Drive Your Talent Brand With Recruitment Marketing

Introducing Bernd Leger, Marketing Whiz

Thank you Robert. I'm really excited to be the director and I want to share a little bit of my personal journey my journey with the previous companies. I've been out and a few references the other organizations that I've seen do talent drawing really well have engaged well with their marketing. My Twitter handle. You on the first day. I want to give you some context about the organization I'm working for right now folks but we're an extremely competitive space. We work in the cloud security space. We compete with many startups and we also compete with many of the large security companies out there and so our challenge is to stand out in the industry to be recognized both from a company perspective as well as from a talent brand perspective. We're headquartered here in Boston we have a team out in Israel on the West Coast and Europe as well. About fifty people. And you can see you're on a flight of a couple of things that have stood out about specifically related to our brand. So we have been rated in number one cloud computing start to work for about. We are currently in the top three patents to work ratings for the B category which came out a couple months ago and we have some local recognition here as well. And so one of the things I'd like to do is share with you some tips and tricks of things that we have done that we did on a shoestring that don't have to cough up money. We're marketing and employment and employee branding works together with us and work together to drive that employment brand.

Your talent brand reflects your product brand

And I want to talk to you about some of the motivations of why I as your marketing team getting involved from an employment brand perspective. So interesting like when I think about my personal journey and I think about marketing and recruiting working together I do feel like a little bit like finding a unicorn. I haven't seen a lot of examples where this has worked really really well and I have my pick. I would say like about 6 7 years ago I worked for a company called Rocket seven and a part and up with our Talent Team of the individual there by the name of. And who since has created his own consulting company consulting her top talent and at rapid 7. It was not just that we had very little talent around. I would say we were not just unknown at the company. There was a lot of negative connotation associated with our telephone business. We had a very profitable fourth. And so what we found was that though the way that our employees were perceived was spilling over to the way that people were purchasing a product and vice versa. So at that moment I felt like wow this is all interconnected and intertwined. So when we think about our common brand and when when it overran those two things are really really closely intertwined and that was kind of the starting moment for me even at the like what we really got to work on the rapid seven and carried it forward in the addition companies I've worked for I'm a six time repeats startup of marketing and have a huge passion for helping companies grow really really fast. And I think marketing and talent acquisition can really really work together. Let's talk more about that and how we can drive a better town brand. Just the last thing your own unicorn ad and I together with John Stanton Talent Connect we're out to present at the Talent Connect and what was happening to me was there were hardly any marketer Talent Connect. My father was very odd. I'm not seeing anybody there and when I kind of ask around the topic that we're talking about today that their tech theme in regard to how to marketers thing and how can I become more like a marketer or having to think like a marketer.

Old Shoe CMO vs. New Shoe CMO

And the way I've described it is kind of think about the traditional way of doing marketing in a new way of doing marketing and the like to versus an issue of CMO Chief Marketing Officer. And so when I talked to people attend connect a lot of the feedback I got was I have so many challenges engaging with my marketing team and some of the things that are heard there was when they tried to work with the market team to get in touch with the market people will say well why do I need to do anything it was important or they'll say well it's a brand like this is really not how we're thinking about our brand or they don't have the resources to help out. They're like look at my own agenda. I'm on gold to me. I don't have time for that can take too much time or they don't frankly have the idea to do anything. So for example when you're trying to spend money on driving awareness and you don't have your own body and you go to the market team very often they don't have a budget for that. And I would describe it as the old way of thinking and I think there is a large amount of emotes to think like that today. And I think on the other hand there are people who I would follow with more enlightened who would kind of see there's a bigger connection between talent company brand. So they're thinking about how can we work together to strengthen the overall brand. And I think one of the core hypotheses I have is brand and company brand is becoming what there's really no differentiation between the two and the enlightened female. The author think about not going to help what they think about how can I tap into the talent team to really drive awareness for the company to really help drive the market goes forward. So we're going to do a quick survey here just to see how that life working in your organization is your CMO and all to our new shortly. So do you want to just click on the button here and it's really curious to see kind of what your experience that new orientation Ryan Ciccolo I'm actually among the surprising. I've got about 50 50 split of people who work with all to see mold and people who work with an issue similar.  

Finding common ground between marketing and recruiting

So let's talk a minute about what is that common ground. How can you what are the things that are logical places to go engage from town planning perspective when you're talking to a market. So first and foremost I think a lot of lines in regards to thinking about also marking how the panels manage we are driving everything from awareness down to closing a deal with product talent acquisition is doing the same candidates looking at our drive from a candidate all with us to a higher I think to the lot to be gained in collaborating on the brand recognition and we'll go all the more into that. There's a logical entry point around areas where you like to collaborate on the web. Or if you're trying to build up a career site. Social media very often the talent may or may not have his own resources to drive social media or in some cases you might have to go to the market team to ask for help. And certainly on the ownership side and on the on the PR side I think there's a huge opportunity to work together. He may you might ask yourself why what's in it for the market team like why would they be interested in engaging with your team. And I think there's just a number of things here that come to mind. So one is at the end of the day it all comes down to angry talent. And I think marketers need to we need to think bigger than just their own apartments they need to think about we only to bring the best talent to the company to ensure we can all meet our mission. The other thing from a Marketer's perspective being involved in a lot of the aspect of the technical team is involved and can help them make their brand bigger and they can have a broader perspective fans of the marketing prospectus can play a bigger role in their executive team and they can they can help and have input and they can drive the audience acquisition that you're trying to drive. So personal growth having a bigger role at something that would on my personal goals I feel it's important for me to look forward to my four corners and play bigger on a company. I feel like I can have a big impact helping work with the time acquisition team to drive on brand. I think from a PR perspective just looking at a couple of the goals that Mike if you think about what are the goals the market team has. So we're looking at the growth rates are always driving the man to lead prospective driving awareness within the brand.

Recruitment marketing can help you dominate the conversation

One of the goals I have in my company I'm an example is share of votes and the Sharepoint basically means if I compare my company to our four or five competitors who gets the more mention and are the overall brand awareness and I think the way I look at actually branding can help me drive the SharePoint I can use the talent branding I can use the recruiting team. Porkpie are and use them to actually put articles out there about the company in our town brand which have an overall with the show avoid. Legitimate. A couple of examples. Funnel specifically into what struck me when I was connected just how familiar. Are. The most simplest way to power. Describe your town. So you're trying to create awareness you're trying to create interest and then you're trying to close higher. And again at the top level if you can share and communicate your goals with the marking team for example you're trying to create awareness by having more followers in the organization or you're trying to decrease the time to higher. Those are again personal growth to what the market will think about and just creating that sense Terenty I think will open up the door for a much larger conversation in regards to interacting with each other. I also think in some cases the market ultimately we constrained and if you're if you're able to talk to them are thinking about hey why don't we put this together. I don't have a dedicated corporate social. Maybe you don't either. But if we can funnel this together maybe together we can we can fund a resource to drive awareness or to help with the conversion ratios. So where would I start were the most obvious part. So it all kind of starts with the brand the brand.

How to change your employment brand

And I worked for a small startup. Not every company is fortunate enough to work at Google to work at Apple to work at Twitter. I'm sure these companies have very few challenges in recruiting potential candidates. So that's nice but 19 efforts and above don't work at these companies or you might work at a large company and maybe you have a brand and brand that actually you don't feel great about. Wanted to share. Now you feel like this was a brilliant campaign that you did a little bit with you. Many of you may have seen this as a matter of its own campaign and so what we're trying to do is change the perception they haven't specifically changed their employment brand the town brand. So what's your name. I got a job all the programming edgy. I got a job to at Zazie is the average for food hats on wheels. I love that. Guys I'll be writing code that helps machines communicate just as if you like dogs hamsters guinea pigs you name it to transform the world. I've broken that negative Kats of SML and I'll be helping turbine's power said turbine on a cart. I can make hospitals run more efficient. This is my competition.
 
[00:13:53] Oh my.
 
[00:13:55] That's cute. Can we say fruit platter on a holiday or a cat. Well that was a very clever very creative way of looking at changing your own brand. Again of course not all of us have a same level of marketing budget or employment and branding budget that we have. So for many of them people were looking for a job or a job. We all look like that. We look back with anonymous group of people with very little insight to what is it like to work at the company. That's one option. You don't really know what the company is all about or people are a lot of webs. I'm sure you've seen the very mirror image on mobile web site. It's a nice mix of happy people from the earth background with basically the same image being used on hundreds of flights. And clearly that can't be the answer either and you want to make sure you'd stand up with your own opinion brand. So how did you know just to share a little bit more of recognitions. I would have been having started stirring it. So one thing that we did at cloudlike was we started organizing the luncheon burns where we won engaged talent acquisition team and marketing and then we got an ad rather fold to start looking at our culture and defining what is that we offer like we have something unique at the company. But we wanted to really work on how do we ensure that what we feel is unique get kind of communicated.

Brand is culture, and culture is brand

 And when I think about that again the key point I want to make sure that this is a study from Harvard Business Review an article from Harvard Business Review. The key point here Fred it's cultural brand these things are so closely intertwined that marketers shouldn't think any differently than with Fox. This is one of the things. So I do think the company brand is impacted by employing brands. Give an example when I want to read a trader joe's I feel very differently about my experience at Trader Joe's because I feel like employees are happy then I go to just some regular supermarket chain. So I do think I'm happier as a consumer about how I feel. Shopping looking at airports there. This is a quote from the hubs but I'll check out the other evening culture to recruiting its partners to marketing. So the culture of a core element of focus on defining what makes your culture unique what it is they created as the culture code and whatever recipe a common set of views that they've created in a PowerPoint deck and it posted on flights here. What I find amazing is that this letter has been viewed more than 2 million times. So I think can have multiple effects. What kind of trade credit a corset about that the company has. But it's also being used out a cult appears as a recruiting vehicle that helps to attract attention that's given these guys really strong brand. So we strongly urge you to think of all that making something very visible about your own culture and your core values. Another example is Netflix. Netflix they have also defined their culture and their core values in a Friday which has been viewed more than 13 million times. So it's an amazing amount of PR and branding that they have. You can hear something now full of things that they put in here I think to fly Decoud more than 80 or 90 light. It's just a good way of determining what it is that makes your company unique. So from that you kind of define a party of engaged marketing worked on kind of communicating that branding is really one of the theme. How do you go from there and more share a little bit of what we did at one point was that we felt like. Let's start small let's just show private and very small steps. And by doing that we felt like we could get more technicians moving forward and we could get more buying and more resources. So I wanted to share with you kind of what it looked like when I started in April 2014. This was our career site. So it couldn't be more anonymous than that. You don't see anything about the company the people who work here. And we basically have one paragraph with the open job listings. Now what kind of where we started off by doing with much to learn by kind of brainstorming. We quickly felt that for us to make our point about who we are. We want to kind of showcase the people that work here and why. Why do these people want to work at Walmart so we made it all about the people?

Simple changes: revamp your career site, invite employees to join in

So I think we did it. We changed our career site. And again I think this a great opportunity to engage with the market teams to select block what can we do on the site on the corporate site. What can we do on the social channel what can we do on the link and type what we do in the foresight to really from our culture to the far from an upside where we started and we started creating this video. So you know we talked we talked about the story of cloud like what's our background. All through video which gives people more insight about who we are and then we had a lot of brainstorming sessions and what I find fascinating and even going back to. I feel like talent acquisition folks really are so well aligned they think the same. Are all at heart. There are people in the market. They love telling a story and this is a great way because they get the more creative juices flowing. When I tell my physician approached me there was nothing more fun for me than to start thinking about how can we get creative we think outside of the box what can we do to drive a brand. And I think that's again a great way of approaching the market team thing. Hey we have a son and we have a great project. We think this would be really fun for you guys to engage in a kind of re energize the market teams with their credit users. And so what we've started doing a call up is something super simple. We started creating these employee spotlights. They took less than five minutes to create. We had one time attempt left. We are employed point three to four questions and we started posting these ones on a common Web site and we started socializing these through the editorial channels. And I frankly was shocked and surprised like how much more these kind of employees were on resolving an engagement. The other thing you were trying to do. So you know we had the engagement that were two times higher than any other post that we provided. And so we started doing that on a regular basis across the different organizations across the different offices because they have a big presence and Israel is important for us that we attract people from all over the world. So that worked really really well. The next thing that we did is we created a relay recruiting video. We didn't have any money. We didn't have enough time. We found a couple of people who were interested in what I move experience and who are on whom are on the table and what we did. We basically dove in 1917 a Chinese karate flick movie and dropped it and made an all out plot. And it's just a really funny way of engaging again without a lot of money without a lot of resources. Put that out there and it's quite an amazing amount of you know a great way to kind of bottom your brand. Once we had that in place we kind of went a little further and saw the fear cloud logic and llama and I bring this up because one of the things is you can use them both really to drive your talent brand and to again engage with your marketing team and the chick Lamacraft is very very significant. This is what we are the first billion in the box. We spend a little bit of money in getting that video showing the videos like 30 seconds on the chicken Llama's very significant means a lot to us. I'm not the artist of the chicken but I do believe in the chicken Lamma what it stands for came about as a basically as a dry co-founder and CTO Ryan grew up during a recession we're having with the customer and weren't able to mute for whatever reason that I remember. I went up to the board and drew a dinosaur or what I thought was a dinosaur is trying to get across the message that the person on the other line is a dinosaur. And this was his driving. And it didn't really look like a dinosaur it looked more like a chicken. It. Became a symbol for us. And it's become its own thing. Kieran Thulborn I'm sure it's on the website and on 3D printed chicken little magnets and so we decided to keep that you can Marmot's and remind ourselves and our customers of the choice that they have to either go extinct or become a part of that transformation and evolve to take advantage of what the future has in store. So we've really made a second home our home and you can even find on social. We have a view that is like where the hell is Kilama we take pictures of the SEC Namma all over the world. We've taken that to the next level. We now have the concept of superpowers and we've addressed the chicken Lombe out the superhero and rather just talking about our core values which is very 1980s.

Encourage your employees to showcase your brand’s culture

We focused more on encouraging our employees to live and encourage them to have demonstrated their superpowers. And we have posters of a lot all the offices to kind of share with you some personal things that have worked on the clock. If you have something similar that works for you after all the talk about social arm I think the key thing here is social again for the great avenue for you to engage. I've heard from many towns that they either have or don't have their own team to drive talent around. I wanted to do a quick question again here to the audience. How many of your teams the town teams have a dedicated social channel and your organization. It's like looking at results. All right talking about 50/50 which is interesting though regardless if you have your own hand or not I think the key here comping if it's things like we did with the employee content or just making the company come alive I think the content is really important here. I want to share one example from John Stanton who is head of recruiting at a team talent of talent. And they have actually created their own channel. And what was interesting they created their own channel because they couldn't get marketing to engage. And for that reason they left treader handle it make a company come alive. Let's give the employees the voice and let's recruit kind of understand what we're all about which is a very different approach than we took a call that I actually tell Nickelsen approached me. I said no initially when they feel like they want to have I'll handle it because I feel like our overall brand was too small. But on the flip side actually give them access to the cockpit hammock so that they can leverage the handle that we have to start communicating with employees. I think I've kind of come full circle. I do believe that having a dedicated talent handle can be a great way of engaging and demonstrating kind of what your company is all about. Want to share part of another way another example that I really really like this is this company is the foundation. And then they have a fantastic way of telling a story. And in order for them to better relate to recruits they created a super short video to show you a little bit of it. And they made it very personal they made it all about their employees and how their employees are connecting to what their mission and why are they so passed about what they do and that is what they did that they created like a lot. Talk about why am I here and what am I trying to do in the organization. But it's something very similar thoughts that go against large brands. They have had a major transformation of the last few months after changing their talent ram. And that came from their respective they are very active in promoting these. I chose Cisco because you can see that for to promote reasons why the working assets of which are all which I also found very very creative.

Collaborate from a social perspective and make sure to track your talent metric

The other thing I want to point out here and again offices. There are so many new channels out there that you collaborate from a social perspective and marketers love that kind of stuff on the case. But you are using a new technology which basically the way of watching light conversations is like you have a little radio or TV station that you can use to engage with your mature potential recruits with your candidates and then you can watch these offline as well. The reason I bring this up because I think there's so many new technologies that people and organizations haven't tapped into that across the board between talent acquisition and marketing and I think this is a great example for one of but just want to again call the audience really quickly like what are some of the third sites and so far left that you're using for your town from today. So this is multiple choice and love to see kind of what are you within your right and interlinked and lapsed or Facebook and Instagram. Periscopes the great governor of Utah. Fantastic. Great. So we talked about the fun of talking about the branding talked about social let's talk about. Again how can you engage and can we demonstrate our thickset then how mocking be a factor in that. So when a column when we think about results and measuring talent Branning and homeworking it's helping with that we think about engagement with think about followers.

So we think about reach and we obviously track all those metrics thing that we even are more excited about are things such as our ability to attract talent. And so this is from the first six months last year and updated the numbers have kind of leveled off a little bit but you can just see the dramatic impact that we have. It's sort of putting an emphasis on talent branding. We had a tenfold increase in the number of applicants in just six months and we dramatically increased the number of hires. And the best people are the people who come to you rather than you trying to reach out to people so frothed up a major way.

Encourage conversation across your company

I would offer what I would offer that is as it relates to measurement of your ability to communicate what you're doing. One thing that our town Kim has done here in Kate's entire executive team and we have as an example we have a monthly all hands meeting where the entire company gets together and every. Time we do that employment training gets a minute or two when I talk about some updates and key successes that we've had to bring the point home in our CEO every single time something like make sure you know the critical part about the organization. Please vote. Can I share a couple of examples from the flight that would present that the all and me? So if you have a CEO if you have it appears passionate about employment running tap into that and make sure that get communicated in more broad terms. So we're to talk about that. For us it was the cloudlike back to work top 3 in the U.S. And just to show you how tangible that is and what it means to our brand. Take a look at this chart right here. This is the number of page views that we have had on Glassdoor. And you can see here we had a massive influx at the time when the best time to work was published. We thought maybe this is just the one time but it wasn't. You can hear it still pretty high even in the next smartphone. So if you can tap into that and have a strong advocate in your organization who can be somebody who can help make it a success. And the marketing can do that. I think it's a great way for tapping into that. So without the kind of 0 percent comes to the recommendations on how you can work with marketing and also what you can promote marketing and how you can tap into that. So to think like a marketer you have to understand what their marketer think like what do they care about and what they want to begin a dialogue recommendation that would have set up a regular one online meet at multiple levels meet with the people who are doing the day to day meet with the social team movie people on the brand meet with the CMO you can start establishing those direct dialogue and start by just talking about what your goals are magical and see where you see those linkages other thing where they can help you are the things where you can help them. And as I mentioned earlier there's a lot of things that you can provide to them that help them. It's not a one way street. You can provide a fresh perspective you can ingest a fresh way of thinking you can inject a creative way of thinking about A Woman's Nation that maybe they haven't thought of. And you can re energize the market team with credit campaigns that they love to do but maybe haven't thought about or haven't had the time to sort of bring me up and. And we talked about capturing culture and we talked about the importance of branding is basically one company brand enough to differentiate it from the employment brand. And it's if you can kind of get that across and you combine from the Seymore that point you can start driving the town brand together and you can tap into the PR team not just to drive the product but to drive your talent. We talked about finding start small and fun project something small that can give you kind of that initial burst that allows it to take off like a rocket ship and that can help you gain more buying in more resources in your budget. And we talk a little bit about doing some quick wins and using data to really show progress.

Key takeaway: always convey your top differentiators

But the most important point I want to leave here is really that you know the most important thing I find is sending out whatever it is it doesn't matter the size of your innovation how big or how small you are. We all have something that makes us unique and I think that's important to kind of convey for cloudlike. Because at the end of the day I think that the core that we all have as great people make great companies and a market what think exactly the same way that you do the better people we have the better that makes the product the better that makes the company and kind of bring that home and after people still feel like wow. The thing about just for employers if you go to your own Website and you don't start seeing a lot of people employed. Talk about not just the company what did to positively or negatively about your company enter product that you know don't focus on. That's what people are doing and they're communicating product hours to communicating company via. So I'm going to go away. It's the impact on how you think about your talent but it's also a major way for think about the company overall. So that's kind of what I want to leave you out of my life like you're really thinking about your town brand because the same way it works for the old shoe or new shoes imo. Are you an old shoe or new show talent around executive or recruiter yourself.

Leverage AB testing to develop better recruitment marketing

So without Robert I think you have time for a few questions. Yeah definitely. Thanks so much. Go ahead and start with that and get questions to come through and everyone please feel free to keep those questions coming and we'll get to as many as we can. Go ahead.

I'll start off here with a question you've got from Bobby who has only recently released a new employer brand campaign that was validated it tested internally. The focus group surveys and so on and within a few have any recommendations around testing the employer brand externally on career sites or fall any regulations you may have there. Yes sir. And I don't know to what degree employment and talent branding are leveraging AP testing I think that could be a great way though in marketing we use tools such as optimized lead to do a thing we use that on a proper web site or recommendation or suggestion might be if you are doing that already fantastic if you're not or top the market teams and the like have love to do a Navy test on some of our poor women branding and put that on your site. But then on LinkedIn put that to see kind of what resonates better you can split your split up big time with some groups and you can kind of gauge what could be a better response.

Communication is key to creating a fun workplace even in a regulated industry

Great. Next question you've got coming from Stephanie. She's curious how do you suggest having more fun when you work in a highly regulated industry. Everything needs to be run through an compliance of financial services and so on that in an industry that's not necessarily known as being fun. That's a great question. And I think what I did mention is another kind of key stakeholder you have to work with to work through with the legal team. So my recommendation there would be I'm thinking that you know even though you a regulated industry I think again the employee you can have on a financial circumvention you can make that come alive and then hopefully you can work with your legal team and other people who have worked on that and just talk about what your company is all about. That doesn't necessarily defy kind of regulations that are in place or that you know have anything to do. I don't work on financial services for them I just know regulations that you have to be aware of. But my recommendation to again bring it back to the people just communicate take pictures of people show up show your or your applicant what it is to work in your organization and I think that can build upon them to attribute that and that home share pictures of your outings your company outings your picnic picnics your company in session. I think that just brings a little bit light into an organization even if it's highly regulated.

She's curious what's the best way to persuade a reluctant organization an employer branding is important. Well well, I think we all work in organizations have an ultimate goal which is either trying to drive revenue or trying to drive retention. I think the best way is to demonstrate the power of employment branding with results and with data. And what we try to do when we try to show an artist was having some examples that demonstrate that we had an increase in awareness and just like using some of those metrics to show that hey we're doing these very small steps then we can have the impact on employment branding. I would I would also point to if your employment brand isn't great and the best way to show review through executive team and say like look this is what people are saying about the occupation on Glassdoor which is just an easy way to bring it home like we can have the impact if we can dramatically improve what people think about innovation because if we can attract attractive people it's going to have an impact across our innovation. So showing really positive example and showing potential here is of concern that you might have with data. Think of a great way to show the importance of talent running. Red flags.

Questions from Tyler which you know how do you go about monitoring analytics census data and stats from social media with little or no budget. Yeah I think one thing about you don't want anything. I mean you can start with something as simple as Google Analytics. Track traffic can track the youth page views on your career section. I think there's a lot of free food available from solution better tools from LinkedIn and other solutions like that that you can tap into and out there is a lot more to you when you start spending money. But just think through like what are some tools available that are often a thing and start. Awesome. Great. Thanks so much. And unfortunately that's all the time we do have for today. But we do say everyone for attending and to hope everyone had.