All employers are the same.

At the Campus Recruiting Forum in LA, Sabine Gillert of TMP Worldwide led a great workshop on employment branding. At one point, she divided the attendees (made up of campus recruiters from about 20 companies as well as some college careers office staff) into two groups of about 15 people each. She asked one group to brainstorm out their impressions of Chevron as an employer while the other group did the same for Qualcomm. (The Chevron group included a couple of recruiters from Qualcomm and vice versa.)

The groups quickly put together a good list that included things such as "good benefits package", "secure employment", "innovative", "attempting to position itself as 'green'", "cool technology", and so on. The two lists were shared and the recruiters from those two companies verified that the lists were quite accurate. They included the key elements that those two companies were trying to convey with their branding as well as a few things they hope that prospective candidates will ignore.

But what struck me most was this: nothing on either list could convey in the slightest way what it would feel like to work in one of those companies. Are all employers with good benefits, some bureaucracy, a nice logo and a healthy balance sheet the same? To a very large extent, in the eyes of a candidate (especially a young candidate), the answer is YES! Here was a group of people in their twenties, thirties, forties and up who work in recruiting (as well as some in campus career services who have a long familiarity with these companies) who knew next to nothing about what it would feel like to work in either of these major corporations.

Why? Simple: because we don't know these companies' stories. Only stories can give us the feeling of working with innovative people or under tight timelines. And only stories can convey the most important elements that attract us to an organization: the comraderie, the companionship, the sense of belonging, the feeling of working with like-minded peers. And the only truly believable stories are the ones we get directly from the people they belong to; told by the current employees in an authentic way.

Without these stories (about everything from the company softball team to the feeling of completing a great project to the charitable community work to the inspiring company founder...) employers can only appeal to the candidates' intellect, if that. By ignoring the importance of the gut feelings that are stimulated by true stories, employers are recruiting with at least one hand tied behind their back. Possibly both. Without stories, all employers are the same.