Support for this podcast is provided by Willow, a video interviewing platform for scaling businesses. As the talent market evolves, you're probably thinking about how to build a more inclusive candidate experience that doesn't require long days on Zoom, Teams, or Skype. Willow is a virtual interviewing platform where candidates can record responses on their own time using video, audio, or text, and it's used by some of the fastest growing businesses like Coinbase, Hotjar, and HelloFresh. Willow's flexible platform means candidates can truly be themselves, and recruiters get a consistent, transparent process. It's also excellent for the candidate experience. 35% of candidates interview with Willow between the hours of 6pm and 6am. Willow also integrate seamlessly with over 5,000 business applications, such as Workday, Workable, Lever, Greenhouse, and Team Taylor. There's a free trial to try everything, and if you need more, Willow's tailored plans include features to help you expand your talent pool and streamline recruiting operations, all with 24/7 live support. Request a personalized demo today at willow.video. That's W-I-W-I-L-O-DOT video. There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime than mine, at all the ages of history. Hi there, and welcome to Episode 628, a recruiting feature with me, Matt Alder. It's been a highly volatile few years for talent markets and hiring. So, how is all the uncertainty and disruption shifting employers thinking around EVP and employer branding? Is it still considered to be as important as it was before, and what might the future direction look like? My guest this week are Neil Harrison, an independent employer branding consultant, and Mike Heel, managing director at W-D-A-D Communications. Neil recently collaborated with W-D-A-D on qualitative research into the current EVP and employer brand landscape. The findings give some unique insights into the priorities employers are giving employer brands, and how things have changed since the pandemic. Hi, Neil. Hi, Mike, and welcome to the podcast. It's an absolute pleasure to have you both on the show. Please, could you introduce yourselves and tell everyone what you do? Hello, Matt. I'm Mike Heel. I'm managing director of W-D-A-D Communications. We're a recruitment marketing boy branding agency. It's been around since 1995, so nearly celebrating 30 years in the business. Matt, really good to see you again. My name is Neil Harrison. As you probably know, so I head up NH237, which is a talent intelligence organization, work a lot independently with organizations, but equally partner guys like Mike on a regular basis for EVP and EVP-related work. Neil, you're on the podcast a little while ago with some research that you conducted post-pandemic on the state of employer branding. You've just done another version of that research in conjunction with Mike's business. Tell us a bit about the research, why it was redone, the methodology for doing it. Give us a bit of background to it, Mike. Yeah, I think as you mentioned there, Matt, we did a piece with Neil back in 2021. Obviously, the world has changed quite dramatically since that particular piece of research has undertaken. We wanted to go back out to the market and actually just see where those attitudes had changed, what the issues that organizations were facing there, particularly after the pandemic and everything that we went through back in 2021-22 plus. Also, being quite frank, it gave us an opportunity, the results gave us an opportunity to talk to our clients and potential new clients as well about some of the facts that we uncovered, and as Neil will talk about later, some of them were actually quite surprising. Neil, tell us a little bit about the methodology that you used to sort of do this. Yeah, it's a really important question as well because you can go about this research in a number of different ways. Quite simply, we constructed a question set on Survey Monkey. We retained some questions from the 2021 version, which enabled us to compare how people was responsible to change over the last two and a half years. We obviously created some new questions because in 2021, there was lots of probing around COVID and people's response to that. It's less relevant today, so we had less focus on COVID and more on looking ahead, the state of the marketplace. We pushed out an invite to take part in the survey to a wide number of largely UK-based senior TAFER. We got just under 100 people responding, which is relatively robust. It gives it its indicative. Is it a UGov poll? No, it's not, but it gives us a really useful and topical indication about what the marketplace is thinking and where it's going. So give us the headline findings. What has changed? What were the big things that you identified that has changed over the last couple of years? It's really, really interesting things for me. Fascinating. One of the most obvious areas of change was around DE&I. When we wrap around the session previously, more than half of the people completing the survey, for them, spending around DE&I as regards their EB investment, more than half of the people saw a real area of focus. And not surprisingly, what did surprise us was when we surveyed it this time round, so what probably six weeks, two months ago now, that figure had dropped by around about a half, so only just over a quarter of our survey felt that spending around DE&I was a real area of focus. Now, I was kind of torn as to how to interpret that. Did I see that negatively? Is DE&I no longer a priority for some organizations? Or has it become business as usual? So rather than seeing it as something to focus on additionally, is it become so important? It's business as usual. And I'm probably leaning more towards that as one of the interpretations about that, but certainly a really, really interesting output in terms of that. One of the areas which probably hasn't changed, and maybe depressingly so, was around, I suppose, metrics. So we asked a question around senior management buying or senior leadership buying. So what are the key metrics, the key indicators, that enable you to have meaningful conversations with senior leadership from a TA perspective, which opens up future investment around this kind of space. And that's a real issue for a lot of people. And so we asked them what are the key metrics, the key KPIs, which really make a difference to those people. And the response was broad and wide and a nearly contradictory. So for us, there's a real challenge there. And the times we're living in right now where a lot of TA folk are facing challenge, and there is cost cutting clearly across the sector, not being able to come up with a really compelling and convincing investment case across senior leadership. I think he's a real sign of vulnerability there. Yeah, I think that's really interesting. And certainly we've seen a lot of employee brand professionals being laid off and teams being reduced and all those kind of things. Potentially a time where, and we can talk about this a little bit later, potentially a time where employee brandings perhaps never been more important. And it seems that that's something, that sort of lack of metrics and business case, it's been the case for a while now. Why do you think that is? And do you think there's a solution, a solution to that? Because when you could have sit in this space and you see the impact of employee branding, it kind of seems quite obvious. But it's, how is that communicated in a way that the leadership team of a business could understand? That's not the reason why. But at the same time for me, one of the real, one of the obvious interpretations of that is that we've never had the ability to generate so many metrics as far as TA is concerned, all the kind of dashboards that we can access there, which in a way is really, really positive. But typically though the metrics we're able to generate tend to be, I suspect as far as senior leadership comes through that quite operational, quite functional around TA. So it's about time to hire, it's probably about cost to hire. It's kind of metrics around that. I suspect those are of less interest to senior leadership than either money saved or money generated as a result of TA and EVP-based investment. A lot of it suspects is down to communication and dialogue. So having conversations with people like that to understand what are the metrics you want to hear? What are the metrics we're delivering that perhaps are are interesting but not repivital in terms of changing that dial? And I think that sense of dialogue is really, really important. But it's, I suppose, having the confidence, having the ability to have those conversations to unlock effectively investment, because we've never had the ability to create so many metrics and figures around that. But do they make a difference? Do they push the dial? I suspect not. And I think they're probably taken for granted. There's often a challenge that a lot of senior leadership, and it's a terrible thing to say, probably think recruitment is easier than we all know it to be. And as a result of that, I think we have to work that much harder to make the case for what is our work doing? How is it, whether it's saving money, whether it's who the people were bringing on board, quality of hire, all those kind of key metrics which probably make more of a difference and are more interesting to people at that level. And all that considered, what was the feeling about how companies felt about employer branding? Was it still considered to be important? Was it to be less important than it was or more important? What was the kind of a change in sentiment, if you like? It was really, really interesting, because we asked a bunch of questions at the start of the survey around the size of the team today compared to 12 months ago, the investment that people were putting into it. And I was broadly speaking pleasantly surprised by the optimism and the buoyancy that were heard back. So people were generally, not exclusively, but generally fairly positive about that. The other side of that, I think the most fascinating fact for me was that something like 7% of those respondents were actually happy with where their EVP currently is, where it currently stands. And I just find that shocking, really, that so few of the audience that we're talking to are content and happy with their EVP. And yet, as you say, it's so important and it's so important that it's up to date, that it's relevant, that it's authentic, all of those things that we are forever spanking on about. That was something that struck me from the report, probably the key thing. I think that's interesting. And do you think that, because obviously we're in very changing times, we considered the pandemic to be challenging, which it was. And I think since the pandemic, we've had a whole set of different challenges in terms of the economy and in terms of talent, shortages of talent, all those kind of things that have been happening. How has that kind of affected the way that people see their employer brand? I mean, the changing markets, all those kind of things, people being flexible with what they're doing to achieve that, is that perhaps the reason why so many people aren't happy with where they are right now? I think it's really important. I think change and how we respond to change. I mean, it was half the reason we did the second survey in the first place, because we wanted to understand the kind of key changes that the marketplace was finding themselves in. I think we've had, I keep using this term when I asked to describe this roller coaster in terms of the labor market, in terms of the economy since COVID. We've had the marketplace effectively stopped immediately after COVID, and we had two very, very positive years in terms of talent acquisition. The last 80 months have been a real grind, a real struggling in a lot of cases. You look at the future and GDP for the first quarter of this year looks really, really positive. That doesn't really suggest that the labor market, however, has moved on as well. So you've had this real kind of shopping and changing all the time. So I think people have had to be hugely flexible. I think as well, and it's something that Mike and I have worked on for a model around how we adapt EVP delivery. One of the challenges often about EVP is ironically, because it's been done now so comprehensively, so robustly, so professionally, particularly by larger organizations, often organizations across different continents and jurisdictions, they can take too long. So often we find particularly larger exercises in this kind of field, the research for all good reasons that I've talked about in terms of engaging with a representative sample of the employee base across different countries and cultures. Fantastic. It can take nine, 10, 12 months to do that. And as we've just spoken about, the world has moved on within that time. And if we're basing employer branding messages on research, which is now 12 months on, the world has changed and evolved and moved on. So it's often describing a world that doesn't exist anymore. And as I suggested, we've kind of tried to develop this model, which is more about agility and flexibility. So instead of these processes and programs, which take 10 to 12 months, we've got a lot more intuitive approach to EVP development. And I think that's important in terms of delivering a solution in communications collateral, which reflects the current marketplace, the current sense of market competitors, and so and so forth, rather than what it looked like 12 months ago. No, that makes perfect sense. And what about the kind of attitude of employees or potential employees to their jobs? Because a huge amount has changed in terms of that. We've had all the debates about remote working and hybrid working and returning to the office. There's a new generation coming into the workforce with some very, very different ideas about what work should look like. There's a lot of trauma going on in terms of cost of living and various things that are kind of happening. How are employers responding to that in this area to have empathy with the way that people might be feeling? Sure. Yeah. And we covered that during one of the kind of questions during the survey. And we got quite a positive and I thought considered viewpoint from people. So I think there's an awareness that employee bases have gone through such a lot of angst over the course of the last three or four years. Now, whether it's Covid, the response to that, having caring duties, being isolated. Fast forward to today, you've got all the residual mental health challenges that a lot of people have suffered either directly as a result of Covid or indirectly. For the last 18 months, you've had high interest rates responding to inflation, so you've got a real cost of living squeeze. And I think very positively, people felt that employees as felt that they had to respond with real compassion about the way they delivered competitive messages to candidate audiences because they know whether it's their own employee base, whether it's external candidate audiences. People have been through the ring area over the last three or four years and they want to be working for organisations that are compassionate and considerate and understand what people have been through. So I think culturally, as it will always be within our kind of field or get people looking at roles about changing jobs, they want to understand the culture in which they're moving to, and is it going to be considerate? Is it going to be compassionate? Or is it largely going to forget what's happened in the last four years and just carry on? One of the other things that I really wanted to pick out from the report was the whole notion of using employee stories to tell the story about the brand and the employment experience and all those kind of things. And it struck me in this conversation that all three of us have worked together. I'm not sure all at the same time, but we've all worked at one point with each other in the world of recruitment, marketing and communications. And if you go back that far in time, you know, an employee story was a picture of a recent graduate hire in a brochure. And fast forward now to the crazy noise of everything that kind of goes on. What are the challenges now with employers sort of telling their employees story and what are the challenges and where could they be doing better? I think if I can jump in there, having just been out on a video shoot for four days, I'm probably in a fairly good position to answer that one. So clients still seem to be struggling to get people to put themselves forward, to be in a position where they are on camera, where they're telling their stories both truthfully and as convincingly as they can. I don't know what it is. It's organizations aren't necessarily getting the stories out to their people that this is for their benefit. This is will help them deliver their job. This will make their job easier. So having just done a shoot, we struggled to get people to actually come forward and volunteer. And it goes back in part to that EDNI point that you made. We struggled to tap into some of those communities and some of those aspects of the workforce, which organizations are desperately trying to promote and push out their messages and their appeal to those communities. And yet they're struggling to get people to step forward. And there's got to be some sort of communication. There has to be some sort of issue there or barrier that we and other recruitment marketing agencies need to help those organizations sell the stories. I suspect remote working will have an influence on this as well because it's often harder to pull people together if we're all on a screen like this in completely different cities, post-cows and what have you. Whereas in the past, we're all in the same office, we're all in the same city. So bringing people together for photo shoots or whatever means or shoots and video was a lot more straightforward. And I think, again, it's the conversations we've had for two or three years, that sense of working on belonging is so, so important. It's so much harder to achieve when people, people have often joined organizations and never worked there because they're doing it all and quite understandably and quite successfully and productively in many cases, doing it via teams or any other kind of video channels. But actually having their presence on things like that. And I guess getting themself to put themselves forward is more of a challenge than it's been. Picking up on that communication issue, I mean, it's a bit of a contradiction because we live in a world where people are on video all the time, whether that's in the Zoom calls and, you know, a lot of the short form video just rules the world in terms of what people consume and what people make themselves. So do you think maybe that there's a complacency amongst employers that people automatically feel comfortable doing video and automatically being able to tell their story because it's just the way things are. And they're not selling it to people the right way or convincing people or really explaining why people should be doing it and the benefit to them. Could it be something like that? I think it is. I think it's how it's positioned, how it lands, I think, unless you're connected with employer branding and EVP, telling your story to an anonymous audience can feel a bit odd. Why am I doing this? Who's going to see it? I'm not really convinced about this. Why am I doing that? And who's going to see it as well? So I think we're often, and I wonder, you know, when we're going into increasingly people are cynical about deep fakes and are people really saying that? Are people going to say, well, is there any need to do that? You automatically generate that. And if I do put myself forward, what happens to my video image? But I think it's about TA, whoever's making that request, just being really clear and actually flattering people and saying, look, you are so representative of the people we want to hire down the line. We'd love you to just spend a little bit of time talking about your background, about your experiences with the organization, where it's going, where you love this place, et cetera, et cetera. And I think just a little bit of clarification, a little bit of just saying that this is where we want these are the outputs. Because I think people can, if we're not careful, just not assume the worst, but just not really be convinced about what the outputs are. Yeah, and that makes sense. So there's obviously a lot going on. There's issues with measurement. There's confidence that employer brand remains important, or continues to grow an importance. But at the same time, people are very unhappy with where they are currently pulling all that together. What would your advice be to employers listening right now in terms of what they should be doing, or what they could be doing around their EVP and their employer brand? I think, again, going back to some of those key metrics there, and if I think about some of the clients that we work with, their EVP hasn't really been looked at over the course of a fairly reasonable amount of time, it needs to be current. It needs to be relevant and off the time. So my recommendation would be to actually go back out to your people on a regular basis. Only 7% are happy with their current state of their EVP. That needs to be higher. That needs to rise. And the only way you can do that is by talking to and listening to your employees. I think a lot of it as well is down to, I want to say, informed bravery. So we ask people one question about whether you're looking at it right now or not. What would be the one asset or facet you'd want to increase or encourage within your EVP right now? And the one that came forward as a most popular answer was differentiation. And in a way, I found that quite surprising, particularly as a lot of people were in the process or had just reviewed their EVP. And if they've reviewed their EVP, and ultimately, they haven't achieved differentiation, and something's arguably gone wrong with the process. And the reason I use the word inform, I think, is quite important because during the process of EVP, one of the key facets you go around is that sense of what's the competition doing? So in pushing out an EVP and with all the employer branding messages that go with it, it doesn't happen in a vacuum. So there's a clearly competitive context to what an organization is saying and doing. So that road, that route to an EVP, needs to be informed by what's our competitor set doing, what are they saying, what are they doing? And clearly, we need to respect that and be aware of it. But clearly, our message needs to be authentic to ourselves. And it needs to make a statement that is different, that stands out and gives candidates as well as employees a reason to choose and keep choosing that organization as their employer. And that is, for me, one of the key elements there. So understanding the marketplace, understanding the competitor set, and coming up with a messaging strategy that stands apart, that differentiates its sense of differentiation as well. It also touched on benchmarking, again, really, really surprised that more organizations don't benchmark. I think just over 50% of our survey did benchmark. And actually, benchmarked very, very positively, which, for me, just felt a little bit over the top and a little bit foolish, if you like. But so many other people either just, as a result of their benchmarking, didn't really understand where they stood as regards to competition, or simply didn't benchmark at all. And again, not understanding what you're saying compared to what everyone else is saying and what they're doing and all their activities, just feels as if more could be achieved in terms of that. And understanding how you stand out, how you're different, and ultimately giving candidates a reason to choose you over the competition, and knowing why people are doing that. So, final question. What does the future look like? So, if you're doing the survey again in two years' time, what might things look like them? Fundamental to this, I think, is enhancing the dialogue with leadership, with senior leadership, who are going to be in a position to invest, or otherwise, an EVP and EB-related activities. And unless that dialogue is an equal dialogue, where TA is providing metrics, which really impress, which really push the dial in terms of senior leadership and what they're hoping to achieve, then I think the sector is going to continue with this. I feel like the sense of it's great in a good marketplace. And you never know in two years' time, we're likely to have a better marketplace. I can see it going in the right direction, albeit slowly right now. But the next time, and it will come about the next time we have a recession, the next time we're struggling as a profession, that'll be the test of whether we've managed to create credibility, we've managed to land what goes on and the benefits of EVP investment, then we will continue to struggle. It's about the ability to learn the lessons of the past. As Neil said, it's cyclical. It will come a time when employers need to differentiate themselves more than they're doing currently. I think EVP, it will continue, there will continue to be a demand, we will continue to get inquiries, we'll continue to do projects. There needs to be sufficient buy-in, there needs to be sufficient budget to actually do those projects properly and to get the results that actually make a real difference in terms of the outputs that we can then create. And I think perhaps a lot of organizations to date are perhaps scratching the surface. They're not really going deep enough into the market context, into their own employees, their own potential employees, attitudes towards them as an employer. So I think if the market becomes more difficult, conversely, there is an opportunity for organizations to invest. It's always been the case to invest heavily and actually stand out and be ready for the next upturn when that comes along. Let's say it's quite a difficult one to actually convince a client with the benefits to invest in something in the future when they haven't necessarily done it up until this point, but we live in hope. Yeah, and I just backed that up because one of the questions we asked was around are you and your material and your OUEP ready should the marketplace become more competitive and more boring. I think less than half of the people said that what they had, their collateral, etc, would succeed in a buoyant marketplace. So again, they're responding to the current marketplace and in a lot of places very understandably, but should the market improve and there's half a chance we're going in that direction, then all of a sudden they become vulnerable, they're not ready to take advantage of a more buoyant economic climate. Mike, Neil, thank you very much for joining me. Pleasure. Thank you, Matt. My thanks to Mike and Neil. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also subscribe to our YouTube channel by going to mattalder.tv. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track about 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. [music] This is my show. [music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
Get my free whitepaper "10 Ways AI Will Transform Talent Acquisition" – Download Now
Transform Talent Acquisition – Find out how my digital course will help you shape the future of talent acquisition in your organization – Click Here
It has been a highly volatile few years for talent markets and hiring. So, how is all the uncertainty and disruption shifting employers' thinking around EVP and Employer Branding? Is it still considered as important as before, and what might the future direction look like?
My guests this week are Neil Harrison, an independent employer branding consultant, and Mike Heal, managing director at WDAD Communications. Neil recently collaborated with WDAD on qualitative research into the current EVP and Employer Brand landscape. The findings give some unique insights into the priority employers are giving to their employer brands and how things have changed since the pandemic.
In the interview, we discuss:
The background to the research project and how it was carried out
How things have changed in the last three years
DE&I as a focus for employer branding
Key metrics to get senior stakeholder buy-in and future investment
Is employer branding still considered important by organizations?
How happy are employers with the current state of their EVP?
Building agility and flexibility into the brand research process to ensure relevancy
Changing employee attitudes to work
The evolution of employee stories
The importance of belonging
Differentiation and competitive benchmarking
What does the future look like?
Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts
