The Best Creative Recruiting Strategy? Leverage Your Company Culture

Introducing our speaker: Kristin Rice

[00:00:04] Hi all. Thank you for your time today and for joining our webinar on the key to recruiting talent showcasing your company's unique strengths. My name is Aaron Hom and I am the account manager here at LinkedIn. I'll be moderating Arthur Son today and a couple of quick housekeeping notes before we get started. So first during the hour please feel free to use the Q and A pop to the right of your screen to ask a question you may have regarding the presentation. Also please be sure to Select all options to send your questions are seen here given everyone on the line is needed. We will have a dedicated Q and A during the last 10 minutes of the webinar. We ask that you please complete the survey. And then finally the presentation and reporting will be sent via e-mail after the webinar so please keep an eye out for that. And with that I'd like to introduce our investors today Christine right. Christine is a talent print consultant here at least and she was and for nearly three years now. Her role here focuses on helping clients understand the power of talent branding and recruiting top talent within the organization. So with that I'll hand it over to you Christine. Take it away.
 
[00:01:27] Great. Thank you Aaron. And thank you everyone for joining us on today's webinar as Aaron mentioned. My name is Christine I am a brand consultant here with LinkedIn and Aaron did a great job on my introduction. The only thing that I'd add there is that I actually come from a background in recruitment marketing. So prior to working at LinkedIn I spent a few years as an account director with a company called TNP worldwide spent quite a bit of my time there working on employment branding projects and initiatives. So really excited to bring my expertise over here to Arlington and to share it all with you during today's session.
 
[00:02:07] So what do we have in store for today's agenda. First and foremost we'll go through the why behind talent brands so why is it so important and why should it be an essential ingredient to any recruiting strategy. We'll look at this from a macro economic level and then look at it a bit more from a micro perspective and from a recruiting trends perspective. Also talk to you a little bit about how to think about developing an authentic talent brand and then how to create compelling content and some methodology to sharing that content on LinkedIn and other social and digital platforms as Aaron mentioned we'll finish today's session with some Q and A.

It’s increasingly difficult to recruit candidates—and especially hard to find candidates with the skills you need

Follow what they mentioned I wanted to take a step back and look at this from a macroeconomic context. We know that it's getting increasingly difficult to recruit top candidates especially in today's talent marketplace. And if we took a good hard look at the State of the U.S. economy here some reasons as to why. If we look at the unemployment rate we're seeing some of the lowest we've seen in 30 years. In fact the last I checked we were just under 5 percent as of January 2017.
 
[00:03:27] We're also noted noticing a growing skills gap. So there's a gap between the skills that the talent has and the skills that employers are demanding. I think a great example of this is that there's actually 4 million open jobs today in the U.S. Yet 20 million unemployed individuals.
 
[00:03:48] So what does this mean for many companies what this means is that they're experiencing a lot of those competitive pressures. So they're actually going after a lot of the same in demand that their competitor down the road is going after as well. So it's becoming increasingly problematic. And what this means is that we need to shift the way that we think about recruiting talent. We need to go beyond our traditional job boards and recruiting agencies and really put some thought behind a proactive and thoughtful talent brand strategy as part of your recruiting objective. And so this is actually information that I gleaned from a report by the U.S. Department of Labor. It's out there for you all the access if you're interested. But here's some things that companies are doing in response and they will go through everything here. But clearly some of the areas where LinkedIn can help is obviously in the reporting space. It's what we do but we'll spend a lot of that today focusing on their recruitment and marketing side of things they're really talking a lot about that talent brand component and how to create authentic and genuine experiences for potential candidates.
 
[00:05:02] And then another piece of insight I got from this report is that companies are looking to improve what they call working conditions being a little bit formal but what that essentially means is the culture. What is it like to work at that company. Is it a great place to work. Is it not such a great place to work. And what are they doing to sort of fill those gaps and make sure that they're telling that message appropriately.

Recruiting has changed from a nicety to a necessity—and employer branding is what sets companies apart

[00:05:44] Sorry about that. If we look more specifically at the recruiting industry what we're seeing here is that more and more talent acquisition leaders implement branding specialists are realizing that it's no longer a nice to have but it's absolutely a must have. And here are some reasons why I'm so over the past 10 years. We know that the implement branding roles that are out there have actually increased by five acts. And the majority of operating budgets are actually spent on job boards recruiting tools and agencies. But those that we surveyed actually said if they had additional budget talent brand would be the number one area that they'd invest if they could. And then lastly of those we surveyed more than 80 percent said that their employer brand had a significant impact on their ability to hire talent.
 
[00:06:35] So again looking at the macro and micro impact we needed just think a little bit differently about how we're going about recruiting talent what are the right messages to put out in front of our radio audiences and I'll walk you through exactly how to do all right. So let's take a look at your authentic talent brand. So what does it mean when you're when you're authentic you're being genuine so I actually went into Google and IGoogle worth I think worth companies stock photo ever. And this was one of the top that populated it was one of my favorites. Looks like a robot. I don't know if this is representative of any of your profiles on the line today but there's a reason that they're called stock photos are not very interesting and they're clearly not genuine or authentic to who you are as an organization. The less stray away from something like this and move toward something like what anyone has done here what it may get your campaign as you can see it's fun it's lighthearted it's much more aligned with who they are as an organization and a culture and necessarily be what we're striving for today vs. more of that corporate speak that I think everybody knows really isn't what the true experience is actually like at your company. So I believe about twice yearly LinkedIn runs these surveys and this is from our global recruiting trends from 2016 and one of the interesting insights that came from it is that one of the biggest roadblocks candidates face when changing job is actually not knowing what it's really like to work at that company. And if you think about this it really shouldn't be the case especially with all of the different social and digital platforms that are available for you to tell your story. And so it's something that we should be taking advantage of. And if you think about the world of talent brand it's certainly not just what you're saying and what you are broadcasting about your company but it's about a lot of different perspectives and what everybody thinks and feels about your organization as a place to work. So now that free time to get involved in that conversation and making sure that candidates are researching and doing their due diligence as they're considering a career change that you have all the information out there for them to consider.

The first step towards developing an employer brand is knowing who you are and what you value

So what are the first steps is really understanding who you are as an organization as an employer.
 
[00:09:11] So I wanted to actually start with culture and values because I really believe that this makes up the lifeblood of any organization and it's something that we actually preach quite frequently here at LinkedIn. This is the way that our CEO Jeff Weiner actually describes culture and values. So culture is essentially your company personality and more importantly who you aspire to be. The values piece are those principles that guide your organization on a day to day basis. And both of these are incredibly important and I know here at least LinkedIn if you were to survey anybody here they could probably tell you pretty explicitly what our culture and values is made up of no Netflix actually is an an organization.
 
[00:09:59] They were one of the first actually that decided to be really open honest and transparent about what their culture and their value system is all about. In fact it's so critical for them so important to them that they've created a 124 page Slide Share link that you actually can access on their company page on LinkedIn. And it's all about who they are and what you can expect. And again if you think about the way that the word goes about searching for work the candidate journey etc etc. they're taking in all of these different points of information. And this is just another way that you could give them another data source to make sure that they're making the most educated and thoughtful decision about probably one of the most important decisions of their lives.

Next, consider if you have a clearly defined employer value proposition

[00:10:45] What they're planning on doing with their career right culture and values. Another consideration here is do you have a clearly defined employer value proposition or what we call an EVP. And I've got to be honest if I think about my time at TNP and just the conversations that I have nowadays with clients it's actually quite difficult to articulate a clear EVP in two to three concise sentences. In fact we have clients that he and that would pay a pretty hefty price tag to actually get our help in defining what that EVP is. But here's a question that you can ask yourself as you think about what is our value proposition as an organization. So who are you. What do you do. Why do employees like to work for you. What gets them excited and passionate and wanting to come into work everyday. And then also why did they leave your company.
 
[00:11:46] These are going to be all great data points to consider when you think about building on a more defined EVP and if you have answers to all these questions that's fantastic you're probably about 20 steps ahead of most of the folks that I interface with anyway and you can certainly chip tune out for the next minute or so. But if you do not know the answer to these questions here are some tools that I can suggest to quote unquote find yourself. One of the first things that you can do is lead discussions with groups of executives and even your C-level suite as well. I think this will give you some interesting insights into the long term vision of your company as well as some of those aspirational goals. Obviously doing some research into your company mission vision and values we've already talked a bit about this and not every company has super clear mission vision and values but I'm sure there's some some literature out there and if there isn't I'm sure this is insights that the executive team as well as other employees that may have been at the company for a while can certainly provide an holding focus groups with employees and I think getting a broad group of employees. So thinking about this from a functional area maybe be thinking about this from a geography geographical area as well and even getting diverse perspectives people from different backgrounds different experiences but certainly these employees will be able to give you some really really valuable insights because they're the ones that come everyday to work you know they're essentially the backbone of your organization. They're what contributes to the success of your company. So understanding what motivates them what gets them excited is going to be really handy in this process. And then also conducting new hires surveys that you do want to make sure that your internal perception and then what you're communicating externally to the marketplace matches what that experience is actually like. So there is a mismatch. If you're saying that you're one thing but you're in another when employees start to work there that's just going to cause you problems down the road.

Better understand what your audience wants to hear, then find a way to share those aspects of your company

In particular I would say employee turnover turnover for example so never been done a little bit of thinking I'm. Who are we and what do we stand for the next step here is to better understand your audience and what it is that they want to hear. So these were some insights that we gathered from our global talent Trends survey once again and the question was What do you view as members of LinkedIn and potential candidates. What do you want to know most about from your company or a company that you're considering.

[00:14:27] What we found here I don't think is necessarily new news but we know that they're interested in culture and values perks and benefits as well as information on your mission and vision. One thing that I did find surprising actually though is that there wasn't any information here about compensation.
 
[00:14:44] So I think especially as we get more millennials into the workforce they care much more about work life balance which would fall under the perks and benefits section here and then also just really making sure that they're part of something bigger and making an impact in that they have a clear line of sight into how they are they themselves are individually driving forward with the vision and mission of your company. So those are all kind of vague though so we have some direct advice from some candidates that we surveyed as well with regard to what specifically would they want to hear from companies. If we if we take those three areas and extrapolate that a step further. So first and foremost is the honest perspective this goes back to being genuine being authentic to who you are giving an accurate representation and really focusing on the positive attributes of your organization.
 
[00:15:43] Sharing your employee views that your employees are a natural extension of your talent brand and some of your most trusted brand ambassadors. So if there's a way that you can get your employees involved whether it's on a large scale or a smaller scale needs a group of brand ambassador that you send out there to really spread the word whatever that might be.
 
[00:16:03] We Trust employees more than we trust the CEO and the company itself.

[00:16:07] I'll give you some more insight into that in a bit but if you think about even just your personal experience and you know whether it be booking a hotel or looking for a restaurant maybe you'll go to Trip Advisor and see what other companies are me what people that have actually stayed at that hotel have said vs. what the company is actively marketing. It's the same methodology here talking about what makes you different. So we experienced this year at LinkedIn where we're a tech company based in Silicon Valley competing with lots of other tech companies who also offer free lunch while free lunch isn't enough anymore. So what is it about LinkedIn that makes us unique and special. And you know why would somebody why would a top engineer want to come work for us versus staying at their job at Google for example. Again clarifying the vision and the strategy and this goes to what I was saying in really making sure your employees understand how they're actively driving that forward and playing a role in that process. And then the last piece of information here is just being open and honest about retention. I don't think this is something you have to actively market or talk about but as your recruiters are having conversations with potential candidates I think it's definitely a good idea to have some sort of response if it comes up right.

Identify your key talent segments, then tailor your content to appeal to their interests

So just looking at your audience on a broader scale and really just trying to figure out who you are what you stand for and what you think on a wider above all what those candidates would want to hear about. Now we can kind of drill down a bit more into how you go about segmenting your audiences. So this is really just thinking about the different talent pools that you want to hire for maybe you hire for engineers but you also hired for film people and finance professionals. And not only do you have different functional areas but you need to consider but you're also recruiting in different geographies where there's certainly cultural nuances. So now it's you know the key takeaway here is your talent brand and your overarching employer brand doesn't really change. But I think you can certainly highlight specific values or specific attributes that are going to resonate more was one audience vs. another. You know I think it's pretty clear that an engineer is going to care about different things than a salesperson might care about. So this is just about segmenting that audience and that will help you actually create relevant messaging as you pull together some kind of content strategy. So no go in to a bit about how do you create compelling content and what are some methodologies to put into play and how to share that content to a broader audience. When you think of a great place to work I'm sure Google might come to mind. Right. They spend a lot of time and resources and money into making sure that their talent brand is very well known. And a lot of people just know that Google is a fantastic place to work which is great. We all know that. But you know Google and that is totally fine. The content that you put out there should absolutely represent you and that you know all the different attributes and values and mission and vision that is special to your organization. And here are just a few examples of some companies on LinkedIn that I believe are doing it well.

Compelling content can be crafted on a shoestring budget—just focus on making it useful, emotional, or relatable

I think this is also a good time to mention that a lot of what I'm talking about can be done on shoestring budgets and can be done kind of scrappy using employees and other sort of natural extensions of your brand. So we'll talk a little bit more about how to do that in a minute here. I did want to borrow a framework from a woman by the name of terror hunt. She's actually a LinkedIn influencer and she has this framework that she calls the three horsemen of awesome content. So as you're thinking about how to build content and how to make it quote unquote awesome I would suggest thinking about this framework with the caveat that it doesn't have to be all of these things at once. But as you're developing content make sure that it hits often at least one of these. And the first that will discuss it being useful. This is all the information that is going to make you better and maybe make you the smarter person at that cocktail party.

[00:20:36] The second type of content is the emotional side and that's just really the content that makes you feel something. Maybe it's an inspirational story or maybe some kind of funny anecdote but at the end of the day you're feeling some kind of emotion of making a connection with your audience.
 
[00:20:54] And then lastly there's the relatable piece. So we've already talked a bit about this but it's thinking about who is your audience. What do they care about. So what is then the kind of content I should be putting in front of them. Because at the end of the day if you're putting content out there and it's not relevant you're not going to get the engagement that you want with your desired audience. I also want to stress that it doesn't make sense to go at it alone. You know I think that there's a lot of resources at your fingertips that you can reach out to. In fact I talked to a number of my clients where H.R. and marketing sort of operates in silos and you care about different things but essentially you're employing the same strategies. It's just the outcomes are slightly different. But this is a great opportunity to reach across the aisle introduce yourself to your marketing peers and see if there's some commonalities some common objectives that you can both work toward together outside of that you've clearly got your employee despite your executives and third party resources like industry news.
 
[00:21:58] And I think a good rule of thumb about content is that 20 percent of it should be created by you or by somebody that you work with and the other 80 percent can be curated from third party source.

When it comes to content, “corporate” information doesn’t necessarily bolster your company brand

[00:22:13] And another piece of advice here don't be so corporate and try to mix it up in the past and even more recently when I look on some company's company pages on LinkedIn I see that a lot of the content is I don't know. Investor Relations reports or white papers or just job after job after job. And I think if you're constantly keeping it top of mind that you want to be providing value to your audience and if you've identified that there's somebody that's essentially following your LinkedIn page that really cares about a white paper and is going to click on that link and read it. I think that's fantastic. But keep in mind that there is a whole host of people that are engaged with your brand on some level. So what are the things that they could be interested in. And I think this is a good framework to work by. We've seen this work on LinkedIn where a majority of this content is around thought leadership in industry news and certainly some of it should be just for fun. So maybe that events that philanthropic event that you did as a group last Friday or something you know it's that kind of information and that kind of insights into your company and culture that people really want to know about. It makes you human. I won't spend too much time here we actually conducted a webinar last month on how to include how to include video in your recruiting activities and recruitment marketing strategies. So this was actually a slide that I stole from that presentation. I just wanted to call it out here because I think that video can be really simple and really cost effective way to get employees involved get them telling their own stories and this is just a few examples of some companies that have been doing a great job with video some that are obviously professionally produced and others that are built upon a shoestring budget.
 
[00:24:06] I'd also recommend mixing up your sources so I looked into this earlier but your employees are a much more trusted resource than executives or your own CEO. So don't just think about what the content is but think about not only who's creating it but also who's sharing that externally.
 
[00:24:26] And this is just showing you that friends and family as well as employees of a company are more trusted than the company's CEO.
 
[00:24:34] This was actually sourced from the Edelman Trust Barometer from the 2016 media and if we go among the employees being your best asset there's a few things that you can encourage them to do.

Your employees are your most trusted ambassadors, and their content can drive company culture

 And the first is just getting them to share their own content. We know that they're out there taking pictures and sometimes video maybe amplify hashtag. We do that here at LinkedIn is called LinkedIn life. We actually have a hashtag within our solutions team called solutions life so you can get really creative with it and this is a really easy way to get people more involved on social and then knowing LinkedIn have made great strides in actually using hashtags and employee generated content and actually integrating that back into the products making it a bit easier on the recruiters that we work directly with estimate to published content as well so I'm not sure if you all noticed but LinkedIn is actually a professional publishing network. So it's a great opportunity to get your employees out there getting them positioning themselves as thought leaders and experts in a certain field. And of course promoting that unlike in other social networks is sponsoring that to relevant audiences outside of those that are already engaged with your company.
 
[00:25:53] And then lastly making it really easy for them to share.
 
[00:25:58] I know our internal global marketing programs manage to send us updates on occasion and say that you know here's a status update. We have a Webinar coming up focusing on employment brand and authentic messaging. Can you share this with your networks and she has a few different ways that you can phrase that and links that you can post into. Of course LinkedIn Facebook Twitter whatever your social network of choice is and we see some some great some great benefits to actually posting at least on LinkedIn. We know that when an employee poses post a piece of content it affects the number of job views that our company sees it has a direct impact on follower growth as well as company page views. So there's certainly huge value in getting your employees involved and a viral component to anything your employees.
 
[00:26:47] Post as you're building confidence always keep the level of engagement in mind. Does no use to you if you're spending time creating content but nobody's actually engaging with it or taking any action on that content. So here's a few pointers to keep in mind. Nothing super shocking here but if you post content that has a link an image or a video you will automatically see exponentially better engagement with that piece of content.

Use A/B testing to find content that resonates with your target audience

I think it's also a great time to think about AB hosting as well also AB testing is basically posting a piece of content. It's the same piece of content but a different time of day seeing which time of day gets better engagement or taking one piece of content and slightly changing the tone of it but posting it at the same time of day. Right. So it will give you lots of great insight into what's actually working and resonating with your target audiences.
 
[00:27:59] So not only what I wanted to bring to your attention are just a few resources as you're thinking about building out content how. Maybe you don't have a design team or any resources. There's a few recommendations here. So obviously your phone have already talked about this is probably sitting right next to you it takes excellent video and images pictures as well. There's an app that  shows me as an online tool that you can actually use and this will help you create infographics and banners. Social media icons are really great and easy to use tool. There's also a site called Phonogram that actually allows you to do data visualization. I know it's not my forte so I've actually found great use in this tool and there certainly probably other tools available online but this is just a sampling of those that I think could be useful to you all especially if you have limited in-house resources.

When it’s time to share your story, keep it simple, flexible, and timely

[00:28:57] Time to think about actually sharing your story. And you know I think a simple rule of thumb here is obviously making a plan. Keeping it simple and keeping it flexible. In the past I've created content calendars that look similar to this and I've created them in a google doc so they're easy to keep alive in real time. And anybody can go in and edit them. So if you are working functionally with your marketing department this is an excellent opportunity to make sure everybody's on the same page especially if you haven't integrated marketing strategy. But this is simply just planning out what the status updates are. What type of content you're posting who your audience is and where you're planning on publishing. You know I think another thing to keep in mind which I actually did not include in here but is the KPI as are those metrics that you're tracking to determine success of any long term or short term campaign that you run around content. It can be impressions that can be clicked that can be leads to a landing page or a visit to a career site. However it is that you're measuring that make sure that you're tracking that so you can show internally to your stakeholders.
 
[00:30:06] And then of course sharing at the right time with users and suggestions on LinkedIn Facebook Twitter Slideshare.
 
[00:30:13] We've got other recommendations if you're going out to Pinterest and YouTube and what not but this is just to give you an idea of when is the right time to post. So you know we want people to see your content if you're posting in the middle of the day on LinkedIn maybe not the best time to post because most people are active on LinkedIn either before or after business hours. So definitely something to keep in mind with any social network that you post to because again at the end of the day we want the best engagement rates and the best way to do that is to make sure we're posting when people are actually active on the site so I think some time with me this afternoon some of the few key takeaways here is that talent branding strategies are no longer nice to have are absolutely a must have as you're thinking about what you're trying to accomplish from a reporting perspective.
 
[00:31:00] Certainly make sure that your keeping talent on top of mind authenticity is certainly critical of your big index for who you are as an organization and who you aspire to be.

[00:31:13] Clearly understanding your audience and what it is that they want to know more about making sure that you don't just share what you want to share but that you're actively considering what your target audience is most interested in. And then of course the building out and sharing that content across a variety of networks is going to be an effective way to market your talent brand message and doing that in a very authentic and genuine way to your organization.
 
[00:31:40] So with that a thank you for your time and I will turn it over to Aaron for Tuesday.

Use focus groups that include a diverse set of perspectives to get a better idea of your culture and employer brand

[00:31:48] We do have some pretty great questions here I like to share. I get your feedback from the audience. So to get started this question comes directly from the EVC statement that you heard in talking about its impact on how you develop that segment of fashion. Would you recommend holding focus groups or interview with me top performers in your organization or MC that is a great question.
 
[00:32:25] I think I would think about that. Sorry I'm just thinking about this what I recommend their.
 
[00:32:36] I think it's always good to get a diverse set of perspectives. I mean I don't necessarily think that you should be holding focus groups with any of your low performers obviously. But I do think it's good to get a mix of perspectives. I think it also depends on how you identify top performers because clearly you know different employees have different strengths.
 
[00:33:01] Some are great from a numbers perspective say they're in sales and are a top performer but maybe others are great in different ways that make them valuable to the organization. So I would certainly suggest a diverse group of people but then just maybe segmenting that actually so maybe doing a group of only top performers to see if there are any common trends that you can identify and then doing some internal focus groups with a that might be interesting to see how the information that you glean from modes differs and so I don't know that it completely answered your question. But I think they persevere is good to keep in mind and certainly just keep away from any of your low performers or the type of town that you obviously wouldn't want working at your organization.

Talent brand and marketing experts can be great additions to your team, and help you bolster employer brand

[00:33:52] Great. Thank you. Now another question is in the age on Ralph what kind of titles is is out there for people that are engaged in employer branding roles. So I think we're looking more so if we were to tap into a certain type of individual or candidate what types of titles that we seek to have to kind of build up that for your brand proposition and message.
 
[00:34:19] Yeah
 
[00:34:19] that's another great question. So I think the way that I've seen it you know typically in the industry obviously if I were to go onto LinkedIn and do a search and you know to try to find these candidates employment brand I think more more people are using talent brand as well.
 
[00:34:38] So those are two obviously keywords now. I think also just thinking about marketing people that are have had brand experience overall. I was actually working with one of my clients last year where she had come from their marketing group in Canada to take on the talent Brand Group in North America. And it's exactly the same methodology that you use in consumer or corporate marketing that you're just applying to talent acquisition.
 
[00:35:05] So I think you could even go out there and search for you know just brands or AFTRS brands specialist marketing more general terms because at the end of the day they're just taking those skills and applying it for a different outcome.
 
[00:35:19] But the methodology and the principles of marketing are still there. Hopefully that makes sense.
 
[00:35:26] Absolutely.

Consider your audience before you post content to a certain social site

[00:35:27] Now we've been getting a lot of questions surrounding that posting a different take to social media channel whether it's Facebook Twitter. So a lot of people are asking specifically what type of constitution holds a type of network and rules around what is applicable in one place versus another place. So one thing that must agree with one attorney asking that it's necessary to limit social or find content to be fair versus policy that type of course utterly Dan curious if you agree and will take the suggestions we make regarding that.
 
[00:36:05] Yeah.
 
[00:36:06] You may think sometimes what I and what I say is Facebook is a place where people go to waste time and LinkedIn is a place that people come to invest time. And I definitely think that you need to consider your audience and what they're doing on those networks. So people are coming telling Dan you know they're doing something having to do with their professional network at least we can assume. On Facebook it's not so much. It's not so much the same. Now you know I add that I don't necessarily think that you need to limit any of the fun activities that you're doing with the social activities that you're doing on only networks like Facebook or Twitter. For example I think that's definitely content that you can bring into a network like LinkedIn because it goes back to that flight I had up around mixing up your content making it not so corporate. Is it the end of the day people just want to know that your partner know that you're you're human and you care about your employees they don't want to see those stock photos or the company speak they want it to just be genuine and authentic. But certainly consider your audience and what you're trying to get out of that posting on whatever social network that you're considering posting to. And we actually have and maybe this is a good takeaway for anybody that's interested but we have a whole employer branding content playbook. I bet if you google that and added links and it would automatically just populate. But if you reach out to your relationship manager they should be able to give that to you. If not I can certainly provide it. But that actually goes into greater detail about what specific kinds of content is great for the different social networks outside of LinkedIn as well as more peak times and those types of details.

To measure the ROI of employer branding, consider your company’s specific brand needs

[00:37:49] Thing here. So I'm using few more questions on this one. Also I think any questions you really want on the line today things that people are really looking at the next action that they can take to help build out the employer brand by making around measuring yearly that offer. So any thoughts or suggestions around how we can turn an employer brand strategy is something that can be measured in what types of ways can we measure the effectiveness of building out that strategy.
 
[00:38:25] Yes there's lots of different ways that we can measure it.
 
[00:38:31] And I think you always have to start with figuring out what it is that you want to accomplish first and foremost. So I have plans that come to me and say we want to make a priority. Okay great. Why is it a priority. Oh were having a really hard time attracting talent because nobody knows about us. So it's impacting our ability to recruit it's affecting time to hire this that and the other thing. So really being honest with yourself about what you want to accomplish at the end of the day will help you inform what some of those measurements should be. Now I do think brands can be kind of fluffy and it's sometimes it can be hard to get investment in it because the impact or the outcome isn't as obvious on first glance but some of the ways that we measure the effectiveness of a talent brand strategy on LinkedIn is around basically your cost per hire. So if you track that if you know your proper hire is two thousand dollars. And I think over time you will see that by having a thoughtful proactive brand strategy that that will actually be reduced because more and more people are familiar with you they know about you. So converting those candidates gets easier. Now keep in mind that's a longer term metric but something that you can certainly look at over time. I think looking at also job applications job you some of those like more hard metrics can be a good way because your talent brand will impact that. And you know I think also you know time to hire anything like that from LinkedIn’s perspective when you do a brand strategy we can actually share with you what your talent brand is like on LinkedIn. So looking at your reach and engagement across the platform we can also measure it by looking at who's clicking on your content who's sharing it what are some of those engagement rates as well and then internally what you can do is you know if you're having any issues with retention or you know maybe it's understanding where you currently stand with your brand. So what's the feeling. What are the sentiments that your employees have. So doing a survey a simple survey monkey sending out that to your employees to get a better understanding of how people are feeling about working out your your organization and then measuring that six and 12 months down the road especially if you're trying to make a shift in that reserve. So maybe your brand isn't so great and you want to change things. I think simply serving your people and understanding how they feel before and after to be a good measurement as well. But there's a whole host of ways. So those are just a couple of examples but certainly reach out to your relationship manager who can put you in touch with me or the equivalent of me to further define what that should look like for you.
 
[00:41:25] Great.

Your values are your own—you don’t need to change them to attract workers of a certain generation

[00:41:27] Now I think your time for about one work bisons before we wrap up today and this question came up as well in regards to developing that employer met and really showcasing it highlighting it to a variety of different role to acquisitions people that are potentially coming on board. But it seems a common challenge is differences of either generation either millennial talent or or more Ten-Year and even across different types of role. So what's your recommendation across the industry that will apply to a wider audience. Given that it is challenging.
 
[00:42:08] There are so many different types of voices and opinions out there yeah great question and I think that when I was talking about culture and values the mission and vision. I mean at the end of the day this is really the primary makeup of your company and that's necessary that's not necessarily going to change nor should they. Your values are your values. For whatever reason. And that's really I think should be some of the guiding principles on how you build out your broader employee that your broader EVP and then as you think about different generations who they totally agree. Different generations hear about different things. The home when you generations a whole nother story. And then you've got people in different countries that value different things as well. So that's where you need to do some of your regional homework either your regional homework or maybe some of your internal homework talking to some of those functional areas or hiring managers or whomever can give you more insights into what that audience actually cares about. Of course LinkedIn and other sources can probably provide you a lot of insights into how that's different by generation. And I know we specifically have a lot of great data on EVP and what people care about most by job functions. So you know that would be my suggestion to sort of distill that a little bit more. But I think on a broader scale as I mentioned it's largely based on who you are the company culture values mission vision and those types of attributes vs. the specifics inserting them.
 
[00:43:53] That doesn't help explain it a lot. So for everyone on the line the top of the hour now and we will be wrapping up our work at that point. For those of you who were unable to verify you we will be doing our best to refine each of you. Otherwise feel free to contact your elected relationship manager if you have any questions or anything that you top of mind boggling she said. The session is recorded and will be handed out to everybody who attended today but also we do simply say there will be a survey so please contribute to that survey and give us your feedback. And again thank you for everyone for joining us today. Thank you Chris for hosting and have a wonderful day thanks everybody.