In my work as a consultant, I’m constantly seeing examples of employers whose recruitment marketing and employer brand activity is ineffectual because they are lacking content from their employees that illustrates what working for them is really like.
Generating, managing and optimizing this kind of content is hard and can potentially take up huge amounts of resource. Unsurprisingly then we are now seeing a growing number technology companies providing products and services to help employer brand managers in this area.
My guest on this episode of the podcast is Phil Strazzulla the Founder and CEO of LifeGuides, a company that is helping employers capture and tell their employees stories. In the interview we discuss:
• The advantages of using “Employee Authored Content”
• Some of the reasons employers struggle in this area
• What makes great employee content and the vital importance of authenticity
• The problem with “Frankenstein” job descriptions
• How data insights can help
Phil also gives us examples of companies who are doing this well and offers his advice on how to get started.
Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from CXC Corporate Services, part of CXC Global. They are the leading global advisor on contingent workforce solutions, helping companies reduce cost, mitigate risk, and improve multi country compliance across their contingent workforces and supply chains. To find out more about how CXC Corporate Services can help you, please visit www.cxccorporateservices.com. that’s www.cxccorporatesevices.com CXC facilitating the future of Work.
Matt Alder [00:00:59]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 55 of the Recruiting Future podcast. In my work as a consultant, I’m constantly seeing examples of employers whose recruitment, marketing and employer branding is ineffectual because they’re lacking in content from their employees that illustrate what working for them is really like. Generating, managing and optimizing this kind of content can be hard, but it’s also something that technology can help with. My guest this week is Phil Strazzulla, Founder and CEO of Lifeguides. Phil is someone who has some great insights into this topic and I’m sure you’ll enjoy the interview. Hi Phil and welcome to the podcast.
Phil Strazzulla [00:01:46]:
Hey Matt, thanks a lot. Thanks a lot for having me.
Matt Alder [00:01:48]:
My pleasure. And where in the world are you right now?
Phil Strazzulla [00:01:52]:
I’m in our home office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, right outside of Boston, where it’s finally getting nice and sunny.
Matt Alder [00:02:01]:
Good stuff. So could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Phil Strazzulla [00:02:05]:
Yeah, sure. So my name’s Phil Strazzulla. I’m the founder and CEO of LifeGuides. At LifeGuides, we help companies build their employer brands through employee authored content that we capture, manage, distribute and analyze, all with software. My background is actually more on the investing side. I used to work at this venture capital firm called Bessemer Venture Partners, investing in some companies in the HR space like LinkedIn and Cornerstone on Demand, and also some big consumer companies that you’ve probably heard of like Pinterest or Skype, which we’re actually ironically using right now, or Yelp or many others. Always been interested in investing but then went off and got my MBA over here at Harvard Business School. And while I was here, many of my classmates were looking for new jobs as people want to do in grad school and basically I kept hearing over and over again how they were kind of sick and tired of these very generic job descriptions that most companies had career pages without really anything about what’s it like to work at the company. And they kind of had to use Glassdoor as their main resource to understand what it was like to work at a company and do a role. And obviously Glassdoor is a great resource. Unfortunately, it’s a bit negatively biased. I think the average rating on there is a 3.2. And I know if you’re an Uber driver, at least here in the US, if you have a 4.6 rating, I think you are automatically placed on probation to kind of give you a sense. And also, it’s anonymous content. You don’t know where it’s coming from, and it’s just pros and cons. And what I found my classmates really wanted to understand was if I join this company, what skills am I going to get and what’s my career path going to be? Like these very, very specific questions. And so when I talked to a couple friends in hr, they kept telling me, yeah, we’d love to put this content together, but we’re. We’re really busy and honestly, we don’t really have the skill set. And so I partnered up with a friend of mine because we saw a really cool opportunity to partner with these companies and help them build this content and help them distribute it and not have to worry about SEO strategies and social strategies and all these other things. And so that’s kind of how I got into this world of HR tech.
Matt Alder [00:04:36]:
Fantastic. That’s a kind of really interesting backstory there. So just to kind of start at the beginning, what’s your definition of employee authored content? What do you mean by that?
Phil Strazzulla [00:04:50]:
Yeah, sure. So what we’re typically talking about is information about what’s it like to work at your company that is generated directly from your employees. So we’re not really talking about somebody coming in with a film crew and sitting down and feeding somebody a script and then throwing some background music to it. We personally think that that is a bit inauthentic and therefore not effective. We’ve all grown up with advertisements thrown in our face. We can all kind of see when we’re being sold to, and there’s a part of our brain that just turns off. And so we think that that approach is kind of almost silly. We actually really like the Fiverr careers page video that kind of makes fun of these videos. I think Pinterest also. Oh, no, Twitter did something similar, which are really funny. Definitely check those out. So what we’re really talking about is what do your employees say in a more authentic setting? And so that could Be honestly, it could be having drinks at a bar in an offline way, but more often than not, it’s an online way. So that could be on social media, or it could be an employee blog post, or it could be content that captured through a platform like ours.
Matt Alder [00:06:05]:
What, what kind of content is it? What? You kind of mentioned sort of transparency and authenticity. What, what makes great employee authored content. Because to me, one of the problems might be that people, people could be wary about being too truthful about what it’s like to work at their organization. Where’s the, where’s the kind of balance with this?
Phil Strazzulla [00:06:27]:
Yeah, so I, I think that unfortunately on the Internet, every single piece of content, whether that’s your friend’s Facebook posts or a piece of marketing collateral, is going to be biased. And I think that because we’re savvy consumers of content, we all kind of implicitly understand bias, but we’re constantly also looking for that underlying information that could be useful for us. And so many times, just like the content on Glassdoor could be negatively biased, I think that the content that is encouraged by the company, that is not anonymous, can be positively biased. However, if done in the right way, it’s still authentic. And more importantly than that, it shares some of the key pieces of information that candidates are so desperate to learn. LinkedIn came out with this study that said the number one obstacle in front of candidates applying for jobs is understanding what the job actually is. And I think a lot of times that’s because most of our job descriptions are Frankenstein’s. There are, you know, four or five job descriptions that we’ve kind of thrown together. Those are all old and stale to begin with. And we have this thing that says, you know, everybody has to have strong written and oral communication skills no matter what the job is. And realistically, if I’m reading that, it’s really hard to understand what am I going to do day to day and what’s kind of in it for me? Like, what’s my career going to look like in this company? What are the skills I’m going to get? And so getting back to your question around bias and authenticity, we can still have quite authentic content even if it’s not anonymous. And I think the most important thing here is that we can have the right content. We can have an engineer talk in detail about what they do, what technologies they’re using. We can have a salesperson talk about their last sales process and what methodologies they’re using and what key value props they’re selling on. And these are the things that we find candidates are desperate to understand. And when they do, they’re much more likely to apply, they’re much more likely to put time into the interview process. And you’re going to have a much deeper conversation with them because when they get to you face to face or on that phone interview, you’re not going to talk about, okay, so what is this job like day to day? You’re going to dig into those next level questions and really understand who this candidate is and what they care about.
Matt Alder [00:08:59]:
So I’m, I’m actually doing a big research project around employer branding at the moment and I’m talking to lots of different employers around the world about what their, what their big issues are. And it’s really interesting because employee sort of generated content always comes up as the top thing they’re all looking to do. But they all seem to have sort of lots of issues with actually kind of getting this off the ground, maintaining the flow of content and you know, sort of just getting it, getting it kind of out there in the right way. Which is, which is, which is kind of stopping them. Well, I mean, what, what barriers do you think there, there are and how can things like technology be solve them?
Phil Strazzulla [00:09:45]:
Yeah, it’s really interesting just to kind of back up what you’re finding. You know, when we talk to companies, many times they’ll say, hey, when can we get this live? We just talked to a company yesterday and said, can we get this live by September? And I kind of laugh because, yeah, of course we can. I mean, if you want to move super fast, we can get content live in two weeks. But realistically, usually our process is about a month. I think one of the biggest barriers is just time. Most of the time the person who’s managing this project has a thousand other things going on. They could be a marketer whose KPIs are more tied to revenue. We see that a lot. And usually when we see that, it means that this is always number five on the to do list. And employer branding never kind of happens for that company until HR or Talent Acquisition finally says, you know what, I’m going to take control of this. Or it’s a VP of Talent Acquisition who is constantly trying to fill recs. They’re on this treadmill. They’re just like in a sales role where they’re always trying to hit quota. And to think a little bit more strategically to take a step back to prioritize another project that is not going to have maybe immediate benefits, at least in their eyes, is very Challenging. So in some cases it’s a matter of prioritization. But then in the actual execution, some companies are utilizing third parties to send out film crews or do these sort of standard interviews. And that can be very expensive. It’s also really hard to project manage that. And it takes a long time to get the content back. But if you want to do it in house with no real technology infrastructure, it’s equally challenging. How do you understand what are the questions in each role that you want to ask? How do you collect this content? How do you manage it? How do you distribute it? How do you get analytics on the back end? So those are all huge challenges and those are the challenges that we’ve really focused on with Lifeguides. So with our platform you don’t have to worry about what questions to ask. We have over 3 million data points at this point that tell us the questions that candidates engage with the most. And so we’re continuously refining question lists that are specific to a given role that we can ask your employees. So what I mean by that is right now we have lots of content that lives out there on the Internet and we know, okay, the questions about day to day have a longer engagement rate than XYZ question and therefore, okay, let’s continue to ask this question and we even know that data specific to a role. So we can say, okay, what’s the technology stack if it’s an engineering role or how do you use Agile? So that’s really interesting and that’s something that technology allows us for. And then just in terms of the workflows, collecting content takes about five to six minutes to set up the survey through Lifeguides and send it out to your employees. And that means that we’re not just getting the voices of one or two people. We could get 10 or 20 or 30 and we can group those people into as many different functions as we want or affinity groups. We’re starting to do guides on what’s it like to be a veteran at our company, in addition to what’s like to be a front end engineer or a salesperson in New York. So technology allows us to capture that information, to quickly review it and take out anything that we think is off brand or maybe is just somebody rambling on a video and then also to distribute it in an intelligent way. So our platform understands what are the Google queries that talent is using to search for you and automatically search optimizes it. Using the latest in schema.org markup and meta tagging and cross linking strategies, we can quickly embed this content into your own media site, so your careers page, your micro sites, et cetera. Obviously, we make everything mobile friendly, and then we can also intelligently push this through social. What’s interesting is that 70 plus percent of candidates are going to check you out on social media, but for most companies, there’s nothing there. With lifeguides, we create tons of content, and then we know you don’t want to sit around writing tweets. We write them algorithmically for you, and we push them on a cadence that you can define through our platform. So it’s kind of almost like hootsuite or Buffer, but it writes the content for you. So technology really manages that whole process. And then finally, and lastly on the back end, it can give us really unique analytics into what content’s working, what are the key themes that are coming out of my content that maybe help define my ever evolving evp? And then also with a given candidate, what do they care about and how do I best tailor my messaging to them?
Matt Alder [00:14:45]:
I think you made an interesting point about, you know, search algorithms and what, what, how people are trying to find this content and also engage with this content. So generally speaking, you know, what do you think’s the most powerful? Because I know that lots of companies who are doing this are using video or they’re using images, or they’re, or they’re using text. Is it a mixture? Is there one particular format that you think drives results over another? What’s your sort of thinking on it?
Phil Strazzulla [00:15:18]:
So I think that a lot of the companies that we talk to are super excited about video, and video is great. However, realistically look at the way you consume content online. You might watch a video every day or two, but my guess is that you’re scanning through a lot of blog posts, social tweets, things like that. And at least that’s how I do it as well. And so what we find is a really good mix is to have a couple videos to show off who these people are. There’s a lot of things that the brain picks up when watching a person on camera. However, the majority of your content should be text because that’s how people consume it when they’re on the subway, on their phone, or honestly, when they’re at their current job kind of doing research for the upcoming interview. So we like video. You can obviously create videos through lifeguides, super easy. Click a button, your webcam or mobile phone turns on, you can talk into the camera, and it’s kind of like a nice talking head video that engages really, really well with the audience. However, what a lot of people, I think don’t understand until they think about it is that the way we consume content is mostly through text. And that’s the way employer branding content, for the most part, should be consumed as well.
Matt Alder [00:16:44]:
So a few weeks back, I had Chris from Chili’s on the podcast talking about some of the work that he was doing around employee community and a huge amount of content that, that those guys are generating from their employees, be that, you know, text in tweets or photos on Instagram or whatever that might be. Is this approach for everyone? Do you think every type of employer, regardless of their kind of industry, could benefit from sort of freeing the voice of their. Of their employees, or do you think it works particularly well in certain sectors?
Phil Strazzulla [00:17:25]:
So I’m recognizing my own bias when I answer this question. However, it’s challenging to think of an industry where this is not effective. And I guess to back up my own thinking to myself, I’ll think of the world of marketing and E commerce specifically. And it’s really hard to think of products that you would buy that you wouldn’t want to hear the customers talking about them. And that’s the analog that I always use with employee author content. Basically, if I’m going to go buy a new pair of skis or golf clubs or whatever, I’m going to Google the product, I’m going to look on review sites, social media, and what I really want to understand is how are people using this? Are these right for me? And that’s the same sort of process that a job seeker goes through when they’re doing their research. And at the end of the day, they want to know how are people’s experience with this product, AKA this job, and is it right for me? And one of the best ways to get that information is from the employees because they are credible and they have a ton of information that talent acquisition just isn’t going to have because they’re not doing that job. And I think this is relevant whether you’re going to go work at Chili’s as a manager of a store or if you’re going to be a software engineer or a truck driver. I think that regardless, we want to understand what am I going to be doing for eight or ten hours per day. And the best way to get that is really through the voices of the employees.
Matt Alder [00:19:08]:
So who’s doing this? Well, who do you think is doing this in. In an authentic way, but also a way that meets their recruitment marketing objectives in terms of Being found and attracting the best talent to them. You know, who’s on your radar or who are you working with that you think is excellent in this space?
Phil Strazzulla [00:19:27]:
Yeah, sure. So I won’t pump our current customers too hard because I think that’s too easy. However. Well, in that vein, I think that CDK Global Leotech is an international company. We just signed on. There’s a number of companies that using our platform are just having amazing results. Outside of lifeguides, I think the companies that have invested in this, I look at Goldman Sachs, they have an incredible careers page with tons of employee author content that really dives into what’s it like to be a sales and trader in Hong Kong or an investment banker in London? What’s your background? What’s your day to day like? What do you guys do after work? There’s tons of photos from around the office and outside the office. I think they’re doing a great job. I think HubSpot, which is a publicly traded software company here in Boston that focuses on inbound marketing, content marketing, is also doing a great job. They similarly have lots of information that’s specific to a given role and some of that is filmed on a really nice camera and some of it is webcam. I remember their CMO did this phenomenal video a couple months ago where he answered questions from millennials about career related stuff. And if you think about that, it’s perfect inbound marketing because you’re giving information to your target audience that’s very useful and you’re building a relationship with them. And something like that is maybe building a pipeline for somebody who’s 18 to 24 months away from leaving their job or graduating from their master’s program and potentially going to come join you. But I think it’s also quite effective. And I think if you look across what we would consider, you know, the top employer brands like Goldman or like a McKinsey or a Google, you’ll find time and again that these companies are investing tons of money and resources into employee author content and employer branding. And I always like to say, you know, these are some of the smartest, most sophisticated companies on the world as well. And they’re not putting all this into employer branding because they hate ROI or they’re not analytical. It’s quite the opposite. And realistically, you know, if Google is still investing tons of money in employer branding, that means that you have to as well, because there are few brands that are as well known. But of course, a lot of that is not by accident. It’s because they spent so much time really helping the market understand why it’s an amazing place to work.
Matt Alder [00:22:14]:
So I think you’ve, you’ve quoted some interesting examples there and companies that really, really get this. I think that the majority of companies probably still don’t. And I think, you know, I’m always seeing career site content that just has very, very flat, professionally copywritten profiles from employers of their employees. Sorry. Or sometimes puts this sort of life in the day type content up there that just, you know, it seems that these people have incredibly, incredibly busy be able to get so much stuff in their profile. What would your advice be to companies sort of looking at genuine employee authored content for the first time? What do they need to bear in mind and how should they get started?
Phil Strazzulla [00:23:05]:
So I have a couple pieces of advice. One is to not be afraid. So I think that so many people have had a negative experience with Glassdoor that they think that secretly all their employees are just looking for an outlet to rant and rave about the boss that they don’t like. And that is just not the case. Your employees, for the most part, every single day that they’re there, they’re essentially voting for you and they have things that they love about your job. So that’s a big piece of advice. I think that some companies that we talk to want to really control the messaging and they say, you know, we’ve got this really well defined EVP or brand and we need to stick to this. And realistically, you know, your EVP is great. However, there’s a huge layer of information below that that candidates want to know about and they want to know the specifics, the specific stories, anecdotes. They don’t want to hear your C level person saying, hey, we’re an innovative company because that comes off as inauthentic. And honestly, even if you are a super innovative company, even if you’re Google, that doesn’t tell me you’re an innovative company. And you really need to show this through. Here’s this new technology that we’re working on that nobody else is thinking about. And here’s how we did it. That’s cool. And the other kind of point there is, you know, the C level person is awesome. However, if I’m an engineer, especially in a large organization, I care about the people I’m going to be in the trenches with because I want to understand their personalities and backgrounds if I fit in. But also that’s the job I’m going to do. And realistically, the person who’s three layers up in the chain of command is not going to know the details that I want to understand. So that’s another point. And basically the implication there is that you need to go deep on this content. You can’t have four or five profiles of people, especially not some career pages which we see, which are a quote from four or five different individuals. That just doesn’t cut it. I want to understand these 10 questions and I want to hear from the five people I’m actually going to work with. That’s what candidates want to understand. And so I guess my other piece of advice is really put yourself in the brain of a candidate through, you know, method acting sort of techniques, or by going and asking your employees that you trust that trust you. Hey, what do you think about this? Honestly, what would you want to know if you were a candidate? Would you believe this? Where would you want to see this content? And I think by asking them these sorts of questions, you’ll get a better understanding of how to put this all together. My last piece of advice for real, is that this project can be managed very, very efficiently through a piece of software like Lifeguides. It doesn’t need to be a production that takes six months to put together and 30 hours of your time. It can be put together in a few weeks with an hour or two of your time if you use the right tools.
Matt Alder [00:26:33]:
Phil, thank you very much for talking to me.
Phil Strazzulla [00:26:35]:
Thank you, Matt. I appreciate the time.
Matt Alder [00:26:38]:
My thanks to Phil Strazzulla. You can subscribe to this podcast on itunes or via the podcasting app of your choice. Just search for recruiting future. You can also find all the past episodes@www.on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
