James Ellis

Employer Brand Nerd.

More than a decade of employer brand experience

I am the Employer Branding Nerd 🧪, an authority on employer branding, focusing on companies who think they have no choice but to post and pray for talent. Over the past decade, I have built the brands for more than a dozen of companies and supported the development and activation of dozens more.

You may have seen/heard/read me at:

✍️ BioSpace
✍️ BioBuzz
🎙️ Chad and Cheese Podcast
🎙️ Recruitment Flex Podcast
🎙️ Duct Tape Marketing Podcast
🎙️ Employer Branding Podcast
🎙️ Talking Talent
🎙️ Talk Talent To Me Podcast
🎙️ Recruiting Trailblazers
🎤 RecFest
🎤 ERE
🎤 SHRM Talent
🎤 Transform
And many more.

I do my thinking in public

✍️ Employer Brand Headlines (in it's fifth year)
🎙️ The Talent Cast (220 episodes)
🎙️ The Brand Plan (10 episodes in season one with Marcus Body)
📘 Employer Branding for Small Business
📘 Talent Chooses You
📘 Employer Branding Handbook
📺 Employer Brand Breakdown
📺 Employer Brand Minute
📺 The Laws of Employer Branding

I am the principal of Employer Brand Labs in Chicago, an author, keynote speaker, practitioner, and podcaster with a wealth of experience across multiple industries for almost a decade. I've authored what’s been called the bible of employer branding, managed the number one employer brand newsletter in the world, and helped companies globally establish and develop their ability to hire talent.

Passionate about solving recruiting problems

Look, I love employer branding. I fell in love with it and haven't looked back. And while I've developed brands for Fortune1000 companies, 125-person startup, and everything in between, what I do best is teach people how to use employer branding, how to turn it into a force multiplier for recruiting, how to leverage it as the human side of their corporate brand, how to tell a story that great talent will fall in love with (even when there's no job to apply for).

After 220+ episodes of The Talent Cast podcast, 150+ editions of Employer Brand Headlines newsletter, three books, countless presentations and webinars, I've come to accept the label someone gave me as the "Alton Brown of Employer Brand."

Having invented the Recruiting Content Framework, the Employer Brand Manifesto and the first comprehensive Employer Brand Architecture, co-authored the Employer Brand Maturity Model, been the first person to prove content positively impacts applications, and turned a failing brand activation department into a multi-million dollar growth engine, I'm ready to help businesses who thought they couldn't afford it take advantage of the power of employer brand.

How can you work with me?

Bringing someone in to create results via employer branding isn't a simple decision, for you or me. This process works best with companies with 200-1,200 employees, generally in biotech, life science, technology or fields where new hires are expensive and time-consuming.

So the best way to start is with a conversation. Let's chat about your situation and see if it makes sense for us to make more solid plans.

If you're not ready to chat, but want to stay in touch, I offer a free weekly newsletter focused on talent strategy and employer brand. It's the largest of its kind with more than 3,500 TA professionals subscribing to stay sharp. Subscribe here in 10 seconds.

Otherwise, email me at James@EmployerBrandLabs.com and we'll find some time.

-James Ellis