In this episode Matt Alder talks to Andy Curlewis of Cielo Talent
Employer Brand is a very hot topic at moment and the number of episodes of this podcast which have been dedicated to it recently reflect the level of interest in the market. The one vital element that is often missing from the employer brand conversation though is how you measure effectiveness.
In this episode Matt and Andy discuss employer branding’s relationship to both talent attraction and talent management, the five core areas where the effectiveness of an employer brand can be measured and what this means in the social media age of truth and transparency. Andy also share his thoughts on the importance of content marketing and what the future of employer branding might look like.
Subcribe to this podcast in iTunes
There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mind, than all the ages of history. Hello, and welcome to episode 19 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. The last few episodes of the show have dealt with employer branding in one way or another, and I think this reflects the current interest in the topic in the marketplace. It's certainly something that a lot of my clients are talking to me about at the moment. One of the areas of employer branding that doesn't get much airtime though is how you measure its impact. My guest this week is Andy Kaloois from Cielo. Andy has a huge amount of experience in the employer branding space and was very happy to share Cielo's methodology for employer brand measurement. Hi everyone, and welcome to another Recruiting Future Podcast interview. It's Monday morning and it's bright and sunny where I am, and my guest this week is Andy Kaloois from Cielo. Hi, Andy. How are you? Good morning, Matt. Yes. It's half a Monday. All very good. Always a pleasure. Could you sort of tell everyone a little bit about yourself, you know, what you do at Cielo? Who you work with? That kind of stuff? Yeah, sure. So, yeah, I run the Global Brands Digital and Communications Practice for Cielo. Cielo, for those that don't know, it's a talent consulting and outsourcing business. More commonly known as RPO. So I guess RPO is an interesting business. We, I guess, for Cielo have somewhere between 100, 150 enterprise relationships with generally large multinational businesses or healthcare systems whereby they'll outsource part or all of the recruitment process. So the practice that we run within that business is if you like a business within a business, which looks after the brand, digital and communications components of that. I guess I've been here three or four years now. My background is marketing agencies, digital agencies, both corporate and consumer, which is obviously where I had the pleasure of meeting you many years ago. Of course. Absolutely. Many, many years ago, 15. You're not supposed to say how many that's, that's, that's absolutely good. But as with the common theme with many of the folk that I think you've interviewed over these podcasts, my original business entry was around it was casinos and logistics and airplanes. So often, you know, people, we could find ourselves coming into it from very different perspectives. Cool. Okay. And I think this is actually the, the third of sort of fourth episode in a row we've been talking about employer branding in some kind of aspect. What's your definition of employer branding? That's a great question. Look, I guess there's two statements I often kind of gravitate to and as you may know, there's been a lot of discussion recently and I've been talking a lot around that, you know, what actually do we mean by this? But, okay, so the first one that I often kind of go back to is that look, a brand isn't a product, a promise or a feeling. It's the sum of all the experiences you have with a company and most crucially of all what differentiates that company from the rest. And obviously when we're talking about a career, it's a pretty sophisticated sell. You're not sending a widget or a solution. I think the other thing that I find kind of cuts through and makes things a little bit clearer for a lot of folk as well is finding people as only half the challenge and days of the Tinto web and all the great tools and recruiters and infrastructure that we have. But I guess it's more about convincing the right ones to join now and then, hey, maybe even inspiring them to stay and do great things. So I guess there's the two dimensions or outputs of a brand. Okay, and I think the interesting thing is about people staying and doing great things and I think increasingly what I'm finding in the conversations that I'm having is that's becoming the most important part, sort of recruiting the right people but people who are going to embrace the company's brand and sort of really performing their jobs. Do you find that as well? Yeah, it is. It's one of the talent or HR operations or however we kind of name the structure that looks after people. Often there was traditionally being a gap between talent acquisition and talent management or as we used to call in the old days recruitment and talent management. And I guess one can't be successful without the other, getting people in through the front door to see them just swing straight out the back door, that can't be fruitful or effective. And I guess that's why it's interesting as an uphill business when you're looking at the metrics that you're applying to value. Value is about total value, total value of cost. And this means recruitment prevention and stopping some of the regretted attrition that can kind of happen. So if you're a recruitment or talent acquisition to be truly successful, it's got to be feeding into an ongoing process that in itself is successful and there was a virtual circle there. If one is completely broken, then the other by definition is going to be a real challenge. I think that's interesting in terms of you touched on measurement there, which is what I really want to talk about, but before I ask you about that, how do you think the internet and perhaps social media in particular has changed the way that organizations should think about employer branding? Well, I think employee branding is a notion, probably goes back even further than when the phrase was first coined. This is not something that we've just invented for the modern world. This is how we think and act within wider structures and in this case companies. So it's very much been around for a long time, but I guess the real impact or consequence of the digital age is just the acceleration of access to knowledge and transparency. If we talk about a digital age really, it's in many respects, it's the age of truth and transparency. It's difficult to hide behind those corporate walls of management babble. And so for me, when it comes to the digital channels, social media, so forth, there's just a real need to make sure that what we're saying and how we're saying it really does reflect who and what we are, because if it doesn't, it's very clear to those immediate stakeholders whether they're employees or candidates or customers or whatever it might be that actually there's a visage there, but it's not necessarily true and that's often more dangerous than not having any communications at all. Okay, no, I think I completely agree. So coming back to measurement then, I think you guys have done some really interesting stuff in terms of measuring employer brand impact, measuring what you're doing, all that kind of stuff. How do you measure this stuff? Well, I think the first starting point is an acceptance that an employer brand has truly succumbed to buzzword bingo. Okay, it's gone so mainstream over the last few years that the number of marketing agencies that will still do that, that the number of in-house heads of employer brand, employer brand manager, officer, and then obviously a lot of other players within the marketplace such as RPO businesses, consulting businesses, outsource partners. There are so many different organisations out there which are really kind of talking about this or offering services and solutions, it's really difficult for organisations to kind of cut through all of that and go, "Well, okay, what actually is really, really important and how can I measure that?" And so I think one of the great things that we've been able to do is if you're representing employer brand for 100 multinational businesses whereby an RPO's commercials are only really focused on successful outcomes, not just transactional recruitment fees, but time to higher quality of higher recruitment, prevention, these kind of things, what that does is to really focus the mind on what works. If our team creates an employer brand that actually doesn't resonate and isn't true or a website that actually doesn't drive the right conversions of the right people, then we've got a whole load of recruiters that know where we sit, so that does kind of focus them. Okay. So I guess we looked at all the different models that were out there, you know, from the CEB to talent brand index to all sorts of things that were there, and all of which were great and robust in many respects, but obviously all of which were also from those with vested interest as well. So we try to distill all of that down into four or five core areas of measurement, the first one of which is obviously brand. So awareness, perception, engagement, consideration and advocacy, universal obviously for their emerging talent and have a similar kind of model. And these generally tend to be some of the places where you'll see a lot of the current measurements focused most of their time. So the number of followers, fans, media reach, perceptions, you might have the talent brand index, our old friend Sunday times, all these kind of things. The second kind of core that we have is attraction, a bit of an old school word that these days, but here we're talking about reach, engagement, conversion and ROI. And that ROI is the critical thing, whether the rubber hits the road from brand into attraction. Now obviously, if ROI is good, that means that your baseline metrics, which is our third component, this is cost of higher, time to higher, quality of higher conversion ratios, those kind of levers, if those are right, then your ROI is fine. However, there are three more on the balanced score count that we look at. What is performance? This is regret or nutrition, engagement surveys, performance rankings, succession planning, the diversity and agility of your business, which then opens it up to the fifth, which is diversity in itself and again through the different stages of recruitment and even engagement and beyond. Then the final one is these are business constructs or programs within complicated organizations. So you've got to be able to build a business case, you've got to be able to deploy these programs, you've got to make sure that you've engaged the stakeholders in the right way, you've got to be able to budget accordingly for it, and then you've got to be able to manage it, measure it, improve the ROI of the program itself. So it's becoming more complicated as our businesses get more sophisticated, but that's the kind of balanced scorecard that we look at. What have you – what have you learned from applying that to employ a brand activity? What kind of comes out of it? So we find that on the maturity curve, there are two things that we look – we're looking for those quick wins, we're looking for those really visible or effective activities that can be deployed, the other thing that we look for a lot is sustainability. How can we put in place something which is truly going to measure effective performance, but you know what, more importantly, how can you put in place something which is going to be adopted, i.e. people are actually going to use these measurements. There's no point having a fantastic dashboard if no one's putting the right data in. If you haven't got the guys or the girls putting that data in in the first place, caring about how important that data is and why it needs to be loved and looked after and put into the dashboard and then analyse and report it on the right way. If they're not getting that, then they're not going to put it incorrectly and the whole process really becomes playing with numbers and statistics. So just trying to make it as sustainable as possible and the key thing there is adoption. Okay, so what's next? We've talked about how employer branding has changed with the internet and social media. What do you think is next in this space? What's going to happen in the next 18 months to three years? Yeah, it's kind of interesting, isn't it, in the sense that when people talk about a lot of the current market trends around where we are at the moment, we increasingly talk about things like convergence or what's the relationship with Canada communications and the customer, particularly when, let's say you're in a B2B environment, you're sending to and hiring from the same group of people. It's your people that deliver the customer experience and all that kind of stuff. So there continues to be a significant kind of focus on that. I'm not really sure that we've got that right yet. CLLO's greatest ever case study was Summerfield or the co-op where their recruitment fees were aligned directly into sales per square foot of stores that they recruited into. Just such a great story. I'd love to see those kinds of scenarios happening again and the principles of brand and how that translates in between your recruitment and your sales or your customer satisfaction would just be fantastic. I do think that content marketing will take a renewed focus. The old buzz words of talent pools and communities and so forth, we've really kind of flogged those to death over the last few years. I do think that people are getting better now at understanding what it means to set those up and also what it means to kind of manage those and drive meaningful outcomes from it. And again, this whole business of sustainability, none of this stuff is going to work. Whether it's dashboards, reporting, brand strategies, beautiful, creative, wonderful websites, none of it's going to work if people don't adopt it. And content generation and marketing, or I think it was Matt Chani or Larsen in his previous podcast said, "The hiring managers have got to own this." When the hiring managers are generating the right content, when they're owning recruitment, when they're owning brands for their teams and their people, as well as their wider organisations, what's going to really drive effective conversions. Andy, thank you very much for talking to me. Matt, it's been an absolute pleasure. Have a great day. My thanks to Andy Kaluis. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or on Stitcher. You can listen to past episodes and read show notes, and also subscribe to the mailing list at www.rfpodcast.com. Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week, and I hope you'll join me. This is my show. Bye bye. Bye. (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
In this episode Matt Alder talks to Andy Curlewis of Cielo Talent
Employer Brand is a very hot topic at moment and the number of episodes of this podcast which have been dedicated to it recently reflect the level of interest in the market. The one vital element that is often missing from the employer brand conversation though is how you measure effectiveness.
In this episode Matt and Andy discuss employer branding’s relationship to both talent attraction and talent management, the five core areas where the effectiveness of an employer brand can be measured and what this means in the social media age of truth and transparency. Andy also share his thoughts on the importance of content marketing and what the future of employer branding might look like.
Subcribe to this podcast in iTunes
