Ep 822: How To Win Investment For Employer Branding

0:00It's been a tough few years for employer branding, with budgets and teams being cut back across many organisations. Some employer brand leaders, though, are still winning investment and influence in these difficult times. So what is it that they're doing differently? Keep listening to find out. Support for this podcast comes from Juicebox. If you're a recruiter, sourcing can quickly become your full-time job. You've got open recs, you've got a deadline, and you're spending the first two hours of your day trying to find people who might be a fit, scrolling the web, tweaking Boolean strings, sending faulty messages to get three replies.

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2:10Hi there, welcome to episode 822 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Employer branding teams are still under sustained pressure. Budgets have shrunk and headcount has been reduced across many organisations, even when the hiring the business needs has become more specific and more critical. Despite all of the cuts, some employer brand leaders are still winning investment and influence. What sets them apart is how closely their work connects to what the business is trying to achieve and how effectively they communicate its impact. So what does it take to make employer branding really matter to a business?

2:53My guest this week is Stephen Quinn, CEO of Atomic. In our conversation, Stephen shares what the most effective employer brand leaders do differently, which metrics carry weight with the business, and how to plan employer branding for the long term. Hi, Stephen, and welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Matt. Great to be here. Well, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. Just to start off with, could you introduce yourself and just tell everyone what you do? Yeah, sure. Happy to. My name is Stephen Quinn. I'm CEO of Atomic. So we're an insight-led agency focused on B2B and employer brand. And on the employer brand side, then we work with employer brand leaders in large corporates like Salesforce, Heineken, Microsoft, L 'Oreal, Primark, Ericsson, to name a few.

3:42And really what we focus on is embedding their employer brand right into the heart of their organizations. So leaders live, it's really important that they are leading from the front. If we have an employer brand or an EVP that feels a little too polished and addy, they're not going to use it. And then everyone, of course, has an excuse to not do what the boss says. Employees advocate for it. Look, everyone's got a personal brand. So if you've got an employer brand that feels not in sync with how people feel about it, then they're not going to go to bat for you. Applicants need to feel it, yeah.

4:17And then we need TA and RE managers to actually use it. They're busy people. If we're not giving them the tools, they won't use it. Absolutely. I think they're really interesting points that you raised there. And I'm sure we'll kind of get into some of them as we sort of go through the conversation. Just to set the tone of things, it's obviously a very disruptive time for employers at the moment in terms of talent, talent acquisition, internal mobility, everything really. How is that impacting employer branding? What's going on in employer branding at the moment? What are the trends? What are the biggest challenges?

4:52Yeah, lots of stuff that I think will resonate with your audience as well. So we're seeing a lot of the same issues for most of our clients. Reduced budget is the classic one and reduced headcount in employer brand and talent marketing as well. So maybe there was five, six, seven people in a team maybe they're down to two but the demands have stayed the same if not gone up so they're under pressure there's no doubt no absolutely and do you think that i think really over the last few years we've seen a lot of pressure on employer branding teams in terms of the resources that they have is that likely to continue or are employers now seeing the value of what employer brand can bring in a different line there's definitely more sophistication and understanding of employer brand.

5:39Now, I'd say still from a reasonably small base, I think there's also a mix of excitement and fear around AI for employer brand leaders. They're trying to think about how they can work within the zeitgeist of reduced headcount, but also needing to hire very specific roles, niche roles. So how do you have a message on one side which is maybe more almost you know corporate reputation management and then on the other side have this positive you know come join us we've got some really interesting things that we're trying to do so kind of hard to have those two ideas in your head at the same time i think no absolutely and yeah i think it's really interesting as well because you know i know in in lots of cases it's just producing lots of slop when it comes to marketing so it's kind of an opportunity and a threat isn't it yeah absolutely like i think some some trends have been around for a long time.

6:32This lack of clarity around workforce planning is a classic one we see. So, say for working with a client and they want to do a recruiting marketing campaign, okay, great, but how does this fit into a broader context? What's the business trying to achieve at a more broad level? Then how does workforce planning fit within that? And then there's a sense of, actually, hang on, maybe we're creating some of these campaigns in isolation of the bigger picture. I suppose that kind of really feeds in the stakeholder buy-in and the funding, the resources and all those kinds of things. And I suppose on that note, you've worked with a lot of employer brand leaders within some very large, impressive organizations.

7:12What separates the really successful ones from those who aren't? You sort of mentioned in the conversation about getting things implemented and getting people to take things up. Or what is it that separates the best leaders from the people who can't quite get it right? I don't think any employer brand leader gets it wrong because all activity is good idea at a baseline. But I think the ones that really, really knock it out of the park, attach themselves to the critical needs of the organization, I've mentioned this already, that they understand what the business is trying to do. And that could be at a macro level, it could be at a regional level, it could be at a role level.

7:48you know we're setting up a new plant in germany or you know we're developing a new ai center of excellence over here so they need to know what's going on at that business level in order for them to start designing programs to help the business achieve those objectives so i just think i think if they're isolated from what the business is doing then naturally they're going further and further down the food chain. So they've got to really sort of grapple their way right up to get that access as much as possible. And then to make sure that they're reporting on the impact of the programs that they're creating in order for the business to help that hit those objectives.

8:29And over the years, I've seen employer branding sitting in all kinds of different places in the organization, in comms, in recruitment marketing, in acquisition. Where do you think it should sit in the organization? And also, how should it kind of integrate through the organization? Yeah. So two really interesting points there. I think we'll come on to the integration one in a minute. For us, I don't think it matters where it fits, but it is interesting to see, depending on where it fits, what their strengths and relative weaknesses are. So if they're sitting in TA, not always, but it can be quite recruitment, campaign-focused, very metrics-y driven, but sometimes quite short-term.

9:10If it's in HR, maybe it's more retention, culture, engagement. It's about the experience of employees. And then if it's in marketing, it can be quite brand-led. So they're all important. But if you're sitting in the TA function as an employer brand leader, then it makes sense that you are thinking about culture, you're thinking about retention, you're thinking about experience, you're also thinking about the brand. So I think it's about not just having the blinkers on depending on where you fit. I mean, do you have any advice to people who, for example, might be sitting in TA doing this in terms of how they can develop the right relationships and conversations with the marketing team or the comms team to really make sure that the employer brand is kind of being integrated and talked about properly rather than just kind of getting a set of rules on what they can and can't do.

10:02Yeah, I think that's absolutely key. And I don't think it's just marketing and brand. I think it's across the business. I think finance, HR, obviously, marketing, sales, product, customer experience, like to actually start having conversations with people in totally different teams gives you that rounder picture. Certainly within marketing is a funny one because employer brand people are brand people or marketing people generally yet i think sometimes marketing people and even creative teams a lot of the times they don't have the time to actually work on these programs but they're some of the most interesting projects for a creative or a marketer to work on i see two schools of thought one keep marketing away and the other school of thought is bring marketing in and actually maybe talk to some of the younger creatives or younger marketers, bring them in as part of the project, let them experience what it's like to actually create campaigns for employees, not for customers, and partner with them a little bit more.

11:02I know it's a cliche, but certainly if you can break down silos as much as possible, you get more permission then when you need to ask a favor or ask to go on a shoot because we want to get the employee side of that particular story. So yeah, lots of conversations and lots of listening, I think. Support for this podcast comes from Pebble. I know that many of you listening are hiring internationally, and you'll be all too familiar with the wall of paperwork, rules and approvals, and you know just how much this red tape can slow things down. That's what Pebble is designed to fix. Pebble makes global hiring simple.

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12:21Go to highpebble.ai before it's gone. That's H-I-P-E-B-L dot A-I. Terms and conditions apply. I think that's a really great bit of advice. Let's talk a little bit about metrics and measurement because there seems to have been a discussion going on for as long as I've worked in this area about how you measure success when it comes to employer branding. What do you see? How should people be measuring the effectiveness of these programs? Yeah, well, maybe I'll focus first on a personal book bearer of mine, which is the raw metrics. So I think there's a lot of focus on views, likes, engagement, shares of content.

13:07And I think that's fine to a degree but certainly if you go to the cfo and say hey look my linkedin campaign or my youtube campaign delivered x thousand likes and four thousand views until you know completion they will just look at you with a glazed look so and they are the people who are wondering what is this money for how is this going to impact what we're trying to do as a business back to this point about uh seeking with the critical business needs so in atomic we have what we call the atomic diagnostic and it's a way to actually really set some benchmarks but also focus on metrics that matter and maybe you know downplay some of the metrics that don't matter so look every customer is different but there are definitely some commonalities that we see again and again so cost per qualified lead will be a classic one okay so we're paying x amount of money for a linkedin campaign what did it cost us did we get or why time to hire is fairly standard i think some interesting ones are things like reduction in declines so and this is where you know seeking in with ta and sources are really important so okay so we have good people in the pipe and now they suddenly dropped out and they didn't tell us why okay so why is that is the something to the hiring manager and how they're showing up is there something wrong with the experience is somebody aggressively targeting the same people we are so like that's a cost and painful as well if you feel good people are dropping it.

14:36Referral rates, really important. Most companies have a referral program. I would probably say most of them are quite underpowered. So are we getting more people through referrals rather than having to use recruitment agencies or paid campaigns? ROI of program investments, I think that's a big one. So we're investing in, I don't know, campus activation or sponsorship every year. Okay, great. We've been doing it for 15 years. everybody loves it. Do the metrics actually stack up? And do we need to have a tough conversation? Yeah. And again, I think they all make a lot of sense. And I suppose linked to this, because as you sort of hinted at earlier, there is a lot of short-term thinking around employer brands, you know, real campaign thinking as opposed to program thinking or strategy thinking.

15:29how should employers be planning employer branding programs for the long term i mean you know what are people getting wrong what's your advice to the employer brand people listening i think it starts with setting a baseline it's the one thing we see again and again that there isn't that sense of what are we doing right what are we doing wrong where are we showing up really badly so like we yeah we might have a great group marketing campaign but our glass door scores are rubbish or the recruiters are showing up in the right way, onboarding is wrong, or we're not leveraging the amazing programs that we run around CSR or IND or LND even.

16:09So I think what we have as part of our diagnostic is we have 32 measures that we can score against, and some of it is self-scoring from our clients plus also external analysis. So I would always start there. And then I think that gives you permission to create a roadmap to say okay look we've got gaps here and here and here we're doing fine on these we can let them sit for a little while and then other areas we're scoring well and create that two or three year quarter by quarter roadmap or however the business manages their time scales and create a dashboard showing the impact and showing the baseline and showing the difference between where we started and where we are now.

16:53And then definitely make sure it's socialized to senior people in the business in a format that they can understand. So classic one I hear all the time is HR thinks in PowerPoints and finance thinking spreadsheets. So if you're going to the finance people and you're looking for money, make sure you don't give them a PowerPoint if they use spreadsheets. Give them a nice, boring Excel with all the numbers in it and the ROI if that's the way that they measure value. So that's where I'd start. And as a final question for you, what do you think the future looks like? You know, we talked about AI a little bit, you know, what impact is it going to have?

17:32How is employer branding going to evolve over the next few years? Yeah, well, I think it's evolving an awful lot, even in the last while. Hard to know, are we at the top of a hype cycle when it comes to AI or are we somewhere in the middle or beginning? There's no doubt, you know, there's been massive highs, are massive lows. I think as an efficiency amplifier, it's absolutely amazing. But I think a lot of EB people are thinking, okay, well, my job is potentially at risk. So I think there's a lot of messaging about how this is going to radically change the experience for employees. I still think you've got to have a human talking to a human as part of the process.

18:10And we need to think about, you know, why would somebody consider joining this organization? And how do we give them a great experience. There's one thing that is no doubt though, that as companies have done headcount reductions because of AI, some of them are going to hire those same people back, no doubt. Others that don't, I think is going to create this new wave of entrepreneurs and innovators. And I think that's possibly where the next wave of really interesting stuff when it comes to HR or TA or employee brand is potentially going to come from. Yeah, I think that's really interesting. I mean, the human-to-human stuff is kind of vital in this.

18:49And yeah, the kind of the makeup of the workforce is certainly going to be changing. Stephen, thank you very much for talking to me. Pleasure. Thanks for having me, Matt. My thanks to Stephen. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on everything that's coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I'll be back next time, and I hope you'll join me.

19:46Bye.