Do you know the next step on your professional path?

No, really. What have been the key things that have helped you achieve more, build bridges, get that promotion, hit your targets, and build a better mousetrap?

Was it a stretch assignment? Was it personal development and learning? Was it attendance at industry-specific workshops and conferences where you built connections and learned from your peers?

For me, the difference between success and failure has been my bosses and mentors. They’ve understood that they don’t know everything, and had the ability to ask the right questions, so I know how to share the information that matters. Not to mention giving me the freedom and autonomy to try new things, and discover what employer branding means for that specific company. Because it’s different at every single company.

The good bosses know what will help you grow your skills and advance your career.

The best bosses know enough to ask you what you actually want to achieve. More importantly, they will help you pursue it. Which brings us to the ever elusive and varied employer brand career.

It’s a hybrid of marketing/branding and recruiting/HR roles, so the career paths available are everything from individual contributing marketer, to resourcing leader, to demand generation and branding executive. But that’s if you can tell a good story about what you’ve achieved.

Most bosses don’t understand it (most think they do), let alone know how to manage it or measure its success. The more information and data you can provide for your leader, the easier it becomes to measure the outcomes. Once you have those, it’s amazingly easier to ask for budget €£$ and additional headcount.

Make no mistake, we want you to come to the Autumn Talent Brand Summit in London.

You will meet people who do almost exactly what you do and who face many of the same challenges in companies across different industries and countries. Your boss will understand that doing this is the greatest opportunity for you to grow and develop yourself. It will be incredibly beneficial for your career as well as your day job. Have you seen the agenda?

We thought we’d put together an email template to help explain it to your amazing boss so you can request the time off and investment in your career and future with your company.

You’ll want to wordsmith this a bit to make sure it sounds like something you’d write. Or you could simply share this blog post with them—your call.

Hi BOSS NAME,

I’m really excited to have finally found an employer branding workshop that I think will help us both achieve what we’ve been talking about!

The other companies attending—Unilever, Intel, N26, Danone, and Booking.com, to name a few—face many of the same challenges we do. They’re also learning about how to effectively tell stories about their employee experience and values. There will be one-person employer brand teams attending as well as larger organisations that I can also learn from.

If you look at the agenda, you can see the topics are relevant directly to what we’re trying to accomplish:

• Getting creative on a shoestring budget to reach our candidates

• Creating content that builds brand love and good company sentiment

• Improving our COMPANY candidate experience quickly at little to no cost

• Engaging our company’s own employees to help spread the word about open roles

• Finding the right tools with insights from people who’ve actually used them

I won’t just be staring at presenters, listening to them talk about how brilliant they are. I’ll actually be in interactive workshops learning from all the other attendees, including people who’ve been matched with me based on our company’s specific challenges . The best part is that I’ll be able to follow up with any of them directly whenever we need advice and perspective on our projects.

If that isn’t enough, they’re providing detailed notes and resources from the event, so I will have a great starting point when I return. I’ll also have fresh insights to share with the team.

There is a catch, though.

They only allow 100 people to attend this event, so it will sell out. But I do have a 20% discount code to save us some money! Can we talk?

Thanks,

YOUR NAME

THE DISCOUNT: Simply request your access to purchase a ticket here, and include the code ‘lovemyboss’ in the comment field.

As a community of people who do what you do, we hope that your boss is as invested in your training and development as we are. At the very least, make sure you request to join the Talent Brand Alliance community.

If we can help with more information or answer questions about the event, please message summit@talentbrand.org directly.

About Our Member:

Bryan Chaney is a global talent sourcing and attraction strategist and a co-founder of the Talent Brand Alliance. He’s worked at IBM, Twilio, and currently leads employment brand for corporate recruitment at Indeed. Bryan has worked in recruitment, technology, and marketing, providing him insights into the marketing of hiring, the importance of technology, and the buying process that candidates make when applying for jobs. You can follow along with him at @bryanchaney.