In this episode Matt Alder talks to Jason Seiden from Brand Amper
Some of the most popular podcast episodes so far have been the ones that cover employer branding. We discussed how to measure the impact of employer brands as well as innovative ways of communicating them. Up to this point though we’ve not looked at the work involved in building them and the way in which some the traditional methods of employer brand research are being challenged by new approaches.
My guest for this episode is Jason Seiden who is challenging established thinking about employer brand development via his company Brand Amper.
In the interview we discuss:
• Why traditional employer brand research takes too long
• Turning employees stories into employer brand equity
• The power of Social Proof in recruiting
• Thinking about employer brand the same way as product placement
• Why companies who are afraid of giving their employers a voice will fail
Jason also talks about the fundamental changes happening in the way people in organizations relate to each other and the importance of company culture in this context.
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Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?
Ep29: How To Research And Build Your Employer Brand In Real Time
Support for the podcast this week comes from my own company, Metal Shift. We live at an age of digital noise and distraction. Cutting through to connect and engage with your audience is a real challenge. Talent Attraction is a focus for everyone, but how can you be sure you're getting the attention necessary to persuade the right people to join your company? Metal Shift is a talent attention consultancy, and we can help you optimize your talent attraction strategy to stand out and be heard. To find out more, go to www.talentattention.com or contact me directly on mat@metashift.co.uk There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mind. Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 29 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. Some of the most popular episodes of the podcast that I've done have been on the topic of employer brands. We've talked about how to measure their impact as well as innovative ways to communicate them. Up to this point though, we've not looked to the work involved in building them. And the way in which some of the traditional methods of employer brand research are being challenged by new approaches. My guest this week is Jason Siden from Brand Empire, a company who had challenging established thinking on employer brand development. I've had the pleasure of working directly with Jason before on a project, and I can certainly vouch for his innovative approach in this area. Hi everyone, and welcome to another Recruiting Future Podcast interview. My guest this week is Jason Siden. Jason, how are you? I'm great. How are you? Yeah, very good indeed. Very, very good indeed. You're talking to us live from inside your car, I think. Yes, all the way from Chicago, Illinois, inside my car in a parking lot to the wide world of Scotland and the UK and Europe. You've got to love modern technology. You've got to love forecasting. Absolutely love it. For people who may not have come across you before or heard of you, or may you, can you just give us a quick sort of overview of who you are and what you do? Yeah sure, so for those of you who have been lucky enough to go through this much of your life without me interfering with it, I run a company called Brand Empire. We turn employee stories into employer brand equity. Even though the company is about a year old, it grew out of a consulting firm that I had. Previous to this with my co-founder, we were the first LinkedIn certified trainers in North America. After spending over a decade doing leadership and communications consulting, we started doing some social media work, became certified. From what we saw in the explosion of work that we saw in employer branding and the feedback we were getting from clients, we saw this real need to really get to the heart of what was true in the hearts and minds of employees and do it in real time, do it really quickly and do it in a way that the company could really capture that information at scale and come up with in a player brand that really resonated with the workforce. That's kind of a real quick overview of where I come from and sort of how the company that I'm running had it start as well. Cool, thank you. I think we were saying just before we started recording, we actually kind of last sort of met up a couple of years ago when we were working on the same project in New York and I remember at the time you were sort of building out a product and a company round this whole concept. Give us a flavor of what the product is and what the company does. Sure, so thank you for that, for the opportunity and let me start kind of just back one step with a couple of things that I think everybody will be familiar with, just so there's a foundation. The first thing is a few years ago, we started seeing social media obviously change the way that people interacted with people and then very quickly, since organizations are made up with people, social media then changed the way that people interact with organizations and on the recruiting and hiring side, what this met was that individuals could interact with their friends who worked for companies. If I were going to look for a job now, right? There are no classifies. I would probably go on to Facebook and tell my friends I'm thinking of leaving my company who's got something and my friends will tell me what's happening in the world of their companies and whether or not I should apply for a job and if you think about that, what that does to recruiting and recruitment marketing is it creates a need to really think about employer branding the way that companies think about product placement, right? Because it's in the world where I'm reaching out to my friends first to find out where I should go look for a job, your billboard doesn't help me. If my friends don't tell me come work here, I'm probably not thinking that I'm going to come work here. Social media changed the way that we really think about or that we go about doing the job search, but the traditional recruitment marketing methods that companies use weren't keeping up. Our clients, we were out there right, so we're out there doing this consulting and our clients are frustrated because we're telling people, listen, update your profiles and include company messaging and they're like, wait a second, wait a second. We just hired an agency. We're going to be doing focus groups for the next six months and then we got to get approval on all this stuff and we don't have our policies in place and then we've got to do an internal communication program to get that message up and the clients looking at us, they're like, maybe we can't hire you for 12 to 18 months and I'm looking at them and saying, are you crazy? Like 12, it's 365 days of actual activity that your employees are out there. By the time you get to them, forget it's not even that it's lost time, it's by the time you tell your employees what you've approved them to say, they're going to roll their eyes at you and say, you obviously don't care about me because you left me dangling for a year and a half. Well, yeah, exactly. And it's very much about the way the world works now. Things happen very, very quickly. And I think that I've found in my work, recruitment marketing can move very, very slowly. And by the time it's got up to speed with what's going on right now, right now is 18 months ago. So you want to find a year and a half later, what is true today? Well, so here was the interesting thing. When we started doing this work, we started capturing what people were saying. So we took employees working with 10,000 plus people at these huge companies, and we would track what they would say, the stories they would put together. And what we discovered was what we found over the course of a couple weeks or whatever it took to roll out our program, the messaging that generally percolated to the top was the same or very similar to the messaging that would pop out of the survey and focus group work that the companies would do. So we were finding it in real time. So we started experimenting with that and we built, we started building tools that would help us capture employees stories. And we played around with the format and how it would work. And after about a year of playing with it, and remember, because we were doing training, we weren't just consultants, we were eye to eye with employees, as well as the people who were hiring us. So we really heard this issue from both sides. We found was we were able to capture stories in a structured way. The employees wrote something that it's like marketing 101 for the individual. We never ask individuals to be advocates for the company that was never on the radar. What we help them do is we help them put together stories that allow them to be advocates for themselves. I don't know if you love your company or hate your company, but I do know that you're going to want to put yourself in the best light. So we never thought that we'd just help people put themselves in the best light possible. And we give them the option of using the company they work for to help them do that. Right. So if I work for an engineer at Google, I could tell you I'm passionate and smart and I'm innovative in all these things, or I could just say I'm an engineer at Google, and you're instantly going to know a lot about me because you probably know the Google brand a lot better than you know me. So we make that case to people. And what we found was enough people would take us up on the offer and then use suggested messaging. The company can use our tool to suggest messaging to people. Enough people would use that that not only do the employees make themselves look good, but it's like we just created this rolling focus group where we could then go back to the company and we can say here's how your people see themselves. Here are the messages of yours that they're pulling through. And we can now start to say here if you push a bunch of messages through, we could say here are the top two messages in Europe. Here are the top two messages in the US. Here are the top messages in Asia, Pacific region. And all of a sudden companies can start segmenting their employer brand in real time. And they know it's true because they're being responsive to what their employees are actually saying. This isn't being filtered in any way, shape or form through focus groups or management offsets. It's just a roll-up of what employees are actually saying. I think that's really interesting. And I think it's interesting in terms of I was talking to, I was interviewing someone about social referral platforms for the podcast the other week. And one of the biggest challenges is getting a message out through employees. And I think that anyone who's ever had a team of people or worked in a big business will know that actually trying to find advocates and people to spread messages is very, very difficult. And I think a lot of organizations haven't really moved on from sticking posters up in reception or in the canteen. So I'm sure that when it's spreading the message that's coming from employees themselves, that must make things a lot easier, I'd imagine. You just put your finger right on the origin of Brand Dapper. That's how we started was we had a client come back to us before we ever had a product. And they said, "What are you doing in your training programs?" Because the people who are going through your programs, we have more advocates coming from your programs. People are using our other social sharing tools. We're getting more referrals from them. They're more engaged. They're sustaining their engagement online. And that's when we went, "Huh, interesting." And what we discovered was the difference between our approach and most of the other approaches out there was the other tools, our competition, really focuses on making social sharing or social referrals easy. But it turns out the technology is not the problem. The problem is we don't know why we should be doing it. We don't know what's in it for us. So Brand Dapper is really focused on that identity piece. Once an individual understands what's in it for them, they'll find a way to go make it happen. And anyone who doesn't believe me, what I'd say is, "Have you ever bought anything online? Have you ever bought anything from Amazon?" The site from a user interface standpoint is not that great, but somehow we've all figured it out because there was something on it that we wanted to buy. So we figured it out. I'm sitting in a car right now. The dashboard on this car, the electronics on this car are awful. Absolutely awful. I figured them out because my car gets 90 miles per gallon, which in compared to my last one got 16. I wanted this car. So I figured out the electronics. If somebody had thrown a manual at me and said, "Here are the electronics in the car. I wouldn't have understood why I should care." Of course, yeah. So that's the approach we take. And you put your finger exactly right on it. What we do really is about activating and making real the promise of social recruiting and all of the benefits that companies hope to get from social. But you really don't get unless employees get to put themselves first. Do you have any examples of companies that are doing this or types of companies in terms of sizes or sectors that you feel this might work best? Yeah. I'm going to speak in sort of generalities because our company is a year old. Ultimately, the platform we're building is designed to support companies of all shapes and sizes. Anybody with more than just a few employees would benefit from this. Initially, what we've done is we've targeted larger companies. And that was really just a decision so that in these early days before we really have benchmark data, we can go into a client and we can get enough employees through our platform to have statistically significant insights to share back with the client. So we tend to be focused on larger clients. And across industry, we did get started with a professional sector. So right now, we're actually exploring a shift into hospitality with more frontline employees. But initially, no, we've been industry agnostic. We started with professionals and we are we're slowly expanding from that. And in terms of industries and sectors, really, Matt, we're looking for good brands, right? It's brands with something good to say, where you've got a group of employees who actually care about what you're doing. It doesn't matter what industry you're in. One of our best clients is an insurance company. Who'd have thought, but they have an incredible culture. 75% of their people give back every week. These employees have something to say. And that's the kind of company that really benefits from from a tool like brand out there. From this type of approach, that's cool. And what would your advice be to, you know, employers who are kind of looking at this issue in terms of, you know, employer brand and social and sort of engaging their workforce. Now, obviously, your advice is going to be usual tool. Let's take that as a rant. What other advice would you give? So my co-founder, Lisa Cervancos, she's got a brilliant mind for branding and marketing. And there's a couple of things that she says that I just think are so true and applicable, you know, and it doesn't matter where you are in this process. The first one is, fear is a liar. Okay. And what I tell people is like, if fear is driving, you're going to fail. And what she means by that and what I mean by that is we've heard over and over again decision makers say, we're afraid of having our employees speak because they're going to speak badly about the company. Or we haven't told them what to say. And you know what? It's a false concern, right? It's a vapor fear. Fear is lying to you. We've been doing this with a tool and before brand emperor as consultants, we've been doing this now for six years. I don't think I've ever had somebody speak badly about their company because if you're putting employees first, it's their identity. And anything that nobody's going to say, you know, I'm a great marketing person. So thank God I work for this Mickey Mouse organization that really needed me because I saved them. If they say that, they're a jerk. What people will say is, I'm a great marketing individual. And what I love about working at this company is I have a great team. Or it gives me an opportunity to use my skills, right? Yes. So when you find fear talking to you, just you got to find a way around it because it's lying to you and it's control and it's ego and it's fear of making a decision. So push forward. So that's I think the one and most important thing. And then the other thing that I'll just sneak in there really quickly is when you get started, you don't have one employer brand. You have multiple employer brands, right? Your employer brand is incredibly complex. It's not like you're going to go run a campaign and you're going to fix the messaging and push it out. This is about helping people connect with people. They're all going to use your brand a little bit differently. So you got to think in terms of themes and motifs rather than specific taglines because you want to give individual employees the flexibility to adapt what they're hearing. And when you do that, that's what lets you then really segment your audience and understand is there a difference between how your programmers and engineers relate to your company versus your attorneys versus your marketing team versus your operation folks. But if you give everybody the one size fits all message, you never get that feedback. You just know if they're using it or not. So provide some flexibility and don't think in terms of one statement, think in terms of a theme that people can put their personal stamp on. That makes a lot of sense. Final question, what's next? Where do you think recruiting and employer branding and social recruiting? Where's it going? What should we be looking out for in the near future? So I love the question, but I'm not the guy to ask about the near future. I'm the big picture of future future guy. Okay, well the future future then. The immediate future is a little hazy, but I see a fundamental change in the way individuals and organizations relate to one another. If we just take some of the basic themes of what's happening in the workforce, and I don't know exactly how it is in Europe, so I'll speak for the US. We're seeing a rise of contingent workers. We're seeing a lot of project work. The laws are lumpy and they're slow catching up in terms of am I an employee of the company or am I an independent contractor? But the point is that we're not going to an office every day. We're geographically dispersed. We work with people. We work shoulder to shoulder with people who actually are badged to different companies, but we collaborate on projects and on clients. And what that means is, is that a lot of the things that historically have defined a company are disappearing. I don't think of myself as working for this company because I show up at the same office every day. I don't think of myself as belonging to this company because I have the same people around me every day. That's still true in a lot of places, but it's less and less true. What that means is that your company's culture is becoming more and more important. I think when if we look into the future, the relationship that an individual has with their company will be a lot like the relationship we have with the university or that we have with a hometown. We all live in different neighborhoods. We all take different classes, but we all belong to this thing, and it's the culture of that thing that we really hang on to. If you think about that, that means our associations with our employers will become lifelong associations, even if our actual work of that company is reasonably short. I don't know all the implications of that, but I do know that that means we will recruit different, we'll treat our alumni differently, we'll treat our employees differently. I think we'll see more of a hiring won't be a discrete activity, onboarding won't be a discrete activity. These are things that will be more fluid in nature. Jason, thank you very much for talking to me. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me, Matt. My thanks to Jason Siden. For show notes and past episodes of the podcast, please go to www.RFpodcast.com. You can also subscribe to the mailing list there and find out more about me on the work with Matt Alder page. You can of course subscribe to the podcast itself on iTunes and on Stitcher. Thanks very much for listening. I'll be back next week, and I hope you'll join me. This is my show. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]