Summary: Judging an employer brand awards competition for the first time surfaces an uncomfortable question the scoring rubric leaves off: judge against what? Creative excellence and craft are on the sheet; how the candidate actually thought and felt in the moment the work reached them is not. This piece argues, with Paul Rand as witness, that there are two ways to fail — idea without craft, craft without idea — and that most forgettable work is an organizational fear problem that arrives looking like a font choice.

6 Minute Read

I was asked to jury an employer brand awards competition in Bulgaria. I don’t live in Bulgaria, or Europe for that matter, and I’ve not visited Bulgaria, yet, so it was a pleasant surprise. As it goes, all entries come in English alongside the local languages, which I’m grateful for, or I’d be living inside Google Translate. First time on the other side of the table. After a long career of submitting work, presenting work, defending work, I get to sit and judge it. Which sounds wonderful until you actually think about what you’re being asked to do.

Judge against what?

That’s the question the rubric never quite answers. I’ve studied and researched the concept of judgment at length in my work. Most creatives and strategy-types do. The dynamic of being a judge is so interesting for me because I have to work through the notion of judge against what?

Creative excellence, sure. Messaging impact. Memorability. Craftsmanship. Artistry. Authenticity. My personal likes and dislikes, measured against an objective professional standard. Can those two even be separated? There’s a rubric. There’s always a rubric. But sitting with the stack in front of me, I keep circling a less comfortable criterion that the awards program didn’t include on the scoring sheet: how did the audience think and feel in the moment the work reached them. This is not the same thing as click or like metrics.

I mean the person this work was made for in the moments they interacted, viewed, or engaged with it. The candidate halfway through a job search who is weighing your offer, your salary band, your manager, whether they’ll have to move, whether the culture will eat them alive. That person is not, I promise you, screenshotting your typography skills or use of gradients. They care about the offer and they care about the people. And the work, and the growth potential. We’re right back to judge what all over. The colors and the fonts are not the decision. They never were, but you better have them.

So I’m sitting here about to score work on artistry, fully aware the audience that work was built for might not have registered the artistry, or imagination, or craft at all. Or maybe they did. Maybe that aspect encouraged attention, or leveled up a degree or two of trust.

That’s tension.

Throat-clearing honesty

I’ll tell on myself. Every few years I go back and look at work I was proud of, work I’d have entered in something like this, and I have the same reaction every time: what on earth was I thinking. Go back long enough, a decade or more, and I can be really hard on myself. I didn’t think the craft was bad. The craft was usually fine, definitely out of fashion today, as expected. Or too reflective of a moment in time, my way of seeing, or the market, or the world at large. It’s that I can see, now, that it didn’t have an enduring relationship between an idea underneath it and the insight of what it should do. It was ok-dressed and a little empty. It looked like it was saying something at the time. It wasn’t over time. Creative is intended to be short-lived, ephemeral, but when it’s really great, it transcends. It will look out of place a decade later, or a year, but the idea-to-intention connection should always be lasting, even if a lot changed.

Paul Rand had a line that’s stayed with me for exactly this reason. He said graphic design, however accomplished, however technically correct, is not good design if it is irrelevant. That’s the part people skip when they quote him. They love the simplicity stuff, the silent-ambassador stuff. The cold one is the one that matters: irrelevant work is not good work, no matter how good it looks. Mind you, this isn’t work I do alone. Some of it is, some of it is a team, or a pairing. No matter how it got made, I can see the gaps with time and perspective.

Which gives you two ways to fail, and they’re the failures sitting in every awards pile.

You can have the idea and skip the craft. Smart, relevant, true to who’s actually engaging with it, and so badly made that nobody notices it exists. The right message in a font that says nothing, a layout that asks for nothing. Blew the authenticity with stock art. Good thinking, dressed for a funeral.

Or you can have the craft and skip the idea. Gorgeous. Award-bait, frankly. Beautifully shot, perfectly kerned, and saying absolutely nothing a candidate couldn’t have guessed about any company in the category. This is the more dangerous one, because it wins things. It photographs well. It just doesn’t do anything. I bet we’ve all seen awarded work and asked ourselves, why?

The work that survives, the work I still remember from twenty years ago, the work that made me laugh or stopped me or made me want to work somewhere I had no business wanting to work, had both. An idea worth having, made well enough that you couldn’t look away. Rand’s whole point. You need the relevance or no one cares, and you need the craft or no one notices. Miss either and the work goes straight onto the heap.

The pile gets tall for a reason

Good work doesn’t falter from a lack of talent. The talent is usually there. It goes flat in the gap between what the creators can do and everything else standing around the project. The internal expectations. The ownership lines. The five stakeholders who each need their fingerprint on it. The mandate to exceed market standards while, somehow, offending no one and surprising no one, all while standing on one foot, often on roller skates.

And the brief. You know the brief. Solve recruiting. Fix retention. Communicate the culture. Reach six audiences. Do it in a way that’s bold but safe, distinctive but on-brand, emotional but professional. Budget: roughly a Happy Meal. Timeline: one week.

That’s not a brief. That’s a wish list with a due date. And work made to satisfy a wish list comes out looking exactly like work made to satisfy a wish list. Smooth, inoffensive, instantly forgettable. It checks every box and lands on no one. I heard a great way of thinking about this during Charter’s New Employer Brand Summit. To paraphrase: the pursuit of certainty leads to the average. The closer you get to certain, the closer you get to the norm. False certainty destroys trust and manufactures mediocrity. Just as Rand predicts.

I’ve spent a career watching, asking questions, and never fully being satisfied. Memorable work tends to say one true thing, and forgettable work says six half-true things at once because six people needed to be in it. That’s not a craft problem you can design your way out of after the fact. It’s an organizational fear that shows up long before anyone opens the design file. But it lands in my judging folder looking like a font choice when it was really an organizational one.

Being judgmental on purpose

I have a lot of submissions to go through, and I’ll judge them honestly, against the rubric and against the harder question the rubric leaves off. I’ll give every entry all the benefit of the doubt, all the thoughtfulness, rigor, and empathy I have. I’ll try to remember that I’ve made plenty of the well-dressed-and-empty kind myself, and called it good at the time.

What’s sitting in the back rooms of my mind is that I don’t want to add another ok-made thing to the heap. I want to make things people remember. The thing with an idea worth having, made well enough that you can’t ignore it. Defining the problem differently so it can be solved innovatively. That’s not a better mousetrap. That’s asking why we’re trapping mice at all.

Anyway. I’ve got my judging work cut out for me. Wishing all the entrants in the Employer of Choice Awards Bulgaria, the best of luck.