team can help slash the costs of talent acquisition and, by extension, make a positive impact on your bottom line.
Category:
E-Commerce
In Shift: Managing Your EmotionsSo They Dont Manage You, Ethan Kross shares a comeback story about tennis champion Novak Djokovic. It was the Wimbledon quarterfinal and Djokovic, who was the No. 1 seed, was down two sets (5-7, 2-6) against 20-year-old Jannik Sinner. After the second set, he requested a break. Then he awed the crowd by triumphantly winning the next three sets (6-3, 6-2, 6-2). What shifted? Djokovic shared that he gave himself a pep talk in the locker room. He looked himself in the eyes and said: You can do it. Believe in yourself. Now is the time, forget everything that has happened. New match starts now. Lets go, champ. Djokovic utilized distanced self-talk, an emotion regulation tool that Kross writes about, to recalibrate himself. A week later, he won Wimbledon for the eighth time. Djokovics story illustrates the central theme of Shift: You dont have to live at the mercy of your emotions. With the right tools, you can learn to master them. Kross is one of the worlds foremost experts on emotion regulation. As an award-winning professor at the University of Michigan, he leads its Emotion and Self-Control Lab and shares his work as a bestselling author. In our conversation, he illuminates how to cultivate emotional resilience, stop an anxiety spiral, and reframe stress to elevate performance. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You describe that our perception of self-efficacy is a master belief. When it comes to our emotions, learning what we can and can’t control is critical to building it. Can you explain? Several years ago, I came across a study that was as close as you can get to shivers running down your spine when reading scientific literature: 40% of respondents say that they can’t control their emotions. When I first encountered this finding, it was a mind blower. I run the Emotion and Self Control Lab. My whole life is dedicated to this concept. Yet, close to half of a sample doesn’t think that it’s even possible to manage your emotions. [Image: Courtesy of Ethan Kross] If you don’t believe that something is possible, why would you make any efforts to try to achieve that impossible goal? You wouldn’t. Decades of research demonstrate that compellingly. The 40% of people who said that you can’t control your emotions, it’s not that they were wrong. There are facets of our emotional lives and experiences that are out of our control. I share an anecdote about how when I’m in the gym, I’ll often have this very dark, maniacal thought about carrying a dumbbell and dropping it on someone’s face. What’s wrong with me that I’m thinking about that? That’s probably my brain preparing me for a worst-case scenario. So it motivates me to squeeze the dumbbell tighter or put it in the opposite hand so I don’t drop it. I never have, but I experience those dark thoughts sometimes. There’s this whole dimension of our lives that is characterized by these automatic emotional responses. We don’t have control over that. But what we do have control over is what happens once those thoughts and feelings are activated. You highlight the reframing paradox and explain that when it comes to reframing, one of the big challenges is that people don’t know how to reframe their experiences adaptively and fall into the trap of reframing negatively. What are the hidden traps of the reframing paradox and how can we avoid them? The way to avoid them is to first understand that this trap exists. Knowledge is power. We often think about reframing as a universal good. But reframing can be a force of good or bad. You can make the argument, as I have, that a lot of what happens when we’re anxious or depressed is that we’re reframing things. When I’m getting myself anxious, Im thinking about all of the what ifs. Im thinking differently about this, but in a negative direction. Then, the question is: If reframing is taking me in the wrong direction, how can I right the ship and have it take me in the right direction? There are a couple of tactics that are often useful. Distanced self talk: Try to give yourself advice like you would a friend. When friends are struggling with things, you don’t give them advice to make them feel worse. So, what would you say to a friend? We don’t always say those things to ourselves. Another reframing tool can be mental time travel: How am I going to feel about this next month, next week, or next year? The fires [in Los Angeles] are a great example of that. How are the fires going to feel next year? Five years from now? They are awful right now, but things are going to get better. Has there ever been a natural disaster that we haven’t recovered from in this country? For those who have survived thus far, you could also go back in time and think about other kinds of adversity to put this in perspective. There are a lot of people who are dealing with tragic circumstances who don’t have the resources, either personally or countrywide, that you have to deal with this. You share a study that found that our interpretation of our physiological stress response influences our levels of anxiety. Illustrate that process for us and how we can leverage it to not only regulate our emotions, but elevate our performance. This is one of my go to tactics. Experiencing physiological symptoms of stress or anxiety is a common part of that experience. Good luck trying to not have that reaction. Its probably not desirable either, because we know that a moderate level of stress can be good for performance. It energizes you and mobilizes your resources. Research indicates that how you interpret what you’re experiencing physiologically can push you in different directions. If I’m getting butterflies in my stomach or I have to go to the bathroom, its notOh crap, I’m not preparedwhich is one way of interpreting it. Instead, its saying: Lucky me. My body is like a Lamborghini. Im getting ready to perform. It is a game changer to reframe what you’re experiencing, not as a threat and that there’s something wrong with you, but rather: This is how you’re supposed to be feeling. Use it to your benefit. Research shows that distanced self-talk promotes wise reasoning and intellectual humility. Why is it so effective? What tactics, such as using you, can help us apply it? Distancing as a tool is useful because it allows us to look at our experiences from a broader point of view, rather than getting trapped in a more narrow take on the situation, which can feel restrictive and fuel our emotional experiences. What are we taught to do from when we’re kids when it comes to a difficult problem? Roll up your sleeves and work through it. Zoom in really carefully. But, what we’ve learned is that sometimes doing the oppositezooming out and looking at that bigger pictureis helpful for navigating these circumstances. What’s interesting about language is that it seems to allow us to relatively automatically shift our perspective. Take the word you. You is a word that we virtually use exclusively when we think about referring to other people. We know that it’s much easier for us to give advice to other people than it is for ourselves. So, when you use the word you to think about your own experience, it’s as though it’s automatically putting you into this advice giving mode. Now, I’m thinking about it like I’m talking to someone else. I’m pretty good with other people; Someone else goes through my problems and I can give you the solution for what they should do easily. But, I can’t do that for myself. You is applying that lens to my own life. We can also use the word you generically. What it involves is using the word you to refer to people in general; You don’t give a great talk. What are you going to do? It happens to everyone. There, I’m not using the word you to refer to myself. I’m using it to refer to the universal. We find that when people are trying to make meaning, being able to do this helps them, because it’s not just me. Im talking about a personal experience in these universal terms. I’m taking it away from me and making it about anyone and everyone. You say that avoidance is a key part of flexibility and flexibility is a key indicator of resilience. Can you explain why avoidance can be a superpower? We like simple solutions for good reason. Its easier to follow simple prescriptions. But, we know that research doesn’t support this idea that avoidance is always harmful. Yes, chronic avoidance can get us into trouble. But, being flexible can be effective. Importantly, what I’m talking about is being able to be flexible with how you deploy your attention. There’s a great study where after 9/11 researchers wanted to know which people were going to fair best over time. These were students who were living in New York City when the attacks occurred. The researchers were interested in how the ability to either expressapproach and get your emotions outor suppressbottle up and avoid your emotionsmight factor into this equation. What they did at the beginning of the study was measure the ability of people to express or suppress their emotions when told to do so. Then, they tracked them over time. What they found is that the people who fared the best were those who scored highest on their ability to both express and suppress their emotions. My grandmother grew up in Eastern Poland and was a young adult when the Nazis came. She saw most of her family being slaughtered and narrowly escaped. She lived through all of that and managed to survive. She would never tell me those stories. She wasn’t interested in getting into it, except one day a year when there was a Remembrance Day event that she and her fellow survivors organized where they let their emotions spill out. Over time, what I learned was that it wasn’t that she was chronically avoiding thinking about what happened to her. She was skilled at being flexible in how she deployed her attention. She’s a testament to this idea that its not about being dogmatic in how we apply these principles. Being flexible can make a difference. Lets dive deeper into the psychological immune system. You share that time is one of the most important components of it. Still, there are non-traumatic circumstances that you may keep thinking about for yearssay the loss of a job or friendshipdespite them no longer impacting you. What can we do to clear these from our psychological immune system? Some experiences are harder to let go of. Particularly, the more intense they are, the more time it takes for them to dissipate. One thing I like to remind people of is that theres this natural curve that goes up. Then, as time goes on, our emotional reactions tend to wane in intensity. That’s true of most of our experiences, but not all of them. With experiences that have happened, what you want to be able to do is to make meaning out of them. The fact that you’re still thinking about this suggests that you don’t have closure yet. The question is: What have you tried to do to get closure around this experience? What is standing in the way of you achieving that closure? Is there some cognitive work that you need to do to reframe it more effectively? Is it a conversation you need to have with this person to put it all out there? Thats what you would want to target to understand why you still think about it. Attention is an important aspect of our emotional life, particularly because we often focus on what’s going wrong rather than what’s going right. What are the most effective beliefs or practices to shift from having a scarcity mindset to an abundant mindset? It’s about being aware of that distinction and trying to find evidence that contradicts it. This is where the power to reframe can be so effective. We always have the ability to reframe our circumstances. A good example of this might be the work on social comparisons that I talk about. We tend to think about social comparisons as toxic, in particular, when we’re comparing ourselves against people who are doing better than us. It elicits envy. Yes, that is a pervasive phenomenon. But, what we lose sight of when we cling to that narrative is that we can also benefit from those social comparisons when we flip them. If I see someone who is outperforming me across the board and it elicits that initial sting, I can dwell on how much better their life is than mine or I can think about them as a beacon that I can try to navigate towards, like: Hey, if they can do it, so can I. Why don’t I try to achieve this? Im flipping from what I don’t have to what I can attain. You can also do it in the opposite direction for people who are doing a lot worse than you. One of the ways that people often think about them is: Oh man, it happened to them. It can happen to me. That doesn’t feel good. Or, I can think: Wow, I’m really grateful that didn’t happen to me. Look at how much worse circumstances could be. Reflecting on our conversation and the book, a thread that stands out is that the quality of our thoughts determines the quality of our life experience. I’d love to close with a few questions that we can ask ourselves to continuously elevate that equation. I would say the nature of our thoughts, more than the quality. Our thoughts allow us to interpret the inputs that come in and that is one of our greatest superpowers. It means that we arent reacting in a default way to the situations that we encounter in the world. We can make sense of them in different ways, and how we make sense of them can put us on a completely different emotional trajectory. Simply recognizing that is number one. But, then committing ourselves to identifying the most profitable ways of making sense of our experiences. What I man by profitable is, not in the monetary sense, but in the sense of: What are the interpretations of this world that allow you to live the life that you want to live? Its an unbelievably powerful tool that we want to hone.
Category:
E-Commerce
Wilson’s Airless Gen1 basketball is back. The hollow, $2,500 3D-printed basketball that doesnt need to be inflated was first showcased at the 2023 NBA All-Star Weekend. Now, Wilson is selling the ball via a new production run for the remaining few people who can afford to spend thousands of dollars on a basketball. The Airless Gen1 ball features a latticed pattern of hexagonal holes and doesn’t require an inflated bladder inside. By all accounts of professional and amateur players who have tried the airless wonder, its honeycomb architecture and plastic material makes it perform like a traditional basketball, matching its size, weight, and rebound characteristics. [Photo: Wilson] The initial release in February 2024 sold out rapidly. Now, Wilson is responding to the high demand by rereleasing the basketball in limited quantities, said Kevin Murphy, general manager of team sports at Wilson, in a press release: We have been consistently overwhelmed by the excitement surrounding our Airless basketball products. The rerelease features three color options: black, natural/white, and a new burgundy. Each ball is produced using the same 3D-printing process as the original, with refinements implemented to enhance production. I asked Nadine Lippa, Wilsons innovation manager, why the company hasn’t been able to ramp up production so more people can buy it. Were still using the same printer, were still using the same type of smoothing and dyeing, she explained. The Airless Gen1’s high price tag reflects the fact that 3D technology is not mature enough to make the jump to industrial production. Its not a problem of the design, but of how slow and cumbersome 3D-printing technology still is. Without a quicker way to materialize these items, which need extra cleaning and sanding work to turn them into consumer products, it cant really command production runs sizable enough to knock off at least one zero from that price tag. [Photo: Wilson] 3D-printing technology for industrial production keeps advancing but still faces big challenges like slow scalability, material limitations, and complex post-processing and quality control. While the industry is not stagnant, it is not yet fully realized for mass production. The additive and 3D-printing ecosystem continues to evolve year-over-year,” says Lippa, “and the Wilson Labs team continues to monitor the progress and engage with key players in the industry. Lippa tells Fast Company that Wison is still committed to making this technology more accessible in the future. Her team is continuously assessing all options on how to bring this to scale in the best way possible. Our mission is to create great high-performing products at every level for every athlete, so we will continue to research and explore until we solve the problem, she says. Specific to our Airless Basketball, we are continuing to evaluate 3D-printing materials and technologies that offer the right properties needed to make a basketball perform at a much-lower cost. Hopefully, one day we’ll be able to pick up one at the store just like we do with normal basketballs. But until then, the Airless Gen1 will remain a big-ticket item and an unreachable object of desire for b-ball fans everywhere. Starting Thursday, February 13, the Wilson Airless Gen1 will be available for purchase from Wilson.com. A limited number of units will also be available at NBA All-Star 2025 in San Francisco on February 17. Thankfully, you may have a higher chance of getting lucky, according to Lippa. While we dont share exact quantities, this will be our largest drop of the Airless Gen1 to date.
Category:
E-Commerce
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